Florid, banal psycho-babble
reeking of opportunism - Harry and Meghan are riding other people's grief like
trams
By Quentin
Letts for the Daily Mail
Published:
21:24 EST,
1 February 2024
| Updated: 04:09 EST,
2
February 2024
Veteran Sussex watchers were yesterday in their power-showers,
trying to scrub clean after the latest hosing of treacle from Meghan and Harry.
The couple had
issued another of their press statements, this time about child safety on the
internet.
Such announcements
have become a regular part of the Sussexes’ modus operandi, linking them to a topical issue on
which they can parade their empathy.
Their statement, not for the
first time, was peppered with American emotionalism, tear-stained platitude
mixed with a certain self-serving preachiness. Florid, banal, breathy, reeking
of opportunism, it is an art form the exiled royals are fast making their own.
Commenting on a US
Senate hearing into dreadful instances of internet child abuse, the duo
applauded the ‘bravery and determination’ (one noun alone will never do) of
parents whose children had suffered.
As they clawed their
way into the circle of virtue – outta the way, people, this is about us –the
Sussexes boasted that ‘over the past few years we have spent time with many of
these families, listening to their heartache and their hopes for the urgent
change that is needed’.
This was ‘an issue
that transcends division and party lines’. They also disclosed that one father
had told them ‘if love could have saved them, all of our children would still
be here’.
Journalistic
scepticism may seem harsh given the sensitivity of the issue at hand; yet when
an issue is this delicate, would it not be seemly for minor royals to keep
their self-promotional psycho-babble to themselves?
This is not the
first time that Prince Harry and his actress wife have contributed their
unremarkable thoughts on a raw area of public debate.
If they did so
spontaneously after, for example, having a microphone thrust into their faces
at some public event, it might feel all right.
But the Sussexes come out with sentimental saws on the level of
low-grade greetings cards, and they do so by placing them under the ‘news’
section of their personal website. Sorry, but this is pure PR puffery. ‘Turn
pain into purpose,’ said Harry at a World Mental Health Day event in New York in October. As it happens, he was talking about how
those who suffer misfortune can sometimes become stronger as a result.
‘Days are long but
years are short,’ added his consort at the same event.
Eh? It’s the sort of
inscrutable gibberish guru Master Po used to say to Grasshopper in the 1970s TV
show Kung Fu.
Or take this corker.
‘I’m confident,’ said Meghan, again on mental health, ‘that with more ears and
awareness and visibility of what is really happening, we can make some
significant change together.’ More ears? Are two not enough for anyone?
As part of her
payback to Netflix, from which she and her husband received millions of
dollars, the Duchess disclosed that in her wedding speech she spoke of ‘the
everlasting knowing that, above all, love wins’.
If you said that at
most English county weddings there would be a ripple of mirth and a teasing
forest of fingers down throats. Heaven knows what Harry’s old muckers made of
his bride’s claim.
Guy Pelly must have
almost done the nose trick.
But Meghan appears
impervious to British taste. She is immune to the most diabetic-high levels of
rhetorical saccharine.
Along with the
unfortunate, droopy-tailed Harry, the duchess is a devotee of California psycho-babble and of anxieties being worn as social
and political badges.
Look at me, these
say, I’m sensitive, I’m not a viciously ambitious, multi-millionaire, West
Coast actress cynically adopting positions for career purposes. I’m a genuinely
humble, vulnerable, touchy-feely soul. And if you suggest otherwise my
attorneys will bust your ass.
If British
politicians issued the sort of emetic press releases that Harry and Meghan do,
they would be swiftly denounced for gross misjudgement and for trying to surf
on other people’s misery. Again, you may think this a harsh comment.
You may say ‘but
Harry and Meghan are not politicians’.
I am afraid I would
disagree with you. They are behaving in an intensely political manner, beating
their breasts for public consumption. Note, too, the repeated calls for
‘change’. These smack of political campaigning.
The Sussexes may think that their press releases are powerful and
poetic. To British tastes they will, possibly, more likely look manipulative
and opportunistic.
Merely as literary
ventures, they are cloyingly mawkish, viscous in their sentimentality.
Whoever writes them
has the prose style of a schoolgirl diarist. It is sad that the prince has lost
sight of the British virtue of understatement. When it comes to expressions of sympathy,
less is always more.
Instead, we are
subjected to this mush and gush. On Planet Sussex, ‘light’ is always being ‘shined’, be it on
empowerment or inequality. Trite stylistic doubles are deployed.
Writing in Elle
magazine, Meghan said that women should ‘focus less on glass slippers and more
on pushing through glass ceilings’. And then there was ‘a ripple of hope can
turn into a wave of change’ – a phrase the couple pinched off the late Robert
Kennedy and used at some humanitarian awards in 2022.
There is much
‘focusing on wellbeing’ and ‘relating to shared experiences and challenges’ and
‘discovering of opportunities for growth’.
‘Mentoring’ is a
must-have, both for mentors and, dreadful word, ‘mentees’. And ‘hearts’ are
invariably ‘heavy’.
Other people’s
disaster and grief are ridden like trams.
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