You wonder if Prince Harry even has any idea what he is doing in Australia.
Meghan, we know, is to be interviewed on stage at a “girls’ weekend” retreat in Sydney this weekend – where the £1,650 VIP package includes a group selfie opportunity with the duchess. Who could resist?
To which you have to say: where does that leave Harry?
He is billed, for what it’s worth, as a guest speaker at something called the InterEdge Summit in Melbourne on Thursday, exploring the “vital space where individual wellbeing and organisational responsibility meet”. This seems a bit on the nose. If he was actually any good at “organisational responsibility”, the whole “working member of the Royal family” thing might have worked out a bit better.
Look, God forbid a young couple enjoy a mini-break. But what exactly does it say if a tightly scheduled programme of fundraising engagements is the only way for Harry and Meghan to spend some quality time together? Perhaps the besties VIP package appeals to him. He could show up at the five-star InterContinental Coogee Beach with a ticket in one hand and a selfie stick in the other, yelling, “Surprise!” Tickets to meet Meghan are still available. Imagine that.
Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking the waking nightmare for any mum of two on a girls’ weekend is for their husband to actually join them on it. The husband’s job, from personal experience, is in fact to stay at home and say reassuring things about nursery pickup and bathtime while remaining schtum about mystery rashes and the fact that they woke up eight times last night yelling “Mummy!”. Harry knows this. Even as he trundles around on this “part business, part charity” quasi-royal four-day tour, wheeled out at the Royal Children’s Hospital here, playing the old hits there, not for the first time he looks a bit, well, spare.
Not only that, but he has lost dad points. Crucially, with me. There is a ranking system, although we won’t talk about that. Just take my word for it that dads desperately seek out other dads as role models. It is how we learn. Usually from afar, in the absence of actually asking for advice. And Harry, from afar, seems to me to be an excellent dad role model. His memoir, Spare, if it was anything, was an exercise in being curious about his own father.
I have long found Prince Harry relatable. I think it’s a girl dad thing. He has Lilibet, four, and I have my daughter, two. He has a grey tee emblazoned with the words ‘Girl Dad’ which he wears running. I don’t, but I’d certainly like one. We have the same colour hair, and increasingly we both have less of it. At 41, he is going to seed in a way that I, at 35, find both reassuring and encouraging.
So it goes without saying that I sincerely think he looks like a very good dad. You just get a vibe.
What I’m not on board with is jetting halfway around the world for four days and leaving the kids behind. It’s not a great look.
He may well have his reasons. But photos of him at the aforementioned children’s hospital show him hugging the kids there with the unmistakable crumpled look of someone who really misses his own. According to the Daily Mail, he spent the 15-hour commercial Qantas flight – no private jet, your majesty? – talking about his children to anyone in business class who would listen. Which I absolutely love.
So what is he doing on the biggest grift since the Spice Girls’ third reunion tour? If I were him, I’d have stayed home. That’s surely where he’d rather be. It’s definitely where he ought to be. Not shilling for coin on the Gold Coast. Given a choice, I am certain he’d rather be at a “Pints & Ponytails” get-together at a London pub learning how to plait hair. And possibly not in Montecito at all.
This is the tragedy of Prince Harry. Under a fairytale Megxit spell, he is cursed to live a life half in, half out of the real world, condemned to business class, to petitions of 45,000 furious Australians miffed at having to fork out for his security detail, to guest speaker slots presumably booked to “build the brand” while his CEO wife gets her Goop on. Paying your own way won’t pay for itself. But don’t most people take their business trips in turns?
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.independent.co.uk ’
