The latest trailer for ITV’s interview with Prince Harry lays bare the full horror of how he and his brother were required to perform for the crowds and the cameras after Diana’s death.
The conflict between their aching, private grief and the public role that was expected of them is set out in painful detail.
It’s easy to say that Harry has made victimhood a way of life. Sometimes, it seems, everything has to be someone else’s fault.
But you would have to have a heart of stone to fail to sympathise with him when he describes the trauma of his mother’s death and the days that followed.
We all remember those desperately sad pictures of the two young boys being paraded – first outside Balmoral and then at Kensington Palace – to see the flowers and shake hands with the crowds.
We wondered what on earth might be going through their poor young heads.
Well, now we know. Harry, at least, was feeling utterly confused by the wet, tear-stained hands of the weeping people who felt they knew his mum, while he and William – the two people most loved by her – were expected to show no emotion, beyond empty smiles. It made them feel guilty, as if they were betraying their mother.
And then they were made to walk behind her coffin, feeling numb and on show to the world. Harry reveals that he cried only once: when the cameras and public had finally been banished.
At Diana’s island burial place at Althorp. It is a tragic image.
If only the rest of his now comprehensively leaked book Spare was as insightful. Instead, it is full of petty jealousies and sibling rivalry.
I am, quite frankly, beyond caring about who made who cry, whether they hugged or not or if there was a spat between Meghan and Catherine over a tube of lipgloss.
I don’t care that Harry and Meghan found it galling to have to shop at IKEA while the Cambridges’ apartment dripped with luxury.
Most of us are busy worrying about whether we can afford to turn on a radiator or how we are going to get to work.
To carry a lifelong chip on your shoulder because you were born the second child is, quite frankly, ludicrous.
Harry unbridled, like the stallion his first lover spanked on the bottom in a field behind a pub, is proving both petty-minded and dangerous. Controlling his own narrative, without guidance or advice, is a risky game.
The backlash from his decision to announce the number of Taliban he killed in Afghanistan is loud and ongoing. Military comrades feel betrayed. And he has compromised his own and his family’s security.
Harry is now a man riddled with internal conflict and confusion. His “beloved brother” is also his “arch-nemesis”. He believes in the monarchy, but detests its infrastructure.
Last year, on a fleeting visit to the UK, he called in on his grandmother, the Queen.
He wanted, he said to make sure she had the right people around her. How ironic. From the evidence of his book and the endless round of interviews, this troubled prince badly needs a safe pair of hands nearby.
