Pick the prince who recently said this: ‘I take a long time trying to understand my emotions and why I feel like I do, and I feel like that’s a really important process to do every now and again, to check in with yourself and work out why you’re feeling like you do.’
Prince Harry, right? The baffled bailer across the water with too much time on his hands, who in the past, while doped up, has confessed to having conversations with both a trash can and a toilet. O, that the alumni of the Algonquin could have been around to join in!
No, it was Prince William. I must admit that I felt a vague foreboding when I heard his comments on BBC Radio 1’s Life Hacks on Wednesday – the Mental Elf strikes again! How lucky was I to grow up in a time when the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny ruled the roost. Then I felt a glint of malicious mischief, imagining Harry pacing about, complaining to Meghan that mental health was his wheelhouse!
But on the whole, I don’t think it’s good for members of the monarchy to talk about their emotions. These are hard times for people and, though William attempts to give a nod to the fact that he has a very easy life compared to many of his struggling subjects, it all comes out a bit humble-braggy: ‘I’m quite emotionally available, I like that about who I am, and I find some of the places I go to, people I meet, are having a really tricky time.’
I do hope that we’re not seeing the Harrification of William. This is a time when the monarchy is increasingly unpopular, after a Starmer-esque series of blunders which has culminated this week with the sleazy allegations against and arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. There is a great deal of affection for William in this country: his Diana face, his choice of wife, his apparent gravitas and the fact that he’s Not Harry. But if he regularly starts coming out with psychobabble like the above, I’m not sure how long it will last.
Let alone when he’s issuing such Hallmark-card clichés as ‘learn to love yourself’. Or calling for ‘more male role models out there, talking about [mental health] and normalising it, so that it becomes second nature to all of us’. That doesn’t sit well with me. A world of people talking about their feelings strikes me as being a very dull one, rather like when people won’t stop telling you about the dream they had the night before or their horoscope.
But where I really get cross is the dissing of the days when people processed and mastered their emotions as a matter of course. ‘I think the situation with the world wars, generations before us, couldn’t talk about their emotions,’ William ponders. ‘You can’t just bottle them up and pretend they don’t exist, because that’s when it all goes wrong and you end up drinking lots, unravelling, being in torment.’
I do hope that we’re not seeing the Harrification of William
Really? Queen Elizabeth, William’s grandmother, was famous for bottling up her emotions. Once, when she was reported to be seen crying in public, her press office issued a crisp notice, claiming that she had a particle of dust in her eye. Was the Queen secretly ‘drinking lots’? I doubt it. It’s like something Harry would say; indeed, his ghastly wife some time back made a covert dig at the Windsors, saying how bad the mental health of those who didn’t spill their guts must be.
I’m not taking this issue lightly. My son died by suicide 11 years ago. I believe that the seeds of his self-destruction were probably prompted by divorce (driven by my adultery after a grimly dysfunctional marriage in which a small child heard many things no child should have to) and consolidated by drugs, mostly extremely strong cannabis. He/we talked a lot about his emotions, and he saw many therapists, including during a stay in the Priory. He still killed himself after a decade of our doing everything we could to dissuade him. Nothing could have stopped him.
What Prince William might be better off addressing – as someone who will presumably become the reigning monarch of this country – is the savage class system’s impact on life expectancy. Last year, a report by the Centre For Ageing Better charity claimed: ‘Men living in the district of Hart in Hampshire (83.4 years) can expect to live a full decade longer than men in Blackpool (73.1 years) while women in Kensington and Chelsea (86.5 years) can expect to live almost eight years longer than women in Blackpool (78.9).’
There is, disgustingly, less class mobility in Britain than there was 20 years ago. The ‘nepo baby’ has become a bad joke in the arts, but the royals are the biggest nepo babies of them all. William is worth around £100 million – a figure that rises remarkably to more than £1 billion when including the assets of the Duchy of Cornwall estate, which he inherited in 2022 upon becoming the Prince of Wales.
But talking about this – people dying before their time because of social class in the 21st century – would draw attention to William and his family’s own vast wealth and privilege. Far easier to channel Harry with waffle like: ‘So for me to understand where we are now, I need to understand where we’ve been. So it’s important, I think, that we understand where we are now. We’ve got a long way to go in this journey of mental health, but it’s really crucial we know where we’ve come from because that is such important growth for all of us to get our heads around where we’re trying to head to.’
No monarch would dare to tell the peasants to eat cake these days; instead, they toss us a word salad.
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