Prince harry

‘Calling someone crazy or hysterical completely dismisses their experience,’ says Meghan Markle in her strangely throaty professional podcast voice. ‘It minimises what they’re feeling. And you know it doesn’t stop there. It keeps going to the point where anyone who has been labelled it enough times can be gaslit into thinking that they’re actually unwell. Or sometimes worse to the point where real issues of all kinds get ignored. Well that’s not happening today.’ Cue the intro music – ‘I am woman, I am fearless, I am sexy’ etc. – to the latest episode of Archetypes, the Duchess of Sussex’s Spotify series. ‘I feel pretty strongly about this word crazy,’ says Meghan. She does.

'Privacy' was the reason given for Harry and Meghan upping sticks and leaving Britain in early 2020. The dilettante duke and his Hollywood beau were supposedly fleeing this sceptred isle to find sanctuary in Canada, away from the beastly British press. So it's such an awful shame that the right-on royals keep finding themselves embroiled in endless public spats of their own making in their new-found home in America. A persistent theme in these spats appears to be Prince Harry's barely-concealed contempt for the American system of government, which makes it all the more baffling as to why he chose to live there. Seemingly unaware of the monarchy's role in the very creation of that country, Harry first criticised the First Amendment which guarantees free speech as 'bonkers.

Steerpike is fond of a periodical check-in with modern Renaissance men. And they don’t come much more multi-talented than Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, Mr. Meghan Markle, formerly HRH. Following his departure from official royal duties, the people’s prince has kept busy by locking himself into lucrative positions at some of the planet’s most prestigious companies. His multiple deals — Netflix and Spotify to name two — were not uncommon for an up-and-coming sleb, but the most bizarre of his roles was joining the ‘mental fitness’ start-up BetterUp as ‘chief impact officer.’ Oh, how we smirked, with the occasional eye roll, firm in the belief that he’d be back in Britain soon enough, grovelling to granny for his lovely old life back.

Washington, DC Prince Harry is once again mouthing off about American politics despite a rudimentary understanding – at best – of our founding principles. The pampered Brit delivered a speech at the United Nations on Monday insisting that we are witnessing a 'rolling back of constitutional rights here in the United States'. Prince Harry, who only lives here because his wife dreams of doing animated voiceovers for Netflix, routinely opines on our constitution with all of the British pomposity that led to the Revolutionary War. Newsflash: Americans do not like it when foreigners tell us what to do or how we should feel, and yet Prince Harry (do I even have to use his title anymore?) is too arrogant and lacking in self-awareness to sit down and shut up.

Well 2021 is at an end and what a hell of a year it's been. There were laughs, tears, shock, disgust and despair – and that was just the reaction to footage of Matt Hancock's video nasty. The past twelve months have seen various ups and downs in Britain and abroad, ranging from the highlights of the vaccine rollout and England's Euro run to low points like the Capitol coup, the Afghanistan debacle and various pandemic pitfalls. And Mr S has been there throughout it all to chart the gossip, drama, high politics and low shenanigans. Tony Benn once sniffed that it was 'issues, not personalities' that mattered; Steerpike holds that the inverse is true when looking back at the events of 2021.