I don’t know why everyone is so down on Prince Harry. Of course he had to check that the Queen is “protected” and “has the right people around her” on his whirlwind visit to Britain earlier this month. If he doesn’t check up on her once every couple of years, then who is going to? I’ve seen those public information films about looking in on the elderly: if Harry doesn’t put his head round the door once in a while, Her Majesty could be left undiscovered, lying dead on the floor, in front of a cold bar heater, half-eaten by her corgis, for months.
And, of course, if you read between the lines, you can see that Harry is also very keen to protect the Queen from herself. Capricious and quixotic old thing that she is, she could easily, if left unattended, end up marrying a gold-digger, falling out with her family, making a massive tit of herself on the world stage and giving up her royal titles for a better life in America. I’m just thankful he got there in the nick of time. If you think what an absolute Horlicks the Queen made of her first 70 years on the throne, without Harry’s biannual checkups to depend on, it’s a miracle she wasn’t deposed or usurped or otherwise brutally dethroned.
And as for having “the right people round her”, nobody knows better than Harry how important it is to have the right people around you. Whether it’s drunk Etonians in SS uniforms, naked chicks in a Los Angeles swimming pool or Oprah Winfrey and her ravening production hordes, one is simply nothing without the right people around one.
The Queen is 96 years old and increasingly immobile, so without Harry’s sage 21st-century guidance how could she possibly be expected to tell a genuine Netflix show-runner offering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reveal what goes on behind the scenes at Buckinghamshire Castle from a simpering, transphobic, structurally racist court flunky of the kind that have beleaguered her family since the days of Cardinal Wolsey, John of Gaunt, Piers Gaveston, Tostig, and all those pudding-bowled hair-shirters who failed to get Ethelred the Unready ready?
If Harry doesn’t put his head round the door once in a while, Her Majesty could be left undiscovered, lying dead on the floor.
Did you see the Queen’s birthday portrait on the front of The Times? Did you clock what, unprotected by Harry, she had allowed herself to be surrounded by? Horses! Worse still, white horses. Talk about systemicalogical racism!
Harry, in all his glorious Californian wokeness, could have got Her Majesty surrounded by some horses of color, which would have been a horse of a very different color. Or, better still, cows, which are not associated with colonial things like slavery, Black Beauty, Red Rum and the Charge of the Light Brigade. A couple of nice brown Jersey milkers and Bob’s your uncle: the Queen’s looking properly diverse. Although Bob isn’t Harry’s uncle, unfortunately. Andrew is. Photo of him skulking in the background with his arm round one of the cows, and you’re in big trouble.
There is absolutely nothing at all self-aggrandizing or delusional about a 37-year-old expatriate playboy dropping in on the nonagenarian head of a 1,000-year-old monarchy to check she’s got the right people around her. It’s like when I show up at QPR on a Saturday afternoon to check they’ve got Dykes up front, Ilias Chair in midfield and someone tall in goal, with a nice big pair of mittens on. If I didn’t, they might pick anyone. Like that philosophical thing about the tree in the forest that only makes a noise when it falls down if Prince Harry is there. Or something.
Sure, Harry’s “Queenie and me” revelations to NBC reeked of solipsism, but who does everything revolve around if not the son of a future king? When Harry says, “We talk about things she can’t talk about with anyone else,” he truly means it. What those “things” are, of course, are Harry and Meghan. And the Queen can’t talk about them with anyone else because no one else is interested in them. And nor is she. Everyone knows she is only interested in horses and dogs, and Meghan won’t let Harry talk about those, because of animal cruelty and structurological colonialisticness and all that.
Which leaves just her spectacles. Because the only thing old people need from young people, in my experience, is someone to find their glasses, which they definitely had a minute ago, when they put their tea down to check the Racing Post, but now can’t for the life of them …
“They’re round your neck, Granny.”
“Really? Oh. So they are. Thenk you. Now, sod orf home and let me watch the racing, will you? There’s a good chep.”
Giles Coren is a columnist for The Times of London and the host of Amazing Hotels, on BBC Two, and the podcast Giles Coren Has No Idea