H. Sunberg

Yeah, but the media don’t even allow him to be those things. Even now, you all treat William as though he’s Harry’s parent rather than Harry’s sibling. You can barely mention Harry without the obligatory speech: war hero, Invictus, trauma. Funny how an ordinary squaddie who did a couple of tours is just doing his job, but Harry becomes a permanent war hero. And Invictus? It’s a brilliant project, but Harry didn’t create it alone. It came out of the Royal Foundation. William, Catherine and Harry championed it, while talented civil servants and staff did the painstaking work of building it. Most of you don’t afford William the same humanity. He lost his mother too. Yet nobody feels compelled to begin every conversation about William with the image of him walking behind Diana’s coffin. Nobody introduces him through the worst day of his childhood. And, frankly, 15 is tougher than 12 in many ways. At 15, William understood what was happening. He’d become his mother’s confidant. He watched the Panorama interview while at school as his family fell apart in public. That’s a different kind of trauma. Twelve is horrific too, but you’re still more protected from the adult world. Even people who dislike him frame everything through the language of his childhood, as though that settles every moral question about the man he is today. Meanwhile, George actually is 12. Where is this concern for him? It’s his mother whose medical privacy was invaded. It’s his mother who endured months of grotesque conspiracy theories. It’s his mother who was targeted by an online campaign that included fake images of her face bloodied and bruised, alongside the lie William had done it. So why endless obsession with preserving Harry as a little boy? What’s the point of endlessly revisiting 1997 if, with Harry’s help and a social media ecosystem that behaves like the worst tabloids, we’re recreating the same for George and Charlotte? Harry and Twitter have become the new tabloids. Then commentators package that outrage into podcasts, columns and YouTube videos because it pays. Is it because admitting Harry is just a muddled middle-aged man would mean admitting your own age too? Harry is 41 years old. Thirty years later, someone should be saying, “Aren’t you glad you walked with your mother? That you protected her as much as you both could until the very end?” But no. 1997 was the year I started boarding school. I was 13. I’m not 13 anymore. I’m 41. And I bet when I say it about myself, you immediately see how ridiculous it would be if people still treated 13-year-old me as the defining version of who I am. So why do you all do it with Harry?