Barry Turner: Princes, kings, soldiers & traditions

By Barry Turner Columnist

Prince Harry is destroying the Royal family as part of a plot orchestrated by the woke left and a foreign princess. Or so the fevered imaginings of the right-wing UK media would have us believe.

With all the drama of a Shakespearian tragedy, the headlines scream hyperbole about betrayals and treasons. Megan is the new she-wolf of our thousand year old monarchy and the latest Jezebel to put it in existential jeopardy.

Except of course she isn’t. The monarchy is not at all facing anything at all like an ‘existential’ crisis. It’s just that the media love apocalyptic language.

There is little to disagree with the idea that this appalling episode is not a distasteful, and to say the last rather badly timed, with the recent passing of Britain’s longest reigning monarch. The grandstanding of the ‘spare’ prince is rather too Hollywood for the old traditionalists and the conservatives with a small ‘c’ but that is probably because so few British people have the faintest idea of our Royal traditions.

For a nation that exists because of its history, British people in the main prefer the fantasy to the harsh realities of how we really got where we are today. The reality is actually far more interesting than the mythology that the British believe to be their history. A raunchier tale of betrayal, treachery, murder, mayhem and skulduggery could not be invented that would match that of the ancestors of the current House of Windsor.

If we, for the sake of argument, start the timeline with William the Conqueror, we might note that his sons and other relatives engaged in rather more familial treachery than writing a self-indulgent memoir. His great grandson Henry II, an Anglo-Norman king of England who has never been given enough credit, had to fight his wife and all four of his sons in battle, not simply contend with an excruciatingly embarrassing interview of one of them on Oprah Winfrey’s show.

Richard III was hardly a role model when it came to family and friend relationships and coming closer to the present, Queen Victoria had ‘problems’ with a prince who liked the company of prostitutes and the occasional ‘toke’ on an opium pipe. For every Royal bottom that ever sat upon that throne there are multiple skeletons in the closet, in some cases quite literally.

So basically all of this is not so much news as ‘same old same old’. Instead of castigating the errant Prince and his wife, the press should be applauding them for maintaining a thousand year old tradition of infamy. If he was still around today, William Shakespeare would have a field day writing characters.

Now onto the latest ‘betrayal’ by our spare prince. His betrayal of his comrades in arms. Already several distinguished officers have condemned him for betraying an ethic of soldiering, in that he had the temerity to declare his tally of enemy fighters killed. This is not done in the British armed forces, the indignant cry. We British simply do not do that sort of thing. Really?

During the Falkland’s War the British hunter killer submarine sank the Argentine warship General Belgrano, at the time a highly controversial but militarily justifiable engagement. On returning home HMS Conqueror, appropriately named flew the Jolly Roger black flag of piracy. A naval tradition in submarines. It might be noted that 323 Argentine sailors were killed in that attack, considerable more than Harry’s tally.

In the Royal Air Force the tradition of victory markings, or kills as some might call them, are displayed on the fuselage of aircraft. It is probably worth noting that many of the crews of shot down aircraft were in fact killed in the process.

Bookshops in the UK are well stocked with best-sellers of former SAS, marine, paratroopers and other military biographies in which kills are declared loud and clear. The heroes in these volumes were not told they had let the side down or broken a solemn oath of never disclosing they had killed the enemy.

It is sad that former soldiers with distinguished military backgrounds now play up to the Harry baiting. There is one thing that is undoubtably true about Harry, and that is he was a real soldier, rather than someone who dresses up and a Field Marshal or an Admiral depending on which day it is.

There is no doubt that Harry’s claims are stupid and give ‘excuses’ to psychopathic terrorists to seek revenge but, let’s not forget they never needed much of an excuse anyway now did they. ‘Harry is stupid’ of course is not much of a story and certainly not one that even GBTV could spend six hours every day rattling on about. Harry & Megan, destroyers of ‘everything we hold dear’ is much more captivating.

There is an ancient journalistic maxim which goes, “never let the truth get in the way of a good story”. Try and keep a thousand years of history out of it too might be a useful addition.

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Barry Turner is a Senior Lecturer in War Reporting and Human Rights and a member of the Royal United Services Institute.