What Prince Harry And King Charles Have In Common (Even If They Won't Admit It)
Since all of the drama surrounding King Charles III's coronation has died down, the question of the feud between Prince Harry and his family has quieted –– at least for now. Still, it's safe to say that the Duke of Sussex and his monarch father aren't on the best of terms these days. Yet, you might be surprised to discover that this father and son pair has plenty of common ground that they could find if they were willing to hear one another out.
Harry makes it very clear that he relates to and identifies with his late mother, Princess Diana, and by the same token, he seems to feel that he and his father don't fully understand each other. It's also clear that the trauma Harry suffered from losing his mother in the way that he did has him on alert about his own family's safety. His and Meghan Markle's 'near-fatal' paparazzi car chase and the response solidified this even further.
Yet, despite the kinship Harry feels with Diana and the fraught relationship he has with his father, Harry and Charles are more alike than they realize. In fact, the pair has several similarities and recognizing them could be just the thing to bring the two royals back together.
Father and son in the public eye
Being a part of the royal family basically means that the public is always going to know about you and your life. Of course, this is a fact that Harry often laments, and we tend to assume that Charles feels the opposite. In reality, though, the public opinion of these two public figures has followed a similar trajectory. For Charles, the public's view of him changed dramatically as a result of his divorce from Princess Diana –– namely after Diana's famous interview with BBC, in which she was open about Charles' affair with Queen Camilla. The number of folks in Britain who believed that Charles was fit to be king dropped from 82% to 41% after the divorce.
Harry's fall from grace in the eyes of the world has been very similar. In 2019, 72% of folks in Britain supported the Duke of Sussex. Yet, this number plummeted to 55% in just two months when the Sussexes revealed that they'd no longer be working royals. Just like his father, a televised interview further influenced folks' opinions. In Harry's case, his and Meghan's interview with Oprah Winfrey landed him at 35%, and the release of "Spare" resulted in another drop to 24%. While the actions that caused Britain to change its collective mind about Charles and Harry differed, the effect was the same: folks stopped giving them the benefit of the doubt once they felt they'd gotten to know them.
The apple doesn't fall far from the royal family tree
It's no secret that Prince Harry has a problem with the media. Yet the Sussexes weren't the only members of the royal family to sue media outlets. King Charles sued The Mail on Sunday for leaking and publishing his diary entries and won the case in 2006. It seems that Harry often portrays his father and brother, Prince William, as siding with the media. However, like Harry, Charles is willing to stand up against media outlets when he feels that he's been wronged.
Another area in which it's surprising that Harry and his father align? When it comes to being willing to be publicly critical of one's family. Between his Netflix docu-series and his memoir, Harry hasn't shied away from exposing the truth of how he's been treated by his family –– the good, the bad, and the ugly. Notably, though, neither did Charles in his day. Charles, himself, was allegedly open about his own father's wrongdoing, admitting that Prince Philip once embarrassed him so badly in front of guests that he cried and that the only time that he felt he could get real affection was from his nanny.
Would recognizing the common ground between the two make Harry and Charles more open to reconciliation? For now, it appears unlikely, but one thing's for sure: there's no need to wonder where Harry got his stubbornness.