Prince Harry’s attacks on press are ‘misguided’ and ‘paranoid’, says Nicholas Witchell
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Prince Harry’s attacks on the press are “paranoid” and “misguided” and he is “unhealthily obsessed” with the way he is portrayed, the BBC’s royal correspondent has said.
Nicholas Witchell, who is retiring after 48 years at the corporation, said the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are “overly sensitive”, and as public figures who “make use of the media” should be “more prepared to take the knocks with the positive moments”.
The 70-year-old, who has been covering the Royal family for the BBC for the last 25 years, said it was a “huge loss” when the Sussexes left their duties and moved to America.
He said that if they had been “prepared to try harder” and if the Duchess “had perhaps just been less impatient, less inclined to see well-meaning people as being in some way against her” the couple could have achieved a great deal.
But he dismissed their suggestion that the Buckingham Palace machine was against them from the start.
Their team – including Australian Samantha Cohen as private secretary and Americans Jason Knauf and Sara Latham as communications secretaries – “bent over backwards to accommodate them and to be in sympathy with her”, Witchell told the Sunday Times.
“Not one of them was the archetypal Buckingham Palace courtier and if anyone was going to carry it off, that team would have done so. Meghan is clearly a very intelligent, articulate, ambitious woman, and you would have thought she would have appreciated the fact that these people were working so hard to make it work.”
He said the Palace should have tried harder but there was a “clash of cultures” and the Duke was psychologically “not suited to the role”.
On occasion, the Duke of Sussex has been “treated badly” by the media, Witchell added, but his ongoing legal battles with newspaper groups are “misjudged, misguided, a touch paranoid”.
The focus of the Duke and Duchess has “become so narrow and is so suffused with this sense of paranoia that they are failing to recognise the bigger picture, the opportunities that they have,” he added, saying: “They’re obsessed – he is certainly obsessed – with the way the media portrays him. Unhealthily so.”
Witchell will spend Christmas Day in New Broadcasting House reporting on the King’s message and the royal gathering at Sandringham for the last time.
His career has seen him rub some members of the household up the wrong way. King Charles, at the time the Prince of Wales, was caught on microphone in 2005, when he thought the tapes had stopped rolling, saying that he “can’t bear that man” and he is “so awful”.
Witchell, though taken aback, admitted that “we’re not there to be liked”. He believes the comment was related to a piece he had written comparing a holiday aboard a friend’s yacht that the then-Prince had taken with Camilla Parker Bowles, his wife-to-be, with holidays taken by Edward VIII and his mistress, Wallis Simpson.
The future King was “very cross” and did not talk to him for a number of years, but they have since buried the hatchet, he revealed.
During his quarter of the century in the role, the “appetite” for tabloid-style reporting on the royal family has changed and he has had to fight against “moving into the soap opera end of it”, he said.
He added that they could not ignore the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, “however tedious”.
He blames the “worst single moment” of his 48-year TV career – when he dried up in front of a live audience while reporting the birth of the Duke and Duchess’s son Archie in May 2019 – on the fact that “maybe subconsciously I just wasn’t that interested” in the couple.
He officially retires in the spring, but has said he will not be spending his retirement watching The Crown, which he gave up on after series two because the storylines became too sensationalist.
“I thought the distortion of the facts was beyond what is acceptable,” he said, adding that seeing Prince Philip blamed for the death of his sister was “just unacceptable” and the “final straw”. The late Duke of Edinburgh was still alive when the storyline aired.
