Has Prince Harry Changed His Attitude About the Press Interest in His Life?

On Sunday, one of ITV interviewer Tom Bradby’s hardest questions for Prince Harry started with something that sounded a bit like a compliment. “But the trouble is, you’re probably the most famous person on the planet right now,” said the journalist, who has known Harry for nearly 20 years. “Like, if it’s not a horrible article in a newspaper, it’s gonna be out there on Twitter, so what your family might say to you is, ‘Look, you just can’t—you’ve gotta let it go, you can’t fight it all.’”

Harry and Bradby moved right past that original assertion, but I was stuck on it. Is Harry the most famous person on the planet right now? It’s debatable, but there are others who are more clearly internationally known. In 2022, Australian publication New Idea decided to combine Google search results with annual income and decided that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was the most famous person. On Google’s own list of the top trends for 2022, Johnny Depp and Will Smith were the most searched-for celebrities. But on the same list the death of Harry’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, was the second biggest news event of the year. When his mother, Princess Diana, died in 1997, she was frequently called ”the most famous woman in the world.”

Earlier in the interview, Bradby was a little less specific, describing Harry as “the most talked about man on the planet.” I’m not convinced by that one either, but judging by the front pages of the tabloids, I can understand why people in Britain might feel that way. For the detractors in the UK who want him and Meghan Markle to give up their Duke and Duchess of Sussex titles, he is trying to profit off of his position in the line of succession. But his notoriety, along with his brother, Prince William, has always gone hand-in-hand with their mother, whose fame continued to grow even after she divorced King Charles III. 

As both brothers have discussed at length, her worldwide fame put them in the public eye when they were children, and when she died, her tragic loss made them public symbols. By beginning his memoir Spare with the night he heard his mother died, he is acknowledging how central the loss of Diana is both to his identity and to public interest in his story. In his interviews so far, he has discussed how that dual role of grieving child and avatar for the nation was disturbing for him, down to the “wet” hands of crying well-wishers on the street. For Harry, being a public figure has meant coming to terms that the one thing that everyone knows about him is the worst thing that he ever experienced, which cannot be easy.

When Bradby mentioned Harry’s celebrity, he was saying that Harry had decided to go to war with the press instead of simply going along with them. “I’m not permanently at war at all,” the prince responded. “I made peace with it; I was willing to let a lot of it go back in 2020 when we left the country.” Of course, he hasn’t really let it all go, and his criticisms of the British press have only grown since then, but what he said next helped explain why Harry is still weighing in. He pointed out that the tabloids continued attacking him and Meghan even after they left their royal roles. “If living in a new country, minding our own business during lockdown, not saying anything, not doing anything that would affect the British media at all,” he said. “Every single day there’s an attack—well, then the assumption of it going away or moving on isn’t the case.”