Of all the walls on which you would have wanted to be a fly, the one to choose would be in the room in the margins of a UK-Africa investment summit in Docklands in January 2020 where Boris Johnson spent 20 minutes trying to talk Prince Harry out of moving to the US.
In a tasty appetiser for his memoir, extracts of which are to be published in the Mail tomorrow, he describes “a ridiculous business... when they made me try to persuade Harry to stay. Kind of manly pep talk. Totally hopeless”.
His chief argument was to play on the enormously good work that Harry was doing for the Invictus Games and, a little less convincingly, on Meghan’s work for the education of women and girls in developing countries. With such an appeal to the prince’s better nature, how could Boris fail? It turns out he could. The persuasive oratory on which his classical education was based, and which swayed millions to vote for Brexit, was, it seems insufficient to get Harry to change his mind.
The one question we all want to know is, why wasn’t Boris’s superpower rhetoric deployed before Harry’s public announcement of his intention to leave, rather than after?
After you’ve publicly committed yourself to exile, you’re hardly going to do an about-turn the next day, are you?
The meeting came just hours after the duke gave an emotional speech in which he said he and Meghan were leaving with “great sadness” but felt they had “no other option” but to step away from royal life. Well, after you’ve publicly committed yourself to exile, you’re hardly going to do an about-turn the next day, are you? Did the Palace officials who got on Boris’s case not have advance notice of his declaration? Because if they did, the time to get the PM on the case would have been before he declared himself, thereby entailing no loss of face. But it’s interesting to speculate who might have been behind the idea of unleashing Boris on Harry. The late Queen? Charles? Were they that desperate to keep him?
It must have been gratifying for Meghan when Harry came back to tell her that he’d seen off the PM when he tried to persuade them not to carry out her idea of returning to California. In a contest between two wills: hers and Boris’s, there wasn’t really any doubt about the outcome, was there?
