Given that there is no bringing back the late Queen Elizabeth, or indeed her dear mother, it’s hard not to think that the best thing about the Royal Family right now is Princess Anne. I saw her in action a little while ago.
She was giving awards for Pact, an admirable prisoners’ aid society, in a church near Waterloo. She was modest, brisk, rather kind, skinny as a whippet, and well informed. The whole thing wasn’t about her; it was about the charity, and it was plain that she knew her stuff.
And what was blessedly characteristic was that there was no guff. She bowed her head for the prayers (it was a Christian charity) but there was no tapping into the emotions, no inspirational jargon, no personal story, just bolstering the grassroots work of good people.
Compare and contrast with the next generation of Royals. The Princess of Wales is universally admired for her courage in dealing with her cancer treatment and her efforts to encourage others in that bleak predicament.
My own admiration falters, however, confronted by her predilection for tree hugging. Yesterday, she posted a Mother’s Day video showing her pressing her hands against a tree trunk – a clip from her Timotei shampoo style footage from Norfolk last year – to show us how we should “celebrate Mother Nature” and how “our bond with the natural world can help nurture our inner selves”. Oh please. The late Queen would have talked about the importance of faith and got on with her duties.
About Prince Harry, the kindest thing would be to avert our gaze from the downward trajectory that passes for his career, except it’s impossible not to watch. The unravelling of Sentebale, a charity he set up in 2006 with Prince Seeiso of Lesotho to help people diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, is particularly unfortunate. No doubt with the best of intentions, he appointed a high-flying woman, Sophie Chandauka, to head it.
And now he’s reversed out of his own charity, after falling out spectacularly with her. Chandauka says she was the victim of misogyny and bullying; Lynda Chalker, a trustee and Margaret Thatcher’s former aid minister, says, on the contrary, that the chair had an “almost dictatorial style”. The truth of the matter may be unravelled by the Charity Commissioner but meanwhile observers have pointed out that Harry and Meghan are fond of dishing out accusations of racism and beastly behaviour on the part of the Royal Family, but they’re not so keen on being on the receiving end. The biter bitten etc.
One problem is, Chandauka didn’t quite seem to grasp how charities like these work. She wanted the organisation to be less dependent on the prince and his wealthy friends. Alas, they were precisely the people who made it possible. The enterprise was largely funded by the Sentebale polo match – which Harry used as material for his Netflix polo documentary – and a pro-bono performance by James Blunt, Harry’s friend.
And you know what? Without the prince’s residual royal magic dust, the chances of people paying over the odds to take part in the match or perform for its benefit would be vanishingly small. And so it has proved.
Chandauka complained that none of the trustees wanted to point when Harry was in the room, that donations to Sentebale fell when the Sussexes abandoned their royal duties for Montecito – funny, that – but failed to deduce that it was Harry’s royal associations that made it work. Meghan, who looks as if she’s going alone on her current Netflix journey, should take note.
And where there is Meghan there is the ego question. The footage of Meghan muscling Sophie Chandauka away from Harry when he was handing over a polo trophy in aid of the charity tells us lots. Not least that the younger generation of royals is dispiritingly different from the old.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
