There’s a bit in the final volume of the Netflix documentary where Prince Harry tells the world about the moment he realised he hated himself. It’s not been splashed on front pages or picked over in comment pieces in quite the same way as his pronouncements about his brother, his father or the late Queen, but I think it’s just as significant, if not more so. For here, in one simple but striking moment, we see what I believe is at the heart of the Duke of Sussex’s move to Montecito: he no longer wants to feel fundamentally at odds with the life he leads.
We see Harry shrug off his self-loathing around halfway through episode four, while reflecting on the awful period of time in 2019 when his new wife found herself in suicidal despair. “I was devastated,” he explains. “I knew that she was struggling, we were both struggling, but I never thought that it would get to that stage. And the fact that it got to that stage, I felt angry and ashamed, I didn’t deal with it particularly well. I dealt with it as Institutional Harry as opposed to Husband Harry. And what took over, my feelings, was my Royal role. I had been trained to worry more about ‘what are people going to think if we don’t go to this event, we’re going to be late’ and, looking back on it now, I hate myself for it… What she needed from me was so much more than I was able to give.”
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