It might seem all’s well that ends well. Prince Harry should never have been sent into harm’s way to fight in Afghanistan. The British media should never have agreed to keep silent about it. But given that he was and they did, and now that we know, a great deal of good seems to have come of it in the event – or at least in the lack of any event.
Almost everyone has come out of it well. Harry has emerged from interviews filmed in Afghanistan as an unassuming, sensible, endearing and brave young man; clearly popular with his men and well regarded by superior officers, he is (despite a couple of lapses at clubs and parties) altogether a man his country can be proud of. He is a credit to his parents, his Queen and his country.
The Queen and the royal family come out of all this very well too, and not merely for producing such a nice boy, despite all the obvious difficulties. It’s clear they were not only willing but anxious for him to undergo the same risks and hardships as any other soldier, without special treatment. And while I think they were mistaken, it shows them in a selfless and generous-spirited light.
The army too shows to best advantage in last week’s documentary footage of Harry in the line of fire – brave, efficient, disciplined, hard-working and unselfconscious about its own virtues. Once again it appears that the army remains, despite all the cuts, one of the last great British institutions that the world admires.
As for the reptiles of the British media, they have emerged in a much less cold-blooded light than usual. Who would have imagined that all this country’s editors could have voluntarily agreed to, and voluntarily kept, a disinterested promise of silence about anything? Or that for 10 long weeks no single journalist broke ranks? They would not have done so even now had an Australian magazine (it has since apologised) not innocently picked up the story, leading to its disclosure by the ferocious American Drudge Report website. This minor miracle suggests we in the media may not yet have fallen to quite the depths of depravity that our critics claim.
So while most of our idols seem increasingly to have feet of clay and our institutions seem to be crumbling around us, the story of Harry’s weeks fighting the Taliban in no man’s land has restored some of the shine to the royal family, the army, the press and to this country generally. It is a public-relations success of quite astonishing proportions, and it is all genuine. It has also enabled Harry to have his wish, to serve as a real soldier on active duty.
That does not make the undertaking right, however. It wasn’t. I have very little sympathy with the broadcaster Jon Snow, who has made himself understandably unpopular by saying “thank God for Matt Drudge [editor of The Drudge Report]” for ending the “British media’s conspiracy of silence”. It is hard to understand how a British subject could be glad that a foreign website had outed Harry, so to speak, and in the process put him and his fellow soldiers in great danger.
Given that Harry was, wisely or not, given these few weeks of normal and useful service, why should any Englishman thank God that they should suddenly be ended? All the same, whatever his motives or manner, Snow has a point.
No one can seriously deny that there is something alarming about the media being gagged, however willingly. There always needs to be an outstandingly good reason for it, such as national security or a particular right to privacy overwhelmingly greater than the national right to freedom of information. In this case the reason was far from adequate. It was to enable Harry, despite the obvious risk to himself and those around him, to have the experience of being an ordinary soldier.
It is easy to sympathise with him. There was something almost tragic about the way this young, rather inarticulate boy said: “It’s bizarre . . . but I think this is about as normal as I’m ever going to get.” It is indeed bizarre that that very fleeting feeling, perhaps never to be recaptured, came to him somewhere in the desolation of Afghanistan, in hostile country under hard conditions, in no man’s land. But that is the point. To be a royal is rather bizarre, in a kind of no man’s land. It certainly is not, ever, to be normal. It makes it quite impossible for Harry to be a serving soldier, least of all in a dirty war. He is, as he himself joked, a “bullet magnet”, a unique temptation to the enemy and an extreme risk to the men around him.
A year ago, when Harry was hoping to go to Iraq on active duty, Abu Zaid, commander of a brigade in the Shi’ite Mahdi Army, issued a horrifying and very primitive challenge: “We are awaiting the arrival of the young, handsome spoilt prince with bated breath and we confidently expect he will come out into the open on the battlefield. We will be generous with him. For we will return him to his grandmother but without ears.”
Had Harry been captured that time by the Mahdi Army, or this time by “Terry Taliban”, as he calls them, he would have been very lucky to lose nothing more than his ears. He would have been much more likely to lose his head, horribly, on footage broadcast all over the world, after weeks of public humiliation. Meanwhile questions of ransoms and trade-offs would have been debated, to the delight of Islamic extremists all over the world. That was blindingly obvious then and is no less obvious a year later; no such risk to Harry is acceptable.
The increased risk to his men is unacceptable as well. Last year two soldiers were killed in a reconnaissance vehicle in Iraq in what senior army officers said at the time was a rehearsal for an attempt on Harry’s life; they believed the killers were well enough informed about Harry’s future movements to be able to target his troops in this way.
Such risks may be smaller in the parts of Afghanistan where Harry has been stationed, but in his case no risk at all is acceptable. However much one sympathises with this admirable boy, not one single drop of British blood should be risked or spilt simply for the sake of giving Harry a temporary illusion of being normal. No good comes of fostering illusions, least of all in war; it rarely ends well.
Minette Marrin