Poor Prince Harry is feeling homesick, and has been for some time. “I love my country … I miss the UK,” he told the BBC earlier this year, looking sad.
And this week he’s at it again. “‘Though currently, I may live in the United States, Britain is, and always will be, the country I proudly served and fought for,” he wrote, in an open letter ostensibly about Remembrance Sunday, but which also doubled as a list of things he is pining for as he sits at home in Montecito — the pub, the banter, the “self-deprecation and the humour”.
I have been expecting Harry to come to this realisation for some time. The pasty and the ginger simply do not belong in California. It is not for us. It took me five weeks to reach the same conclusion when I stayed there. It has taken Harry five years.
It is, obviously, too hot. There is a sea right next to it, but to get into that sea you need to take off your T-shirt and show Californians quite how ginger and pasty you are. That is an “authentic self” few have time for.
Then again, if you happen to be a particularly unfortunate combination of pasty, ginger and British then your luck is completely out. It is like landing on the surface of another planet, one full of stringy super-humans imbibing oddly coloured juices. They speak a version of English that is alien, full of the faux chumminess of social media; one that is so new age and winning, so fast and so coded as to leave me and my tiny, ginger brain in an absolute spin. Even New Yorkers aren’t fluent.
‘Harry and his wife Meghan were booed — booed! — at a World Series game in Los Angeles recently when they appeared on the Jumbotron, a fate usually reserved for divisive Presidents or that couple caught cheating at a Coldplay gig’ (Imagn Images)
I stood in one coffee shop watching conversation fizz like music between a barista and an old SoCal lady with fantastic bejewelled glasses, the chatter a quick and rapid-fire pitter-patter of local history and social justice and – somehow – coffee beans which all interwove seamlessly. I asked about the weather and the barista just stared at me, so I paid $15 for my coffee with a $5 tip. So much for British charm.
How much does Harry miss Britain? He is of course great friends with neighbour and old LA hand Orlando Bloom, a man who is neither pasty nor ginger and therefore fits in much better. He spent his own fortieth birthday in the mountains, trekking and trying to pal around with (new) Californian friends near his Montecito home. He likes being a dad. But if there’s one thing California hates – for all the “Girl Dad” T-shirts the Prince sports running – it’s someone trying to be something they’re not.
The thing Harry probably didn’t understand about California until it was too late is that, like most of hard-working America, it spits out and rejects what isn’t working. That’s in-built. The fifth largest economy on the planet has no time for the inefficient. The miracle of the state – and in fact the only way to survive it – is being able to work incredibly hard, incredibly successfully, all the time, while making it look totally effortless and breezy. Harry this ain’t.
His $100m “media career” with Netflix has been a disaster, his five-part documentary about the exciting lives of elite polo players, was a total flop. His podcasts are unlistenable. But is anyone surprised? His midlife career three-point-turn has seem him to go from being in the army, which he was very good at, to raising lots of money for charity, which he was very good at, to attempting to become a media mogul in a state that is absolutely full of inveterate entertainment barons and dazzling young stars. That is like spending your life as a journalist then waking up one morning and deciding that in three days you want to land on the moon.
It is all a great shame. He and his wife Meghan were booed – booed! – at a World Series game in Los Angeles recently when they appeared on the Jumbotron, a fate usually reserved for divisive Presidents or that couple caught cheating at a Coldplay gig. Ranker, an LA-based site that uses crowdsourcing to fuel its rankings, just placed Prince Harry as the third most despised celebrity by a poll of 48,000 people – one slot behind the convicted sex felon Sean “Diddy” Combs, and pipped to No 1 by, err, his wife. But while she, a natural Californian, has no problem with this sort of brand-building, plate-spinning lifestyle – and indeed seems to spend a lot of time whizzing back and forth between glossy prize galas in Washington DC – that is not Harry’s authentic self.
Meanwhile his older and estranged brother William is 6,000 miles south in Brazil for his EarthShot climate prize, focused on saving the world, kissing babies, playing beach volleyball and generating frothy columns entitled things like “My teen crush on Wills is back. Am I alone in finding him hot again?” This is the soft and statesmanlike power of looking comfortable with yourself – looking, dare I say it, happy.
I don’t think Harry ever wanted to build a brand out West. And I don’t think he wants to now. He has the distinct mien of a man in his 40s starting to realise that California might have been beyond him. Nick Clegg had it. Robbie Williams had it. Mick Hucknall had it. And now Harry has it too. There is no shame in failing to be practically perfect. But, as he is starting to discover, when you are pale and pasty and British, there’s no place like home.
