Prince Harry, Princess Diana and the media

The controversy over Harry and Meghan’s Netflix series has led to speculation over how his late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, might have felt about her younger son’s actions.

Piers Morgan, a long-standing critic of the couple, wrote on Twitter that Diana “would be appalled” at how Harry is “trying to destroy the Monarchy & attacking Britain”.

However, others have drawn parallels between Harry’s experiences and behaviour and those of his late mother.

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A ‘burn-it-all-down gesture’

In her book The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor – the Truth and the Turmoil, author Tina Brown suggested that Diana might have approved of her younger son’s actions.

Harry expresses his “lasting contempt for the press” with “tortured, vocal, frequently ill-judged condemnation, a never-ending flurry of lawsuits” and “a burn-it-all-down gesture that his mother… might have well understood”, she wrote, in a passage adapted for Vanity Fair.

“Have we forgotten the lessons learned from Diana’s experience?” asked MSP Karen Adam in The National. She was commenting on Jeremy Clarkson’s controversial column for The Sun in which he wrote that he was “dreaming of the day” when Meghan is “made to parade naked… while crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her”.

Harry “clearly just wants to keep his family safe”, wrote Adam, because he “knows where this could all end”.

Diana ‘would be ashamed’

But could Harry be manipulating the media in the same way his mother was accused of?

Diana was a “media mastermind”, said Elle, and an “unabashed spin doctor of her own wounded cause”. She was “hunting for a chance to strike back against her separated husband” and as “she knew the power of media”, she “decided to use it”, in the form of her bombshell Panorama interview in 1995.

The director of the Netflix series “works hard to foreshadow the Sussexes’ experience in Diana”, said The Cut, “framing her largely as a victim of the tabloids”. However, it added, the reality was “more complicated – a symbiotic relationship with the outlets that cemented her superstar status”. Diana was “known to have orchestrated her own leaks” and “sometimes called the paparazzi on herself”.

Sky News Australia host Rita Panahi said that Diana would have been “appalled” by the Netflix series and the Daily Mail’s Dan Wootton said Harry’s mother would be “ashamed of her youngest”.

There is also speculation that there is intense disapproval from Harry’s older brother. The Prince of Wales is said to be “livid” at his brother’s “antagonistic” use of Diana’s Panorama footage in the Netflix series, Vanity Fair’s Katie Nicholl told OK! magazine.

“William has campaigned for that footage to never be screened again,” said Nicholl, “so for it to be used in his brother’s own reality TV show will be very frustrating for William.”