Sunday, 24 Nov 2024

CALLAHAN: Netflix replays Diana's last hours, Harry can't say a word

MAUREEN CALLAHAN: Netflix ghoulishly replays Diana’s tragic last hours in ‘The Crown’… but her son’s $100M payday from them means he can’t say a word. So the question for Harry: is all that money worth it?

Prince Harry is surely in a hell of his own making.

As Netflix prepares to drop season five of ‘The Crown’ — which covers his parents’ bitter bust-up and Princess Diana’s untimely death — Harry can’t say a thing.

Call it the cost of doing business.

After Megxiting the United Kingdom in 2020, Harry and Meghan took a reported $100 million payday from Netflix.

By their telling, they desperately needed all that money to escape their royal duties and crushing fame.

As Harry told Oprah Winfrey, he worried his new wife would be hounded to death as his mother was chased into a Paris tunnel by a journalistic wolf pack.

‘You want to talk about history repeating itself?’ Harry told Oprah last year. ‘They are not going to stop until [Meghan] dies.’

How terrible it must be for Harry now, to rely on that same evil media for his paycheck.

As we’ve seen, ‘The Crown’ showrunners are actively making stuff up — dark, hurtful, reputation-soiling stuff.

But don’t worry, Harry. At least Dame Judi Dench is speaking out.

In a recent letter to The Times, Dench called for the series to come with a disclaimer, writing in part, ‘Given some of the wounding suggestions… that King Charles plotted for his mother to abdicate, for example, or once suggested that his mother’s parenting was so deficient that she might have deserved a jail sentence — this is both cruelly unjust to the individuals and damaging to the institution they represent.’


Against The Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony,’ we see a royal family in crisis, grappling with the damage done by a wayward, out-of-control Diana exacting revenge through the very media she claims to loathe and threatening the monarchy’s very survival (Left)  ‘The Crown’ trailer shows Diana screeching to a halt in a car chase scene (Right) The outfit is strikingly reminiscent of one worn by Diana on ski trip to Lech, Austria in 1994

And guess what? Netflix added a disclaimer.

From Harry, nary a public peep.

Maybe he hasn’t seen the new trailer for this penultimate season?

Against The Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony,’ we see a royal family in crisis, grappling with the damage done by a wayward, out-of-control Diana exacting revenge through the very media she claims to loathe and threatening the monarchy’s very survival.

Maybe the story that Harry tells Oprah about his mother isn’t so clear cut.

Diana, we now know, cooperated with Andrew Morton for her bombshell tell-all ‘Diana: Her True Story,’ then told the palace she had nothing to do with it. And despite claiming ritual persecution by the media, one of Diana’s last phone calls the night she died was to The Daily Mail’s royal reporter Richard Kay.

‘My mother was chased to her death while she was in a relationship with someone who wasn’t white,’ Harry told Oprah. ‘And now look what’s happened.’

It’s not quite that simple.

Diana was chauffeured that night by a speeding drunk driver. She wasn’t wearing her seat belt — had she been, the official investigation found, she would have had an 80 percent chance of surviving. She was urged not to give up her royal security detail, but she’d done so anyway.

Her death was wholly preventable and not racially motivated. In fact, we now know that Diana had recently split with the love of her life, a Pakistani heart surgeon she’d secretly been seeing, and was possibly playing up her relationship with Dodi Fayed — that ‘someone who wasn’t white’ — to make her ex-boyfriend jealous.

It was a dangerous game that ended tragically.

The notion that Princess Diana was a hunted figure who just wanted to be left alone — well, we’ve long known that was a fiction.

Yet her son and his bride still cling to that narrative for themselves: Hunted. Persecuted. Moved to Montecito to be left alone.

How utterly heroic, then, that Meghan’s gone on to host her own high-profile podcast, grant interviews to major publications while posing for lavish photo shoots, has deigned to star in that Netflix docuseries, and has generally pushed her way into the spotlight at every available opportunity.

Truly a profile in courage.

Also in ‘The Crown’s’ new trailer, we see Prince Philip admonish a loose-lipped Diana. ‘Remember the one condition, the one rule,’ he tells her. ‘You remain loyal to this family.’

‘You mean silent,’ Diana replies.

Now they’re really hitting close to home.

We hear echoes of Oprah’s opening question to Meghan: ‘Were you silent? Or were you si-LEN-ced?’

Never before has ‘The Crown’ seemed camp, and it’s long overdue. Harry and Meghan’s Netflix overlords are going to make these two earn every last cent of their payday.

It’s glorious.

‘She opens her mouth,’ says another observer of Diana, ‘and hand grenades come out! She wants to tear down the temple.’

Who else could this apply to? If only we had a clue . . .

Anyone who saw Harry’s demeanor at the Queen’s funeral ceremonies would know how his miseries have been compounded. The weight of all his poor decision-making — slinging and co-signing the vile accusations his wife has made against his family and the entire royal establishment, even as his grandfather was on his deathbed and his beloved grandmother was shouldering it all — has finally registered.

Harry is an outcast, his presence merely tolerated, both within the family and without.

Harry and Meghan were booed during the Queen’s Jubilee just months before her passing.

And all the Hollywood A-listers who once welcomed them — George Clooney, Tyler Perry, Oprah Winfrey — have not been seen around them for quite a while.

Even his wife is criticized from normally reliable allies, like Whoopi Goldberg, who found Meghan’s latest claim of bimbo-hood over her short stint on ‘Deal or No Deal’ to be terribly tone deaf and self-serving — Harry says nothing publicly.

Such are the consequences when you corner Bob Iger on a red carpet and cajole him into giving your wife voiceover work, or when rumor has it you call Gayle King after every private conversation with your closest family members.

Harry and Meghan were booed during the Queen’s Jubilee (above) just months before her passing.

So now, as Harry waits for King Charles to decide whether his children get royal titles — which he and Meghan so badly want — Harry can’t strike back against ‘The Crown,’ no matter how poorly they depict his family.

In brief: Tampongate stays.

Harry is the architect of his own demise. He can’t credibly claim no knowledge of ‘The Crown’ before cutting that deal with Netflix. In fact, of his family’s depiction, he reportedly once said, ‘Oh, it’s much worse than that.’

And he told royal biographer Angela Levin, as season two was streaming, that she must watch it.

‘My only problem,’ he told her, ‘is they’ve got to stop before they get to me.’

Oh, Harry. Getting to you is a fait accompli. Hope all that money was worth it.

In the end, who has really silenced whom?

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