It is often said that Prince Harry is a ‘New Royal’. Emotionally literate, racially aware, eco-friendly (except when he’s flying in a private jet to hang at Elton John’s swanky pad in the south of France) – he’s nothing like the stiff royals of old. He’s the metrosexual prince. He even occasionally partakes of a cheeky Nando’s, as he revealed in his book Spare.

I’m not buying it. Here’s my question: if he’s such a modern prince, a valiant escapee from the prison of aristocratic prejudice, why is he always throwing his monarchical weight around? Why is he so quick to wag a blue-blooded finger at the government, the press, even us, the plebs? Why does he come off as more entitled – entitled to hold forth on the democratically elected government of the day, no less – than even his father, the King?

New Royal my foot. When I see Harry in action – whether he’s fuming against the tabloids or chastising the Tory administration – I get a chilling vision of what it must have been like when we Brits lived under monarchs who had real power. When we had to suffer the arrogant decrees of people whose high standing derived entirely from their father’s sperm.

Harry embodies that pre-modern imperious style far more than any other Windsor. He’s Harry the Tyrannical, the only senior member of The Firm right now who is deploying his princeliness to political ends. Was the Civil War for nought?

For me, the most disturbing thing in the phone-hacking trial so far was Harry’s denunciation of the government. Forget the alleged behaviour of the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and the People, all of which are accused by Harry of hacking his gadgets to get stories. It was the prince’s own old-world scolding of Rishi and Co that rattled me most.

He used his witness statement at the High Court to say that both the press and the government are at ‘rock bottom’. Britain is being ‘judged globally’ by the parlous state of the current administration, he said. ‘Democracy fails’, he decreed, when the government and the papers ‘get into bed’ in order to maintain ‘the status quo’.

First, if Harry thinks we are going to take lectures on democracy from someone whose public clout is wholly a product of the medieval ideology of the royal bloodline, he must be off his rocker.

Second, what does he think he is playing at? The Guardian coyly says Harry ‘broke with royal protocol’ with his government-bashing. Let’s put it more plainly: it is completely unacceptable for a prince to make such haughty, meddling statements.

Harry is no normal citizen. He is the son of the King. He is fifth in line to the throne. It is an offence against this nation’s great historical struggle to temper the power of monarchs and expand the power of the people for a prince now to exploit his inherited highness to damn our chosen representatives. 

The King must act. It strikes me that Harry has two choices: he either remains an HRH and keeps his drab, Guardianista political views to himself, or he lowers himself to the level of the rest of us, becomes a simple citizen, and says what he wants.

Then there’s his tabloidphobia. This, too, echoes the despotic tendencies of royals of old who loathed the low-rent press and its rousing of the rabble.

We can all agree that it is not good to hack a person’s phone, though it remains to be seen how much merit there is to Harry’s claim that this was done to him on an ‘industrial scale’ by the Mirror Group papers. But there is something deeply unsettling in Harry’s one-man crusade to ‘change the media’, as he has described it.

Isn’t that what the old Star Chamber aspired to do? Change the media – tame it, make it less radical – in the name of the monarch? Isn’t it what George III tried to do when he issued a warrant for the arrest of that hero of press freedom, John Wilkes, after he dared to criticise the king in his roguish paper, the North Briton? Isn’t it what the royals sought to do in their persecution of Daniel Isaac Eaton, the great 18th-century radical journalist, who was prosecuted eight times between 1793 and 1812, primarily for publishing ‘seditious libels’ against monarchy?

The fight for freedom of the press in this country was precisely a fight for the right to mock kings and princes. So every Brit who values this freedom should recoil when a prince now asks ‘Who on earth is policing [the newspapers]?’, as Harry asked this week. Who polices the press? Not you, sonny. 

There is a whiff of snobbery to Harry’s loathing of the low press. Read Spare and you’ll see it. The ‘truly scary part’ of the tabloid phenomenon is that ‘some readers actually believed their rubbish’, he says. Oiks have stories ‘drip-fed to them, day by day, and they come to believe [them] without even being aware’, he writes. We’re so dumb, you see. And therefore, cleverer, better, Windsor-blooded Harry feels he has a ‘moral duty’, as the Guardian puts it, to ‘change the media’.

Where is the pushback against Harry’s monarchical antics? The bourgeois left is itself so anti-tabloid that it is cheering this spoilt prince’s war on the redtops rather than warning about what can happen when royals use their unearned influence to bristle at the press, the people, the government. ‘Prince Harry ROASTS the British press’, yelps Guardian columnist Owen Jones. Imagine if Owen had been around 250 years ago. ‘King George just TOTALLY OWNED John Wilkes’, he might say.

Harry, stop. Your anger at the press does not give you the right to try to muzzle it. Press freedom matters more than your feelings.