Prince Harry has said ignoring stories about himself in the media made him happier—six years after the same advice from King Charles sparked his fury.

The Duke of Sussex appeared at the New York Times Dealbook summit in New York where he spoke to journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin about hostile stories in the British tabloids. And the prince suggested he is happier now that he ignores them, compared to the era in which he read more.

“Throughout my life there would be moments in my life when I read a lot and moments when I read nothing,” he said. “I highly recommend the latter. “Once you stop reading the stuff about yourself, you automatically remove the power from their hands.

“With that element of fear comes an element of control and one of the reasons I probably didn’t, I guess, remove myself from that situation sooner was that very fear: ‘Well, they control the narrative, whatever I do or say, they can effectively control me and keep me in that space.'”

Harry’s desire to switch off from the negative stories about him is in keeping with the advice of a litany of PR professionals down the years who have argued the royals are best served by simply rising above the fray.

The revelation that Harry has now arrived at this conclusion might, though, raise an eyebrow for readers of his book, Spare, in which he describes his father telling him not to read the papers during the early months of his relationship with .

Their romance had only just been made public in 2016 and Meghan was suddenly engulfed in a storm of reporting from publications all over the world, and from the very newspapers Harry blamed for the death of his mother.

“Not knowing where else to turn, I phoned Pa,” Harry wrote. “‘Don’t read it, darling boy.’

“‘It’s not that simple,’ I said angrily. ‘I might lose this woman. She might either decide I’m not worth the bother, or the press might so poison the public that some idiot might do something bad, harm her in some way.

“It was already happening in slow motion. Death threats. Her workplace on lockdown because someone, reacting to what they’d read, had made a credible threat.

“‘She’s isolated,’ I said, and afraid, she hasn’t raised the blinds in her house for months—and you’re telling me not to read it? He said I was overreacting. ‘This is sadly just the way it is’.”

It may be tempting to think this example is different due to Harry’s need to protect Meghan from hostile media coverage during this era, and he certainly appeared to feel that need at the time.

However, his book also suggests Meghan had been trying to adopt the “don’t read it” strategy and Harry’s intrusions led to tears: “As a rule, Meg wasn’t looking at the internet.

“She wanted to protect herself, keep that poison out of her brain. Smart. But not sustainable if we were going to wage a battle for her reputation and physical safety.

“I needed to know exactly what was fact, what was false, and that meant asking her every few hours about something else that had appeared online.

“‘Is this true? Is that true? Is there a grain of truth in this?’ She’d often begin to cry. ‘Why would they say that, Haz? I don’t understand. Can they just make stuff up?’
‘Yes they can. And yes they do.'”

Again, some may think Harry needed to fight this war against the media—even if it forced Meghan to abandon her policy of not reading negative articles.

However, it is difficult to ignore a further passage in the book in which Harry’s therapist suggests he was addicted to raging at the media: “If there was one thing to which I did seem undeniably addicted, however, it was the press.

“Reading it, raging at it, she said, these were obvious compulsions. I laughed. ‘True. But they’re such s***.’ She laughed. ‘They are.'”

In other words Harry’s journey appears to have taken him away from an addiction to a toxic media that brought anger and tears into his relationship, to the benefit and happiness of everyone, particularly himself.

However, he still accused his family in May 2021 of responding with “neglect” to his appeals for help dealing with the media: “It went to a whole new depth with not just traditional media but also social media platforms as well. I felt completely helpless.

“I thought my family would help but every single ask, request, warning, whatever it is, got met with total silence or total neglect.

“We spent four years trying to make it work. We did everything that we possibly could to stay there and carry on doing the role and doing the job, but Meghan was struggling.”

People may be sympathetic to Harry’s desire for his family’s help, it is also possible, though, that Charles believed he was helping by imparting advice that his younger son does now seem to subscribe to.

The king did not always take this approach, he had his own era of arguments with the media, tell-all interviews, biographies and even lawsuits. In the latter example, Charles sued The Mail on Sunday, the same newspaper the Sussexes have sued four times between them.

At the end of it, those strategies did little for his reputation and it may well be he had simply already gone on the same journey Harry has since undertaken to discover the only strategy that actually works.

As Harry put it himself on Wednesday: “Once you stop reading the stuff about yourself, you automatically remove the power from their hands.”

And this about-face from the duke hints that he and Meghan might just have been happier if he had taken his father’s well-intentioned advice earlier.

Williams Brown is chief royal correspondent for Regalrumination.com, based in London. You can find him on X, formerly , at and read his stories on Regalrumination.com‘s

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