Being royal doesn’t spare Prince Harry from mental health issues

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Prince Harry told Oprah that heavy drinking masked the pain of his mother Diana's death (Jeremy Selwyn/Pool via Reuters)

Much has been made of supporting those with mental health. Government ministers have stated it is a high priority. Various media outlets have suggested campaigns and its importance.

But when it comes to Prince Harry, it does not seem to apply. Because he was born into the royal family does not mean he does not suffer like many others, and why should he suffer vitriol from the press because he dares to speak his mind?

I would suggest he is speaking out because he wants to help others and make a difference. The way he speaks out may upset some because they believe the royal family is about the stiff upper lip. But there is the problem with mental health, if you don’t speak out and bottle it up the situation can become worse.

It is not possible to have it both ways or believe mental health is only an issue for those who are not of royal blood or have what may be seen as privilege.

No one born into the royal family chose to be. Add to that a dysfunctional family, a mother killed in a car crash and then having to walk behind her coffin in the full glaze of the world. It is no wonder Harry suffered.

He is, after all, human with the same failings, pain and hurt as the rest of us.

It’s hypocritical for those who support people with mental health problems to criticise him for speaking out. If, by doing so, he ruffles a few feathers – then so be it.

When it comes to issues of mental health, you cannot pick and choose who to support or who is allowed to have problems.

Graham Jarvis

Leeds

Tip of the iceberg?

I worked for the BBC for a total of nearly 10 years and was working as a broadcast journalist on BBC Breakfast News, the night the Princess Diana interview went out. Almost no one had heard of Martin Bashir and we were full of questions as to how and why he managed to get this interview. We were also pretty much unaware that there was an internal BBC investigation, headed by Tony Hall, taking place after concerns were expressed about how Bashir obtained access to Diana.

The one question that hasn’t (yet) been asked following the fallout from the investigation into the Martin Bashir/ Princess Diana interview is: Why did the BBC rehire Bashir as religion editor in 2016? It’s a decision that must have been rubber-stamped by Lord Tony Hall, since he was director-general of the BBC at the time.

According to the BBC’s recent Panorama programme, Princess Diana, Martin Bashir and the BBC, aired on Thursday 20 May, Tony Hall took personal charge of the Bashir investigation at the time of the original Panorama interview with Princess Diana.

It now transpires the BBC had its doubts about Bashir back then and Tony Hall took personal charge of an internal investigation, personally intervening on Bashir’s behalf by telling the BBC’s board of governors that he believed Bashir was honest and honourable.

Today, it is being reported that Tony Hall admits he got that wrong and said that he was wrong to give Bashir “the benefit of the doubt” at the time of the first BBC investigation into the Panorama interview during Hall’s original tenure as director-general.

Hall returned to the BBC, from the Royal Opera House, in 2013 to rescue the broadcasting company, which was (again) in a quagmire following the Jimmy Savile scandal and the resignation of short-lived director-general George Entwistle.

Then, in 2016, the BBC rehired Martin Bashir, as religious affairs correspondent. The director-general in charge in 2016 was the same Tony Hall, who took charge of the original BBC investigation into Bashir.

This BBC appointment went practically under the radar, given Bashir’s previously stellar reputation following the Michael Jackson scoop for ITV and a high-profile career as a correspondent in the US. There was no fanfare, unlike the BBC’s response to the original Princess Diana scoop – which won a Bafta award in 1996 – something the BBC will return.

Surely there are some questions here that need answering? Why did the BBC (and Tony Hall) rehire Martin Bashir, when there were doubts as to how ethical his procurement of access to Princess Diana was at the time of the 1995 Panorama programme? What was Lord Hall’s involvement in the rehiring of Bashir? And finally, the question which should be asked – was Bashir given a job at the BBC to keep a lid on things? Or was something else going on behind the scenes?

There are two other key issues from the fallout of this latest BBC scandal. Has the BBC lost its “aura” of trust around its news reporting? And is this the tip of the iceberg – in terms of other BBC scoops, exclusives or stories?

Andrew Carapiet is the director and founder of media training consultancy Media Friendly

Getting the dirt

How appropriate, it took a Dyson to get at the dirt that the BBC had brushed under the carpet.

Colin Burke

Cumbria

Dulled pain

Jon Davis may have forgiven Tony Blair but many of us have not, especially the families of those who died while serving in the armed forces, and others associated with this betrayal of our trust. Time has not dulled the pain of the needless waste of lives by unnecessary conflict.

That one act has nullified any benefits that he may have achieved for the British people and, for me, he ought to be relegated to yesterday’s man and forgotten about.

Neither he nor any of the others involved in one of Britain’s most shameful episodes have been punished and we have been left with a troubled legacy of unrest in Iraq, which overflows into Britain.

Mr Blair, like Mr Johnson, has no qualms about obfuscating the truth to appease others at the expense of the British people. How can we, in all honesty, accept him back into politics when he has let us down so badly, causing so much grief to so many people?

The adoring way Mr Davis sees Mr Blair’s leadership of the Labour Party and governance of the country is an insult to the past.

I would like to end by paraphrasing Mr Blair: “You start at your most popular and least capable, and you end at your least popular and most capable.” I hope that it is not only improbable that he will return to politics but continues to be unthinkable.

Best of luck with your book, Mr Davis.

Keith Poole

Basingstoke

Plastic waste

We need to consider avoiding the term “single-use plastic,” which can only reinforce and encourage this misguided notion.

The son of the inventor of the plastic bag, Sten Gustaf Thulin (who did so in 1965), is on record as saying his father would be horrified at how his product has become so misused and vilified when his intention was to help the environment by saving trees being felled for paper, an issue then growing in public awareness. These bags were imagined for life (the life of the bag).

Much of plastic packaging is obviously superfluous, and good for nothing once our toys or bananas are unpacked at home – and it is downright dangerous when discarded into the environment. The netting bags oranges come in trap many a creature – even before their slow decay into microplastics entering the food chain.

Many items can be repurposed, from yoghurt pots for storage of DIY bits, garden centre plant plug trays for your next year’s seeds, whatever. The containers our occasional takeaway comes in supply most of our food storage needs, but I dread to think of what happens to most of them. I was born into a post-war household in which any waste was anathema.

The downside comes with each revelation of where our conscientiously binned “recycling” ends up, like a disaster in Turkey or Indonesia, destined for burning or blocking the rivers of poorer conurbations with no infrastructure to cope. The combined effects of Covid and climate change can only exacerbate the scale of the problem.

Some brilliant minds are at work developing alternatives, such as starch-based compostable bags, or degradable pots at the garden centre, or using plastic waste for road surfacing or clothing (watch out for those microfibres going down the drain), but for many uses, there are yet to be widespread alternatives to the variety of plastics produced.

The key has to be in disposal, once they are beyond further use. Humans can be as resourceful as they can be indolent. When faced with numpties dropping drink bottles from their cars or slinging dog poo bags into the hedge, there’s a way to go yet.

Rick Biddulph

Surrey