5
‘I am Invictus’: Masculinities, ‘philanthrocapitalism’ and the military-industrial complex
After his second tour of duty serving with the Army Air Corps in Afghanistan in late 2012 as part of the ‘War on Terror’, in March 2014 Prince Harry launched the Invictus Games: an annual, international, multi-sport event featuring wounded armed services veterans. Pitched as demonstrating ‘the power of sport to inspire recovery, support rehabilitation and demonstrate life beyond disability’, the Invictus Games (hereafter Invictus) promote competitive spirit to deal with the physical and mental injuries of contemporary warfare.1 Competing under the motto ‘I am Invictus’, Latin for ‘unconquered, unsubdued, invincible’, the veterans are encouraged to ‘rise above’ injury, in an individualistic framing which configures rehabilitation as a solo sporting pursuit of ‘mind over body’. This self-determining ethos reflects not only the abdication of state responsibility for injured soldiers but also the functioning of ‘corporate warfare’ in the Middle East.
Photographs of Harry visiting the Invictus competitors are key representations of the Games. These visits are apparently intimate and informal, from Harry partaking in training exercises to giving hugs and personal encouragement, hence contributing to representations of Harry as an ‘ordinary’, accessible and liberal royal figure. His affable persona and philanthropic work act not only as redemption for his so-called past ‘transgressions’ but also reveal an attempt to produce consent for the ‘War on Terror’ in the public imagination. The ‘War on Terror’ refers to the US military response to the 11 September 2001 attacks, a co-ordinated terrorist attack led by the Islamist terrorist group Al-Qaeda. Supported by the UK, the USA targeted Sunni Islamic fundamentalist groups, initially in Afghanistan and Iraq. As I explore, the ‘War on Terror’ is subject to a legitimation crisis considering it is not a ‘traditional war’. The scholars Callie Batts and David L. Andrews write that ‘the disabled body of the Paralympic soldier/athlete holds the potential for nationalistic representation and political manipulation’.2 That is, the soldiers’ integration into a ‘national sporting team’ transforms them into representatives of the nation. Harry's functions in two key national institutions – the monarchy and the army – play an important role in transforming soldiers’ bodies through national discourses and through Harry's own redemptive philanthropic and therapeutic military masculinity.
This chapter analyses Invictus to consider the relationship between the Firm and ‘philanthrocapitalism’: a term describing the use of philanthropy as a form of capital that makes corporations and/or wealthy individuals ‘look good’ and hence generates profit.3 Specifically, the chapter argues that representations of Harry articulate narratives of redemption through philanthropy, both in the redemptive masculinities of his royal figure and in the redemption of the ‘good soldier’ from a ‘bad war’ in producing consent for the ‘War on Terror’. I do not aim to present soldiers as victims, or to simplify the positive work Invictus does in helping veteran recovery. Rather, I aim to document the corporate function of contemporary warfare. Invictus, which is anchored to representations of Harry's philanthropic and liberal persona, condenses and disguises a set of contradictions around global conflicts in the twenty-first century, ambiguities in ideas around state responsibility and accountability and the role of corporate capital in these wars. The redemption of Harry as a royal figure, from ‘playboy prince’ to ‘philanthropic prince’ via ‘soldier prince’ maps on to the military-industrial complex, the production of consent for the ‘War on Terror’ at home, the role of philanthropy in mitigating the effects of warfare and shifting contemporary masculinities.
This chapter was written prior to Harry and his wife Meghan Markle's decision to leave the monarchy. I discuss briefly how this implicates this chapter's argument in the Conclusion section, and the couple's decision will be explored further in Chapter 7 and the Postscript. In fact, their departure represents the next stage in what I describe as Harry's ‘redemption’.
The ‘War on Terror’ and the Invictus Games
Britain's role in the ‘War on Terror’ has faced widespread public opposition. The 2012 British Social Attitudes survey revealed that 48 per cent of people opposed sending the Armed Forces to Afghanistan (and 58 per cent opposed Iraq).4 In 2016, a public inquiry established that the UK's legal basis for declaring war on Iraq was ‘far from satisfactory’.5 The British government, then, faced an ongoing crisis in producing public consent for a war that was later deemed illegitimate. However, in contrast, the same 2012 British Social Attitudes survey found that 91 per cent of Britons supported army personnel serving in Afghanistan (94 per cent for Iraq), with respect for army personnel's work even increasing post-Afghanistan and Iraq.6 These statistics demonstrate a detachment between military operations and military personnel, with the soldier figure appearing to operate separately to unpopular deployments. As the sociologist Sivamohan Valluvan writes, if the soldier becomes a point of celebration, this potentially silences anti-war discourse.7
This suggests that the soldier figure could be used to reorient responses in the aftermath of the ‘War on Terror’.8 Such potential is evidenced in representations focusing on soldiers’ personal narratives, including the charities Help for Heroes which raises money for injured troops and Tickets for Troops which gifts soldiers free tickets to cultural events; songs from ITV talent show the X Factor contestants who released ‘Hero’ in 2010, and The Choir: Military Wives, a choir of wives and girlfriends of serving military personnel, who released singles in 2011, 2012 and 2016 and a BBC documentary; the increasing mediatisation of military remembrance; and the launch of the Invictus Games.9
Invictus was launched in March 2014 in London as part of Harry's royal patronages (see Chapter 1). Subsequent events were in Florida in 2016, Toronto in 2017 and Sydney in 2018 (2020 was planned for the Netherlands but postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Injured veterans from eighteen countries, including the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Poland and Afghanistan, compete in sports such as wheelchair basketball, indoor rowing and sitting volleyball to receive gold, silver and bronze medals. £1 million was provided by the Royal Foundation to launch Invictus, whilst Jaguar Land Rover provides further sponsorship.10 Harry is Patron of the Invictus Foundation, and the Chairman is Sir Keith Mills, a multi-millionaire businessman and deputy chairman of the London Olympic and Paralympic Games.11 The concept was inspired by the US Warrior Games: a multi-sport event for US veterans organised by the United States Department of Defense. The Defence Studies scholar Helen McCartney describes how the USA is a model for Britain's public–military relations because it celebrates army veterans nationally.12 Indeed, Invictus states an objective to ‘generate a wider understanding and respect for those who serve their country’.13 This chapter examines this statement when the ‘War on Terror’ is not a ‘traditional’ national war.
The playboy prince
Representations of Harry have shifted substantially over the years. As this chapter shows, common across these representations is Harry's construction as an ‘ordinary’, accessible, liberal royal figure who transgresses royal ‘tradition’, conservatism and class boundaries. Indeed, Harry's tension with his role has often figured him as anti-monarchy (a framing enhanced by his resignation). In 2018, Ipsos Mori research found that Harry and his brother William are ‘the most liked royals since records began’, with journalists attributing this to ‘a triumph for the modern approach’ to monarchy after they ‘swept away stuffy manners to bare their emotions in public’.14 The BBC3 documentary Prince Harry: Frontline Afghanistan, chronicling Harry's time in Afghanistan, features his comrades asserting his ‘ordinariness’: ‘it's easy to put aside the fact he's third in line to the throne … he's a normal guy’.15 It is the various permutations of this ‘ordinariness’ through redemptive masculinities, from ‘ordinary lad’ to a more liberal, emotionally literate masculinity, which this chapter maps.
Harry's representation as a ‘playboy’ party animal played out across tabloid and celebrity media throughout the early 2000s. In 2002 he admitted smoking cannabis, in 2004 he allegedly punched a paparazzi photographer in a nightclub, in 2005 the Sun published photographs of him in fancy dress as a Nazi, in 2006 he was recorded using the racist slur ‘p***’ to an Asian army colleague and in 2012 he was photographed drunk and playing strip poker in Las Vegas.16 These representations have led to the popular construction of him as a ‘lad’. The ‘new lad’ figure emerged in the 1990s, and encompasses a white, working-class, youthful masculinity organised around loutish, hedonistic pleasures such as beer, football and sex.17 This pivots on cultures of sexism repackaged as ironic, postfeminist ‘banter’.18 Harry's interactions with comrades in Prince Harry: Frontline Afghanistan draw on ‘lad’ conventions. They mock each other throughout a console football game, and Harry announces that whoever loses each game ‘becomes the brew bitch’ and must make hot drinks. Upon introducing his comrades to the camera, Harry refers to them as his ‘friends’ in a mocking, sarcastic voice, mimicking a scene from the ‘lad culture’ television sitcom The Inbetweeners.19
Lad culture also reflects an exploitation of class signifiers, which is condensed into Harry's ‘transgressive’ cross-class identity. The ‘new lad’ debuted in men's lifestyle magazines GQ and Loaded in the early 1990s to subvert the ‘new man’ of the 1980s: a liberal, middle-class figure performing masculinities associated with aristocratic Englishness.20 As the scholar John Beynon describes, while the ‘new man’ reflects the conspicuous consumption of the 1980s, the ‘new lad’ maps on to the de-industrialisation produced by Thatcherism.21 While the ‘new man’ was based upon work roles, ‘new lad’ divisions were organised around appearance, and performances of ‘authentic’, jocular working-class masculinity.22 But both GQ (standing for Gentleman's Quarterly) and Loaded are firmly entrenched in the middle-class market, and hence appropriated working-class identity.23 When figures such as Prince William dress as a ‘chav’ (a pejorative stereotype for the British working-class) for a party at the military training centre Sandhurst, it reflects not only the contemporary aversion to working-class culture but also a symbolic classed violence through cultural appropriation.24 There is a symbiosis here with the spectacularisation of the working classes in entertainment media, which reproduces pejorative class stereotypes.25 Some key iconography of lad culture is also visible in the so-called Old Boys Networks of public schools, such as excessive drinking, uninhibited heterosex and casual misogyny.26 The resurgence of Eton College graduates among the elites, particularly within Parliament, or the popularisation of upper-class celebrities such as Bear Grylls, demonstrate the currency of this version of masculinity.27 Grylls, an ex-Etonian, plays on working-class versions of soldiering, survivalism, and adventuring in performances of ‘primitive’ masculinity.28 Indeed, Harry taps into outdoor, reactionary masculine values through his soldiering, charity treks across the South Pole, and conservation work in Africa (leading to the Daily Mail's appellation ‘Harry the Lionheart’).29 In embodying these contradictions, Harry appears to transgress class boundaries, where he is somehow every class – aristocrat, middle class and working class – at once.
Although somewhat useful for reinforcing notions of a (royal) family with a difficult, unruly child, representations of Harry's ‘laddish’ antics were described by the journalist Antony Barnett as ‘highly embarrassing for the royal family’, and his behaviour is constructed as countering the ‘moral and respectable’ Family Firm. For example, after he smoked cannabis, one national tabloid columnist branded Harry a ‘thoroughly horrible young man’ and a ‘national disgrace’.30 The royal biographer Andrew Morton suggests that Prince Charles's then Communications Director, Paddy Harverson, designed a public relations plan for redemption: refigure Harry as a soldier, playing on the historical idea of military service as royal civic duty.31
The soldier prince
The institutions of monarchy and army have a relationship spanning thousands of years, from the Middle Ages when the warrior king ruled to today's symbolic relationship in the Trooping the Colour military parade to celebrate the monarch's birthday, and the Queen's Guard protecting the UK's official royal residences in their distinctive red uniform and bearskin caps.32 Royal family members often wear military uniform for ceremonial events, and various royals have trained, been commissioned or served for military services: the Queen (Auxiliary Territorial Service), Prince Philip (Royal Navy), Prince Charles (Royal Air Force and Royal Navy), Prince Andrew (Royal Navy), Prince Edward (Royal Marines), Prince William (Royal Air Force) and Prince Harry (the Army).33 Military is, in sum, an acceptable form of ‘royal work’.
After graduating from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst – the two-hundred-year-old army officer training centre – in 2005, Harry joined the Household Cavalry regiment as Second Lieutenant.34 On 7 January 2008, the Australian women's magazine New Idea revealed that Harry had been ‘secretly’ serving in Afghanistan for ten weeks as a Forward Air Controller, breaking a media blackout imposed by the Ministry of Defence, and prompting his immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan due to security concerns.35 Harry's second tour of Afghanistan commenced on 7 September 2012 and lasted four months, this time with Harry acting as ‘Captain Wales’, an Apache Pilot with the Army Air Corps.36
British news and entertainment media accounts of Harry's deployment were overwhelmingly positive. These texts typically overlooked the politics of warfare itself, focusing instead on personal narratives of Harry as a heroic figure serving his country. For example, the Daily Express refers to ‘hero Harry’ in a story which seemingly describes him as a hero in equal parts for the ‘dangerous missions’ he undertakes and for sleeping ‘in a shipping container’ in the army camp.37 YouGov found that 82 per cent of Britons approved of Harry's posting.38
Among typical representations of Harry's deployment was an associative link between his ‘laddish’ playboy behaviour and the soldier figure. The Telegraph, for instance, ran the headline ‘Prince Harry's Afghanistan deployment should lay “Las Vegas fling” to rest, says Gen Sir Richard Dannatt’, explicitly evoking Harry's ‘transgressions’ in narratives of his deployment to establish a linear timeline (or, perhaps, a cause and effect).39 Associations between masculinity and war have long histories. Hegemonic masculine values are constructed through deliberate social practice, such as identical military uniforms and systematic training in values of aggression, courage, rationality, self-control and physical endurance (values also seen in competitive sports like Invictus, see below).40
‘Laddism’ is further conflated with ‘squaddie’ subcultures.41 ‘Squaddie’ refers to lower-ranked soldiers and their embodiment of crass, brash masculinity dependent on humour, aggression and fraternal ritual.42 Photographs from Harry's Afghanistan tours saw him riding a motorbike, playing football topless to display a muscular torso, reading ‘“lads” mag’ Zoo, carrying a machine gun and wearing an unofficial US Army Special Forces baseball cap reading ‘we do bad things to bad people’, reinforcing representations of the ‘good’ soldier fighting a ‘bad’ enemy.43 These representations overlook that Harry is not a ‘squaddie’ but a senior officer, therefore distancing him from hierarchical privilege and making him appear ‘ordinary’. It also realigns his ‘laddish’ behaviour within the codes of war culture, where it can be resituated as ‘good boys in difficult situations’. Harry's ‘bad behaviour’ is redeemed.
As the Human Geographer Rachel Woodward and others state, ‘the photograph of the soldier is never just a photograph of a soldier’.44 Rather, it is a symbolic site upon which cultural and political meanings are inscribed, and these meanings are mediated through Harry's affable figure.
‘War on Terror, Inc.’
We can read representations of ‘Hero Harry’ and his ‘laddish’ masculinity as attempts to produce consent for the ‘War on Terror’, whereby the ‘good’ British or American national soldier fights a ‘bad’ enemy. This is evidenced further in the Sun on 24 February 2011, with a front-page photograph of Harry in camouflage gear grasping a machine gun, with the headline ‘one of our boys’.45 The byline employs a celebratory tone to describe the ‘30 Taliban’ – who signify the ‘bad people’ – he had killed, and the newspaper promises ‘unrivalled coverage including poster’ to celebrate Harry's deployment.
Such discourses describe a ‘traditional’ national soldier in a ‘traditional’ war, waged by nations with clear, strategic aims.46 This is given further bolstering through Harry: the monarchy is symbolic of national identity, and the name ‘Harry’ is loaded with historical associations with Shakespeare's Henry V and the warrior king. Historically, national armies developed alongside nation states to replace mismatched feudal mercenaries.47 Following the 1688 Glorious Revolution, the government established the Bill of Rights 1698 and the Act of Settlement 1701 to prevent subsequent monarchs using the army for personal use. The government took ‘de facto control’ of the army, but the Crown retained ‘government and command’.48 Soldiers still swear allegiance to the Queen as their Commander-in-Chief, and soldier discourses pivot on patriotism and national identity.49
However, the ‘War on Terror’ is not a ‘traditional’ war, and representations of soldier Harry act as dissimulations, disguising corporate relations. The ‘War on Terror’ was not democratic, and indeed it cannot even be claimed that the war was waged against a common enemy, considering that ‘terror’ is intangible. Unlike the First and Second World Wars, it cannot be represented as a ‘just war’ fought for ‘king and country’. War critics suggest that ‘terror’ is merely an excuse for the US government to pursue longstanding military objectives, and impose upon civil liberties and human rights while boosting surveillance capitalism.50 Multiple scholars and activists argue that the ‘War on Terror’ is a corporate war, fought for private enterprise and profit.51 The geographer Philippe Le Billon suggested that the ‘War on Terror’ is primarily a resource war, for colonial acquisition of oil and land.52 The journalist and writer Solomon Hughes argued that the private sector was so crucial to the campaigns that it influenced government policies.53 The author and activist Naomi Klein describes this as part of ‘disaster capitalism’: the extension of capital accumulation into global warfare and catastrophe.54 This is the military-industrial complex, or what Hughes termed ‘War on Terror, Inc.’.55
In distinction to representations of the national soldier, many soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq were outsourced from private military and security companies (PMSCs).56 Whilst the government's Strategic Defence and Security Review in 2010 recommended that twenty thousand army personnel should be cut, companies such as G4S and Aegis Defence Services made millions of pounds every year by signing contracts with the UK government to deploy contractors to undertake security operations.57 PMSCs self-regulate under a voluntary code of conduct and are not subject to military codes and honour. The risks of this were demonstrated when the US corporation Blackwater's employees killed 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007.58 These companies abdicate nation states’ responsibility for human rights violations, war profiteering or any other crimes.
The military-industrial complex goes beyond outsourcing soldiers. By the 1980s, private corporations were providing transport, bombs, guns and bullets to the Armed Forces as part of the arms trade.59 The irony is that UK and US corporations are selling arms to the very countries that the UK and USA are declaring war on. The ‘War on Terror’ has also seen the privatisation of prisons, detention centres, soldier housing and military bases; new privatised surveillance methods (such as identity cards in the USA); and corporatised intelligence gathering.60 Corporations underpinned the new Iraqi economy, with the fast-food outlet McDonald's and bank HSBC opening nationwide, and the oil companies Shell and BP receiving shares of Iraq's oil profits.61
Public relations companies are also central to the military-industrial complex. Although news reporting during wartime is not new – the nineteenth-century Crimean War was the first reported in real time using the electric telegraph – the expansion of media platforms since means that the ‘War on Terror’ is a conflict dominated by images.62 From 24/7 live news reporting to productions of the war as entertainment spectacle on television, film and video games, contemporary warfare can be described as what the Communications Studies scholar Roger Stahl calls ‘militainment’.63 Or, as the sociologist Jean Baudrillard terms it, ‘war porn’.64
Harry's deployment is contextualised in these issues. On his second tour of duty, rather than enforcing another blackout on reporting, the Ministry of Defence requested that media ‘act responsibly’ and ask its permission before publishing stories about Harry, effectively giving it control over coverage.65 In return, reporters from the Press Association were allowed direct access to Harry. This model follows the ‘embedded journalism’ agreement established during the Vietnam War, where the US Ministry of Defense worried that critical coverage would erode public support.66 ‘Embedded journalism’ sees reporters deployed to war zones alongside an attached military unit, which raises ethical issues around impartiality and objectivity.67
The few mainstream media accounts critical of Harry's deployment focused on this ‘impartiality’ angle. The Independent referred to Harry as a ‘propaganda tool’ who is putting ‘Afghanistan's future, and the lives of British soldiers, at risk’.68 The Guardian claimed that Harry was the Ministry of Defence's ‘chief asset’ and is ‘gold dust in PR terms’.69 Such accounts demonstrate how representations of ‘hero Harry’ are potentially serving the bigger purpose of reframing the ‘War on Terror’ in the public imagination.
Comparisons can be drawn here between war as a staged photograph opportunity and the choreographing of royal representations. The careful management of war zones does not wholly differ from the other stages Harry moves between. He ‘performs’ as a solider and ‘performs’ as a prince. Moreover, the ‘embedded journalism’ agreement is replicated in Royal Rota journalists accompanying the royals on international tours (see Chapter 1) and in staged royal photographs (see Chapters 2 and 6). Both the Ministry of Defence and the Firm are concerned with carefully managing their mediated image.
The philanthropic prince
Harry's soldiering worked to produce consent for a war happening ‘out there’, as well as reworking his ‘laddism’ into a more acceptable hegemonic soldier masculinity. However, after his return this required new framing: philanthropy. The historian Frank Prochaska mapped the historical relationship between monarchy and philanthropy.70 When ideas of ‘divine right’ waned, it was increasingly important for the monarch(y) to engage productively with public needs, and appear respectable. Queen Victoria enacted values of social responsibility, supporting the voluntary institutions of Victorian society which compensated for lacking state provisions. After the Second World War, the welfare state displaced the philanthropic and voluntaristic model of civil society. The monarchy developed a new approach, supporting the government's welfare institutions: NHS hospitals were a key focus of royal visits throughout the mid-twentieth century. Thatcher's privatisation of the welfare state in the 1980s, and her advocacy of Victorian values, saw the re-establishment of civil society, or a ‘half-way house between state and society’. Jo Littler's reference to contemporary celebrities doing philanthropy as ‘the new Victorians’ demonstrates how the Victorian model of civil society has been re-popularised under neoliberalism.71 This worked in the monarchy's favour, and indeed Prochaska argues that ‘the monarchy now needs the voluntary sector more than the voluntary sector needs the monarchy’.72
Likewise, framing the ‘War on Terror’ as a humanitarian mission is one way through which it is moralised in the public imagination, such as narratives that it will ‘liberate’ Afghan and Iraqi citizens, and the USA's co-option of feminist rhetoric about the oppression of Afghan and Iraqi women.73 This philanthropic framing of warfare constitutes another pillar of the military-industrial complex, as privatised humanitarian projects abdicate the state of responsibility for recovery schemes both domestically and internationally.
Invictus can be analysed through these concomitant histories. Whilst Harry is presented as socially responsible by caring for veterans, he is also producing consent for the state refusing responsibility for these soldiers. Invictus states that its aim is to ‘generate a wider understanding and respect for those who serve their country’, and, as described above, the soldier figure is often detached from the politics of warfare.74 Invictus makes connections between the value systems of military and sport through ideas of combat and heroic warrior identities. This is illustrated in Invictus's claim of ‘the power of sport to inspire recovery, support rehabilitation and demonstrate life beyond disability’, promoting an individualistic solution to the physical and mental injuries of warfare by redisciplining the body.75
Invictus is named after the poem ‘Invictus’ (1888) by William Ernest Henley.76 An amputee himself, Henley narrates his battle with illness through unrelenting human spirit, unbeaten despite life's challenges. The poem ends with the words used in Invictus promotional material: ‘I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul’. ‘I am’ is emphasised in the Invictus logo through coloured highlighting. By positioning the rehabilitation process as a solo sporting pursuit of ‘mind over body’, Invictus distances the injured veteran both from the specificity (and legality) of particular conflicts and from broader social and political meanings of warfare in global contexts. Of course, sometimes this works positively: individual soldiers did not declare war, nor did they necessarily design combat strategy. However, these representations obscure the state's responsibility for sending the soldiers to war, and for providing adequate professional healthcare for those injured. For instance, the work that Invictus does in rehabilitating veterans contrasts with reports that around four hundred serving soldiers committed suicide between 1995 and 2014 (not including those who have left), after mental health conditions were routinely overlooked and untreated by the state.77 Rather than demanding appropriate state support, the soldiers are figured as ‘the masters of their own fates’ buttressed by private philanthropic schemes. This is a form of ‘philanthrocapitalism’, which does the work of the state under ideologies of neoliberal individualism.78 This is, crucially, in direct contradiction to how soldiers are represented as doing the work of the state.
The Politics scholar Joanna Tidy argues that, through competitive sport, the invisible, unruly, damaged soldier body is made visible only once ‘they have completed their transformatory “becoming”’ and conquered their injuries, thus transforming their plight into personal struggle.79 This reflects contemporary ‘supercrip’ figurations, defined as representations of individuals with inspirational stories of ‘defying the odds’.80 The scholar and athlete P. David Howe queries whether these narratives empower disabled athletes, given their tendency to dehumanise and glorify disabled bodies by celebrating the technology that aided them.81 For Invictus, such a narrative proposes that these heroes have triumphed despite difficulty. The state is absolved of accountability.
Who is benefiting from philanthropic initiatives? The sociologist Andrew Sayer suggests that philanthropy by the rich differs from charity from ‘the public’ because philanthropists want to be publicly acknowledged.82 The main sponsor of Invictus is Jaguar Land Rover. This manifested in 2017 not only in advertisements around the games complex, but also in Invictus participants competing in a driving race in Land Rovers around Toronto's Distillery District.83 This sponsorship is especially notable considering that Land Rovers are manufactured as military vehicles for armies, including for the ‘War on Terror’. In associating with Invictus, Land Rover could be enacting its own redemption by trading military violence for philanthropic recovery. Writing about the mental health charity Heads Together, a multi-charity initiative fronted by William and Kate (this included Harry before he left the Firm), Imogen Tyler and Tom Slater note it is ‘bankrolled by some of the very corporate and financial organisations who are the beneficiaries of neoliberal economic policies … [which] are exacerbating mental distress among the … most vulnerable’.84 Likewise, as a luxury, elite brand Jaguar Land Rover has benefited from a culture predicated on neoliberal inequalities. The company documented record sales in 2017 and a tripling of sales since 2009, which coincides with widening wealth inequalities across industrialised countries.85 By aligning itself with Invictus, Jaguar Land Rover enhances its reputation, and develops customer and employee loyalty. These corporate philanthropic initiatives obscure that it is the very existence of social elites and corporate greed that causes the social and economic inequalities that mean that charity is required in the first place. That is, celebrity charity initiatives like Invictus promulgate the ‘fantasy that these things [social elites and inequality] are not connected’.86 They produce consent for inequality through ideas of social responsibility.
Harry's role in Invictus, as representative of the monarchy, is key to resituating these corporate structures as problems of nation or nationhood. Injured soldiers symbolise the nation because of the (bodily) sacrifices they make for the nation's protection, and, through Harry's support, the soldiers are (re)incorporated into national ideology. Invictus focuses on the damaged soldier body, both physically and mentally. Likewise, Harry is represented as having his own ‘problems’ through his past behaviour, and he has now dealt with these and is helping others to do the same. His interactions with Invictus competitors play on his performance of a liberal, therapeutic, emotionally literate masculinity.
The spectre of Diana
Representations of masculinities are always in flux.87 After the ‘new lad’ of the 2000s, contemporary culture evidences two new ‘figures’: one developing ‘new lad’ reactionary masculinity into toxic masculinity and misogyny (as embodied by Donald Trump), and more fluid representations of gender that challenge heteronormative masculinity.88 ‘Hybrid masculinity’ describes how masculinity routinely absorbs and rejects various identities usually associated with marginalised masculinities or femininities.89 Grayson Perry's The Descent of Man and Robert Webb's How Not to Be a Boy both use biographical memoir to narrate how hegemonic masculinities limit their ways of experiencing maleness.90 Contemporary paternity, from the ‘Instagram Dad’ to ‘celebrity postfeminist fatherhood’ has also emphasised ‘softer’, liberal masculinity and ‘hands on’ fathering – traits performed by Prince William.91
The former US President Barack Obama is particularly interesting for this phenomenon, and reflects Harry's shift from ‘soldier prince’ to ‘philanthropic prince’. Obama continued to pursue neocolonial and capitalist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet, as the scholar John Landreau argues, Obama's approach emphasises ‘soft power’ and a liberal, emotionally literate masculinity as opposed to George W. Bush's combative rhetoric.92 Harry and Obama are routinely represented across inter/national news media as friends, depicted as a ‘bromance’, a portmanteau of ‘brother’ and ‘romance’ to describe interpersonal male relationships.93 In 2016, the Kensington Palace Twitter account (at the time representing Harry, William and Kate) engaged in ‘banter’ with the Obamas’ account over whether Team UK or Team USA would win that year's Invictus Games. After the Obamas uploaded a viral video, Kensington Palace posted a tweet signed by Harry reading, ‘you can dish it out, but can you take it?’ Following this, Kensington Palace uploaded a video of Harry and the Queen watching the Obama video on an iPhone. In response, the Queen scoffs ‘oh really’, and Harry looks to camera and says ‘boom’ while making a ‘mic drop’ 94 gesture.95 Jo Littler argues that the video ‘builds its comedy by juxtaposing a degree of American black cool with uptight white aristocratic chintz-laden tradition’.96 It also invests chintz-laden tradition with values of ‘cool’ through its proximity to the Obamas’ culturally accepted scripts of popularity.
For Harry, ‘softer’ masculinities are represented in his philanthropic initiatives and a new mediated intimacy where he undertakes emotional labour, such as supporting Invictus competitors or discussing mental health issues. For example, in July 2017, ITV aired the documentary Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, for the twentieth anniversary of Diana's death.97 The documentary featured William and Harry speaking candidly for the first time about their grief. In various media interviews during Britain's Mental Health Awareness Week in 2017, Harry elaborated on the mental health issues caused by his mother's death, saying he was ‘very close to a complete breakdown’.98 He received counselling and therapy, where he opened up after previously ‘shut[ting] down all his emotions’, which also acts as an explanatory tool for the ‘harder’ masculinities he performed earlier in life.99
Harry's disclosures were applauded by mental health professionals for contributing towards ending mental health stigma.100 Indeed, a public figure speaking openly about mental health is a valuable intervention, especially from one typically associated with hegemonic forms of ‘laddish’ masculinity. This talking ethos is further promoted in Heads Together, which encourages ‘chang[ing] the conversation’ around mental health to remove the stigma.101 This emphasis on ‘talking’ as a cure, and the importance of recognising and embracing emotions, is relatively new, rising in the 1980s when counselling industries expanded, self-help books gained popularity and the language of therapy was used in everyday discourse.102 This is contextualised in neoliberalism's emphasis on the managed, reflexive self, or as what the sociologist Eva Illouz calls ‘emotional capitalism’ whereby emotions are increasingly mapped and calculated.103 Emotional labour operates as a moralising judgement: discerning the ‘good’ citizens who enact self-care and the ‘bad’ who do not.104 In taking responsibility for his emotions, Harry enacts ‘good’ neoliberal personhood.
Emotional labour features in celebrity cultures to manufacture intimacies with audiences, particularly in reality television.105 Tabloid talk shows such as The Oprah Winfrey Show use ‘the confessional’: where participants reveal something personal and, in so doing, reveal their ‘authentic’ selves.106 However, these confessions are staged and often give participants esteem. This is also a moralised classed, gendered and racialised phenomenon, dependent on one's access to psychological and emotional capital.107 Whilst the lower classes are ‘pathologised’ for their admissions, the confessions of the wealthy and/or famous are ‘invested with great ritual weight’.108 For Harry, his confessions of mental health trauma are central to his redemption as the ‘philanthropic prince’, resolving the ‘scandals’ of his past. In a 2017 article about Harry, for example, the Sun narrated a story of damage and recovery: from young Harry with his mother in the 1980s, his solemn face at her funeral in the 1990s, his falling over outside a nightclub in the 2000s and finally an official photograph for Heads Together where he smiles alongside William and Kate in branded Heads Together headbands.109
Princess Diana is a key representational resource in Harry's remaking. She performed a new level of intimacy and engagement for the royals, distancing herself from institutional formality and embodying values of compassion and approachability. Her own emotional openness is well documented, and indeed the documentary Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy was reminiscent of another (in)famous royal documentary over twenty years earlier: Diana's Panorama interview.110 In November 1995, three years after separating from Prince Charles, Diana was interviewed for the BBC's Panorama programme, where she openly criticised the treatment she had received from the monarchy. Later, Diana's death prompted widespread criticism of the Firm – particularly the Queen – as cold and inhuman because they did not demonstrate appropriate emotional distress. If one of the biggest royal crises of Elizabeth II's reign was because the royals were not appropriately emotional, this is now being reclaimed and resolved through Diana's son(s) and their ambivalent, shape-shifting masculinities. It is interesting, that twenty-two years after Panorama, a similar representation featuring Diana's sons would form part of the carefully constructed tributes to her life, this time sanctioned by Buckingham Palace. The two documentaries are filmed using similar camera angles and close-up shots, and both Diana (Figure 5.1) and Harry (Figure 5.2) look slightly past the camera at an interviewer, drawing on the recognisable codes of the confessional television genre. Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy can be understood as the Firm harnessing emotional labour, mediated intimacies and therapeutic cultures, influenced by the popularity of Diana, whose life and death provide scripts for the younger royals to perform ‘modern’ monarchy and stage an alternative royal lineage through her (although this is more controlled than Diana, see Chapter 6).
5.1 Still from Diana's Panorama interview, BBC, 1995
5.2 Still of Prince Harry on Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, ITV, 2017
Harry's ‘ordinariness’ also plays out in his attitude towards the monarchical institution, which he – like Diana – often positions himself in tension with. As the Media scholar Arvind Rajagopal writes, Diana's emotional openness situated her as both inside and outside the establishment.111 Likewise, even prior to resignation, Harry was positioned as simultaneously inside and outside the Firm. In Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, Harry criticises outright the decision for him to march behind his mother's coffin in the funeral procession, aged 12, in front of millions of global television viewers, saying ‘no child should be asked to do that under any circumstances’.112 Later in 2017, Harry told Newsweek magazine:
We are involved in modernising the British monarchy. We are not doing this for ourselves but for the greater good of the people … Is there any one of the royal family who wants to be king or queen? I don't think so, but we will carry out our duties at the right time113
Harry described the monarchy as undesirable, a duty and burden, again positioning himself as a socially responsible, but alienated, subject. Harry's criticism of the funeral can be understood as royal populism: an attack on an emotionless and ‘out-of-touch’ Establishment by a member of that Establishment, with authority to criticise it from the inside. But although Harry positions himself in tension with the institution, he makes clear he will not dismantle it. Rather, he will continue taking responsibility for his ‘duties’ for the sake of ‘the greater good of the people’, for whom the monarchy is positioned as a valuable symbol. As I explore in the Postscript, even Harry and Meghan's resignation statement still promised to ‘continu[e] to fully support Her Majesty’.114
In speaking about royal duty, Harry describes the monarchy as ‘work’, as labour to be undertaken. This is not a new conceptualisation: in 1966 Princess Alice (Queen Victoria's last surviving granddaughter) described the monarchy in her book Reminiscences as:
an arduous profession whose members are seldom granted an opportunity of opting in or out of their predestined fate … The royal motto ‘Ich Dien’ is no empty phrase. It means what it says – I serve.115
This almost directly reflects Harry's rhetoric. Alice bemoans her ‘predestined fate’, refers to her royalty as a ‘profession’ and suggests that royals ‘serve’. By positioning their roles as work, these royal figures demonstrate that they consider themselves hard working, productive and ‘doing good’. Michael Billig argues that the notion of royal work ‘invites demystification for it implies that an ordinary human being stands behind the extraordinary role’.116 Hence, Harry constructs a ‘real’ him, existing in tension with his ‘job’ as a royal. But, of course, all representations of royal figures contribute towards producing consent for the monarchy.
Conclusion
Since I originally researched this chapter, Harry's story continues to develop. On 8 January 2020, Harry and his wife Meghan Markle announced their intention to ‘step back as “senior” members of the Royal Family’.117 In February 2020, Harry undertook his final royal public engagements, including launching a new eco-friendly travel firm. Upon introducing Harry's speech at this event, the host Ayesha Hazarika said, ‘he's made it clear that we are all just to call him Harry. So ladies and gentlemen, please give a big, warm, Scottish welcome to Harry’ (emphasis added).118
The Daily Mail claimed this illustrated how Harry has ‘drop[ped] his royal title’.119 But in fact, the couple are retaining their official titles ‘The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’, while losing HRH (His/Her Royal Highness). I argue that his request to ‘just call me Harry’ illustrates a new permutation of the story in this chapter of the redemption from ‘playboy prince’ to ‘philanthropic prince’ via ‘soldier prince’, using discourses of royal ‘ordinariness’ and shifting masculinities. Such informality evidences Harry's flexible classed identity. The former UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who attended the public school Eton College and whose family are multi-millionaires of inherited wealth, is (in)famous for saying ‘just call me Dave’: a request obscuring his upper-class background through the codes of working-class authenticity, and populist political styles.120 The Education scholar Angela Smith suggests that ‘just call me Dave’ is a performance of liberal masculinity, vested in forms of social progression.121 This is especially problematic, Smith notes, considering that Cameron's government was towards the political right, promoting austerity and cuts to welfare. Similarly, Harry's request to ‘just call me Harry’ obscures his class privilege, his inherited wealth and the monarchy's conservative values. Criticism of Harry and Meghan's decision to resign also illustrates the problems with representing Harry as in tension with the Establishment. Whilst it was acceptable for Harry to be ‘anti-monarchy’ when within the institution, after resigning he and Meghan became ‘outsiders’, tainting royalty with commercial investments (see Postscript). Harry's journey to ‘just Harry’ evidences the next stage of his redemption story, and the limits of this narrative.
By exploring the Invictus Games, I have argued that Harry has undergone redemption through philanthropy, whereby his past ‘transgressions’ are resolved through a liberal, ‘ordinary’, emotionally literate masculinity articulated through rehabilitating the damaged soldier body. Princess Diana is a key representational resource for this remaking, and Harry's mediated intimacies are staged in and through her memory. By positioning his royal life as ‘work’, and charity as part of his emotional labour, Harry produces consent for the monarchy through ideas of social and civic responsibility. However, this chapter demonstrated a simultaneous process of absolving responsibility. It argued that Harry's role in Invictus condenses and disguises a set of contradictions around twenty-first-century global conflicts, ambiguities in ideas around state responsibility and accountability, and the role of corporate capital in the ‘War on Terror’. Representations of Harry remake the ‘War on Terror’ as a national war, where ‘our boys’ are fighting a ‘bad enemy’ for the ‘greater good’. The ‘war arm’ of the Firm and the ‘charity arm’ of the Firm are directly connected as both are processes of capital accumulation, both produce consent for the Firm in the public imagination, and both are key representational tools to stage monarchy.