Chivalry is back, thanks to Prince Harry

“There are three sides to every story; my side, your side, the truth and nobody is lying.” Robert Evans’s observation, after a lifetime producing some of Hollywood’s greatest films, including The Godfather and Chinatown, seems profound. Consoling even: everyone has their own “truth”.

Another film-maker, the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, thinks differently. His 1951 masterpiece, Rashomon, shown last week at the IFI, also takes one story and three versions. But in Kurosawa’s hands, everyone is lying. “It’s human to lie,” is Kurosawa’s bleak assessment.

These two opposing world views compete for dominance in Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare. After years of therapy, Harry has reached his own “truth”. But he also accuses the palace and the British tabloid press – “everyone” - of lying.

This apparent contradiction undoubtedly led to the criticism that the whole thing is yet another exercise in attention-seeking. Undoubtedly it is. But, according to Harry, media never looked for his and Meghan’s side of the story, which is an extraordinary indictment of the British tabloid press.

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Take the well-worn tale of the bridesmaid’s dress. The tabloids reported that Meghan reduced Kate Middleton to tears. They learned soon after that the reverse was true. But never clarified. Trivial but symptomatic.

Harry’s most vocal critics miss two factors, one of which was the necessity to right a perceived wrong. The equally important factor is Harry’s character and his absolute determination to change the muted fate that history and heritage dictated for his young wife and family.

Has anybody noticed that he has been standing up for one woman’s right to speak, to lead her life without being traduced at every hand’s turn? Far from being a self-serving narcissist, Harry is the kind of role model young men today could usefully emulate.

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Sleepwalking privilege

It took him a while, he admits, to awake from his sleepwalking privilege and his “unconscious bias”. But the iron entered his soul when he returned home one day to find his wife breastfeeding their son, her tears dripping onto their baby. And she didn’t, apparently even read everything written about her: “She would be dead if she was reading the stories,” he told one interviewer.

He resolved to change things. And he did. Country, career and everything he was brought up to believe in.

Until he married Meghan five years ago, he was something of a darling of the British public – the lost boy walking eternally behind his mother’s coffin. What few realised was that – boy and man – he blamed the paparazzi for his mother’s death, though he managed to retain an outward civility. Since his marriage, however, the image portrayed has been of a whingeing, spoiled brat.

His memoir reveals a very different Harry. What leaps from the pages is a surprisingly decent, self-aware young man. One who is more than comfortable with his feminine side.

Macho he most certainly is not – as can be seen from his much-mocked use of the word “necklace” for man-chain and his account of using Elizabeth Arden cream on his frostbitten penis. A small but telling turn of phrase to one interviewer reveals a nuanced modus vivendi. His misfortunes, he says, “Made me the man I am today.” No gender-neutral “person” word for him He is not afraid to be a man.

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Art of manliness

He is clearly an aficionado of the (almost) lost art of manliness. He portrays his actions as simple necessity: “To protect my wife and family.” But in this era of toxic masculinity, whether it presents as misogyny, racism, transphobia or any other bigotry, he is a beacon of enlightenment – including that forgotten virtue, chivalry.

All his manliness, however, would ring hollow, were there not some substance to his claims about the workings of the monarchy. If Harry is to be believed, the competing “comms” (communications) departments of senior royals are at the heart of the problems.

One compelling, well-documented sequence of events gives a real insight. Not of “lying” but of how truth can be weaponised. A communications expert called Jason Knauf worked for the princes William and Harry and their spouses until their households split in 2019, when he moved exclusively for William and Kate. The same year Meghan took a case against the Mail for publishing a private letter to her father. The Mail appealed the first verdict which found in her favour.

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During the appeal, Knauf “voluntarily” provided text messages to the Mail that revealed Meghan had been aware of the dangers when she wrote the letter. It was a convenient truth – one that did Meghan no favours. She won the appeal. Knauf was at pains to point out that he did not do it at William’s behest. He still retains his position at William’s comms office.

Cool-headed lawyers, not warm-hearted chivalry, won Meghan’s case. But the chivalry provided an impetus, Which makes it all the more pity that chivalry hasn’t recovered since second-wave feminism rejected it as a tool of the patriarchy. Which it almost certainly was, back then.

But things change. We live in a world where women clearly need protection at times. Do chivalrous actions really imply a lack of equality or classify women as weaklings? Why are we so fearful of any corrective acknowledgment of men’s roles? It’s not a question of needing more or less masculinity. It’s about respect .

Harry’s story shows the danger of polarities – truth versus lies. The real story is ordinary truth versus weaponised truth. In truth, as in interactions between men and women, there’s nothing to beat good intentions.