We’ve all had one – you know the mate that suddenly decides it’s way better to hang out permanently with his new girlfriend and forsake watching the match in the pub with you, when he could be perusing the aisles of IKEA clutching a rolling pin and a neon cushion. Only months earlier he’d berate anyone foolish enough to waste their leisure time on such mundane and meaningless activities, whilst dropping yet another Jager bomb into his own pint. It seems like the bigger they are, the harder they fall, and never has any man fallen quite as hard as Prince Harry. The one time fag smoking, committed party enthusiast with a healthy appetite for philandering, is now so wrapped up in his own web of green issues, mindfulness and talking bollocks, that he even wore tramps’ socks and shoes to the Oprah interview almost certainly in a bid to make vagrants feel more included.
This is fine – well, it’s not fine if he’s your brother and he’s just accused you of being part of a rampant neo nazi organisation who take people’s passports away and then magically transport them all over the world, but you get my point. I haven’t got to put up with him every Christmas cornering me by the tree, weeping gently about just wanting to be a private person whilst booking another stay at Elton’s villa, and that is great. Anyone who likes to talk about themselves for 3 hours and then organise its transmission to every flat, condo, villa, long house igloo and birds nest on the planet, really needs to cut the dose.
This is dangerous territory for best men. The worst best men in the world are the ones that like to talk about themselves, and there’s every danger if Harry was making a best man speech in the next few years before he discovers just how much of a tit he actually is, then it could go horribly wrong. Every week I receive stories about the groom from best men that aren’t about the groom at all, they are only about the best man. If you factor in that Harry’s self obsessed anecdotes are now likely to be about green issues and grass roots journalism from a season ticket holder to a private jet with James Corden and Oprah Winfrey interviews under his belt, you can see just how tiresome it could be.
However, worse than that, I think he just might have lost his sense of humour. A great best man speech is always funny, and for one simple reason: to balance out the sentimental stuff. Yes, you could try and talk in a meaningful way about the groom for 5 minutes, but chances are in the UK that someone will blow a tranquilizer dart in your backside and you’ll have a waiter under each arm dragging. you backwards. He always had mischievous glint in this eye, a healthy sense of fun, and a knack for making journalists and the public laugh. The only chortle he’s been able to raise in nearly 3 years is by wearing dirty socks to the interview of the decade. God only knows what Meghan said when she found out.
So, Harry wouldn’t be on anyone’s best man list now, least of all former partner in crime Guy Pelly, with whom he terrorised the bars of Mayfair and the West End back in the good old days. However, if you think this bad, I just dread to think what his father of the bride speeches are going to be like, when he’s on the wrong end of 30 years woke conditioning.
