What my friends Prince Harry and Meghan are REALLY like, reveals BRYONY GORDON – who has been to their house and was given a pot of homemade jam

There’s a strange thing that happens when you meet someone who happens to be very famous.

People want to know what they are like, but only if it matches the image they have created of the famous person in their mind.

I tell you this because I became friends with Prince Harry about eight years ago. Since then, my life has been filled with questions from people who want to know more about his character: is he brainwashed, is he planning to overthrow the monarchy, does he smell of money, and so on.

And when I tell them my honest opinion, that he’s nice, funny, and pretty normal, I often see a flash of disappointment cross their faces, quickly followed by words like, “Well, you’d say that, you know him,” as if the fact that you know someone disqualifies you from having a reliable opinion of him or her.

Anyway, I wanted to write this column about what I know about Prince Harry because, as he turns 40 this weekend, I’ve heard a lot of negative things about him. They’re character assassinations that don’t even begin to compare to the man I consider my friend, the one who cares passionately about wounded veterans and has done more than most to change the perception of mental health in this country.

Becoming friends with the Duke of Sussex was a turn of events I couldn’t have predicted in 2016, when reckless journalists like me, who wrote about their many, many failings – depression, OCD, addiction problems – were typically not invited to interact with royals.

Or at least not until the spring of that year, when Harry and his brother and sister-in-law, the current Prince and Princess of Wales, launched their mental health campaign Heads Together.

I was one of the few journalists at the time who was giving mental health a lot of attention (and oh, did I say a lot about it), and I was invited to the launch of the project at the Olympic Park in Stratford. There I met the three ‘directors’, as they were called, and they inadvertently offered me to run the London Marathon for their charity.

(Heads Together had been selected as the official charity partner of the event, so I thought it would be polite to do that, rather than simply bow.)

Over the next year, I spent a lot of time with the young royals, chatting about all things mental health. There were media events and training events and even intimate Christmas drinks at Kensington Palace. I got on well with all three of them, but I seemed to have a special bond with Harry, a bond that, as people often do, we had built up from both spending time on the naughty step.

But I also got the feeling that he understood the darkness I was talking about, and I asked him if he wanted to be the first guest on the mental health podcast I was launching.

To my surprise, he said yes.

Even more surprising was the honesty that radiated from him when we recorded the podcast at Kensington Palace.

He was nervous about what he wanted to tell me—nervous enough that I found myself trying to calm him down and reassure him. But there was a good reason for his fear. Back then, the Royals weren’t known for anything other than a stiff upper lip. It wasn’t customary for them to talk about their feelings.

And so it was truly groundbreaking when Harry – or Haz, as I had come to call him by now – spoke so movingly about the grief he had pent up after the death of his mother, Diana.

“I can safely say that losing my mother at the age of 12 and therefore shutting down all my emotions for the last 20 years has had a pretty serious effect on not only my personal life but also my work life,” he told me. “It was 20 years of not thinking about it and then two years of total chaos.”

When the podcast aired in April 2017, it made headlines around the world. My social media channels were flooded with people expressing gratitude that such a well-known man from such a closed family could talk so openly about grief.

Professor Sir Simon Wessely, then president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said the prince had achieved more in communicating mental health issues in a 25-minute interview than Wessely had in his entire 25-year career.

“He has a reach around the world that people like me can only dream of,” Wessely said. “He will have communicated in a way that I have worked my whole life for.”

Marjorie Wallace, founder of mental health charity Sane, said: ‘It has done more good than many, many campaigns. It has given a message of hope that feelings left unaddressed for too long can become malignant – but that it is never too late to seek help.’

Last year, Bryony traveled to Harry and Meghan’s new home in Montecito to interview him on the eve of the publication of his book, Spare

It felt like a real turning point in how we look at mental health. For me, it was also a pivotal moment in my own personal journey – the fact that this major public figure had trusted me with his story, not despite my own troubled history of mental health, but because of it.

I didn’t expect to hear from Harry again – he was a Royal after all – so I was touched when he called to congratulate me after I completed the marathon.

We stayed in touch through various mental health projects. In early 2018, he introduced me to his future wife, Meghan Markle, who I now also consider a friend. We met for lunch and worked with her as she worked for charities in the UK.

I visited them at their then home of Frogmore Cottage in Windsor, was with them at Buckingham Palace on the day they left the UK in 2020, and last year travelled to their new home in Montecito to interview Harry on the eve of the publication of his book Spare.

I spent an afternoon in the house, the children running around happily while we drank tea. Harry proudly showed me the DIY photo wall he had recently made, with photos of his mother.

As I left, after being sent away by the happy couple with a jar of homemade jam (which I then left in the back of a taxi in a jet-lagged daze; somewhere in Los Angeles, a cab driver had one of the first shipments of American Riviera Orchard’s products on hand), I was reminded that they are a very ordinary couple in a completely extraordinary situation.

There is no air or grace about them, no desire to do anything other than protect their children from an increasingly digital world that wants nothing more than the worst in people. A world that forgets that no matter how famous someone is, they are just doing their best, just like everyone else.

This isn’t what people want to hear, but it’s what I’ve discovered time and time again.

So happy 40th birthday Haz. I hope you continue to make a difference for the next 40 years, no matter who the opponents are.