Poor old Tom Bradby. He got the interview that everyone wants to watch – the first sit-down with Prince Harry about his new book, which aired tonight on ITV – and his fellow journalists all hate him for being a frightful suck-up. We must all be jealous. Mr S, certainly, would kill for Bradby levels of access.

Kelvin MacKenzie summed up the bitter mood among the Fourth Estate:

The reason ITV’s @tombradby always lands the Prince Harry interviews is that the ginger whinger knows he won’t be asked tricky questions like; Why does 50% of the nation want you stripped of your title? Bradby should drop journalist from his Wiki and replace it with arselicker.

— Kelvin MacKenzie (@kelvmackenzie) January 3, 2023

Mr S bows to nobody in his reverence for ‘dirty Mac’ – a tabloid genius, in many ways. But that seems harsh. Bradby tried to challenge Harry at times. He suggested that Harry might be stuck in the past, that he might have a simplistic understanding of the media, and that he might be guilty of infringing his family’s privacy while complaining about the attacks on his own.

But the Duke of Sussex’s doublethink is disorienting at the best of times. ‘100 per cent,’ he often said in reply to a Bradby gist, before then appearing to make precisely the opposite point.

Harry went to lengths to distinguish between racism – Meghan never accused the royal family of, apparently – and ‘unconscious bias’, about which he and Meghan felt ‘concern’. The latter is something Harry believes he has gotten over but his family still suffers from. He will only enlighten them, we understand, after they have accepted their flaws. ‘There has to be accountability,’ he said, repeatedly. It’s complicated.

Harry is prickly, too, as everybody knows by now. When Bradby dared to suggest that he had been ‘pretty consistently scathing’ about his stepmother Camilla – Harry snapped back: ‘Scathing, what’s scathing?’ His eyes narrowed aggressively. Bradby looked frightened, as if dreading a Piers Morgan-style storm out moment, but pressed on:

‘Well as in you say that, your interests were sacrificed “on her PR altar,” to quote, and you seem to be specifically referencing that. Now her people might say, well, it’s not a crime to go to lunch with journalists.’

‘Well, I think in the book is very clear what happened,’ said Harry. ‘There’s no part of any of the things that I’ve said are scathing towards any member of my family, especially not my stepmother.’

Bradby didn’t press the point, which is understandable. But the exchange did point towards a certain truth in MacKenzie’s tweet. The reason Bradby always gets blockbuster interviews with the young royals is because he never lets the journalistic side get in the way of his pally relationship with the Windsors.

In fact, the only moment Bradby threatened to criticise Harry came when the interviewer tried to put across William’s point of view as they discussed the brothers’ collapsed relationship.

Bradby went on, in a fairly unctuous way, to cite the Serenity Prayer:

‘Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.’

William and his father, Bradby tentatively suggested, have the serenity or acceptance part locked down, in that they understand the freedom of the press. Whereas, the Duke of Sussex was still – courageously, natch – trying to change the way publicity works. Harry at that point began babbling about how his ‘life’s work’ now was to change the media. It wasn’t exactly Frost vs Nixon, but then who expected it to be?

Mr S, cynic that he is, couldn’t help but wonder if Bradby might have panicked at moments that this interview with the Spare could jeopardise some future tell-all with the Heir. William, after all, has also trusted Bradby with big sit-downs in the past. Oiling up to royals is not as easy as it looks, people.