‘Selfish, hurtful, atrocious’: Newspapers rage about Harry and Meghan’s decision to back away from royal family

Tabloids with history of suggesting prince was not fit for role react with fury after he quits role

He is the box office royal often depicted in sections of the British press as barely fit to be a member of The Family.

With a history of youthful high jinks that involved him smoking cannabis and dressing up as a Nazi before his marriage, Prince Harry has regularly incurred the wrath of Fleet Street for purportedly bringing shame on his grandmother.

Now, after his decision to effectively resign his role, commentators for some of those same newspapers have reacted with varying degrees of fury.

“Rogue”, “petulant” and “having your cake and eating it” were among the more notable phrases in circulation on the day after the 35-year-old declared he, wife Meghan and baby Archie were to step away from public duties.

"Harry has selfishly turned his back on the institution she [the Queen] has fought to modernise and secure for him and his children," Rachael Bletchly wrote in the Daily Mirror, a paper being sued by the couple for alleged breach of privacy.

“And he didn't even have the guts or decency to tell her, or his own father, of the bombshell he was about to drop….

"Well, good riddance. I for one have had a bellyful of Harry's eco-warrior hypocrisy.”

The paper’s main editorial was more tempered but did feature a little dig of its own.

"It shows shocking disregard for a woman whose entire life has been ruled by a sense of public duty and honour," it said.

The Daily Mail devoted its first 17 pages to the decision, no mean feat given it was only made - on Instagram - at 6.30pm the previous evening.

Veteran columnist AN Wilson called it all “an atrocious lapse of judgement.”

The couple, he wrote, “seemed oblivious to the fact that the British monarchy is a delicate constitutional miracle, not a vehicle for its members to press home their views on the subjects that interest them, however noble."

Fellow Mail columnist Sarah Vine was also characteristically quick to put the boot in.

“It's almost as though they never really had any intention of trying to stick it out at all, as though right from the start the notion was always there in the back of their minds that if life as Duke and Duchess didn't live up to expectation, they would simply leave,” she wrote.

In its main editorial, the Mail said the pair had pressed the "nuclear button" on their royal career (rather begging the question as to just what button Prince Andrew must have pressed when he made the decision to give an interview to Emily Maitlis about being friends with a sex offender and then using Woking Pizza Express as an alibi to demonstrate he is innocent of sexual relations with a minor).

“To them,” continued the paper's leader, “it is 'an exciting next step'. To most of us, it sounds like having your cake and eating it. They want the status of being senior Royals but the privacy and freedom of being private citizens.”

In the Daily Express, meanwhile, columnist Margaret Holder reckoned the couple had "consistently failed to understand that a tax-paying public expects the Royal Family to be relevant, relatable and value for money".

She wrote: “In trying to hide the place of Archie's birth and refusing to name his godparents they pushed aside the public in a way not done by any other royals".

The couple, for their part, updated their new official website – sussexroyal.com – soon after the announcement with a revised media policy.

In it, they stated they wished to “provide access to credible media outlets”, while preventing the “frequent misreporting” that occurs around their lives.

That will inevitably be widely interpreted as the pair seeking lots of positive coverage for causes close to their heart while avoiding the scrutiny of the more critical reporting - a scenario that can only be considered, at best, unlikely