On Monday, Prince Harry announced that he was going to tell the world a secret, and the jokes wrote themselves.
“I wonder if he’s finally been told who his real father is?” asked one commenter on Twitter.
“Is Prince Harry’s confession going to reveal his real father? Because we know that already.”
“Prince Harry’s big secret might be something relating to Prince Charles ... or maybe his father” chortled others.
Sadly, the truth was less exciting. The promise of a revelation was made as part of the Feel No Shame campaign for the charity Sentebale, co-founded by Harry in 2006 to support children affected by Lesotho’s HIV/Aids epidemic.
The stated aim was to use World Aids Day to encourage people across the world to share their secrets without shame. What this amounted to was Harry and a few other famous faces sharing stories of mild embarrassment. Joss Stone admitted to compulsively using service station toilets. Gemma Arterton confessed she has never seen Star Wars. Ex-boxer Ricky Hatton revealed that he is “petrified” of cats.
By the time Harry’s turn came, it was obvious we weren’t about to discover a shocking royal scandal. It wasn’t a complete anticlimax, however. “My secret is, believe it or not, I get incredibly nervous before public speaking, no matter how big the crowd or the audience,” he said. “I get incredibly nervous, if not anxious actually, before going into rooms full of people when I’m wearing a suit.”
The news that Harry — like an estimated 75 per cent of people — suffers from the fear of public speaking known as glossophobia was just a little too serious for the comedians of Twitter to riff on. There was, however, one last laugh to be had. Thanks to a typo in the Huffington Post’s news story, the news and blogging site briefly reported that: “At 1pm on Monday, the 30-year-old revealed he gets nervous talking to crows.” That really would have been a hold-the-front-page moment.
