Even the usually stoic guards at Buckingham Palace must be wincing.
During a Las Vegas party at the Wynn and Encore complex earlier this week, Prince Harry romped around. Naked. Baring the crown jewels, as it were.
Apparently, Prince Harry engaged in a game of strip pool.
Clearly, Prince Harry lost the game.
Unknowingly, Prince Harry exposed his backside to the world.
This, courtesy of another partygoer’s cell phone capable of capturing, storing, and distributing photographs around the world in seconds.
This, despite Prince Harry cavorting privately, if not discreetly.
This, although Prince Harry undoubtedly knows technology’s inherent danger to privacy.
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Unless it’s on the Internet.
He was not in the swimming pool at the Wynn casino.
He was not on the infamous Las Vegas strip.
He was not in a restaurant or bar.
The younger heir to the British throne is not alone in naked shame, though.
As the United States woke from its long national nightmare of the Watergate scandal, Wilbur Mills was Chairman of the United States House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee. A powerful Democrat, Mills fell from grace with the speed of a stone falling in a body of water, specifically, the Tidal Basin near the Thomas Jefferson Memorial.
On an October night in 1974, the United States Park Police stopped Mills’s car. Intoxicated, Mills had a driver, Fanne Foxe, a stripper. She ran from the police, using the strength of her stripper’s legs to attempt an escape. She got as far as the Tidal Basin, where the Park Police found her.
Mills won re-election in the November 1974 election, despite the Tidal Basin incident. On November 30th, Mills went onstage at the Pilgrim Theatre in Boston, a burlesque house, with Foxe’s husband. Foxe was appearing there. Apparently drunk, Mills held a press conference in Foxe’s dressing room.
Mills stepped down from the Ways and Means chairmanship after the Pilgrim incident, checked into a rehabilitation center, and triumphed over alcoholism. But the Tidal Basin and Pilgrim events stain an otherwise exemplary political career.
Mills brought the spotlight on himself; Prince Harry suffered from it. Simply, technology cannot be tamed in a 24/7 media circus.
Privacy be damned.