Meghan and Harry’s race row with royal family will have devastating impact on Archie

The biggest victim of the latest race row to engulf the royal family is Prince Archie, who will pay a high price for his parents’ very public feud with the palace.

COMMENT

What do you think is written on Prince Archie of Sussex’s lunch box?

When his parents Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex ordered those sticky name tapes that get slapped on every item shipped daily into preschools by doting parents, did they just go for a plain ‘Archie’? Or did they include his title? Is there a ‘Mountbatten-Windsor’ thrown in for good measure?

There are identity politics – and then there are royal identity politics.

Not a lot gets written about the young prince but this week Archie has played an accidental starring role in one of the biggest crises, in years worth of large crises, that is buffeting Buckingham Palace.

His grandfather King Charles and aunt Kate, the Princess of Wales are alleged, according to a new book, to be the previously unspecified members of the royal family who raised what his mother Meghan dubbed “concerns and conversations” about his skin colour before he was born.

Every day this week this situation has gotten more and more out of royal hand, from the book in question, Omid Scobie’s Endgame, going from being a caustic nuisance to resuscitating the simmering row over race that has burbled along for years, to, courtesy of the Dutch translation, identifying Charles and Kate as the “concerns” culprits.

The Princess of Wales was named as the royal who allegedly made comments about Archie’s skin colour. Picture: Aaron Chown – WPA Pool/Getty Images

According to a Dutch version of Omid Scobie’s book Endgame, the Princess was named alongside King Charles. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

At the time of writing it’s all a case of ‘Scobie says’ versus an implacable Palace silence, an approach that normally eager over-sharers the Sussexes are following too.

For now, let’s forget what happens in the next few days and whether, as a Times’ editorial has postulated, the duke and duchess should be stripped of their Sussex titles. Forget however much gnashing of teeth might be happening behind the doors of Clarence House and Adelaide Cottage this weekend and forget the clutch of loyal courtiers onto their sixth double espressos and second whiteboard as they try to work out how to respond.

You know that phrase that gets thrown around by conservative politicians and pundits – ‘won’t someone think of the children’? Well as this imbroglio overtakes the Palace and the House of Montecito, won’t someone think of the prince and princess?

What little, if any chance, there might have been of Archie especially but Lili too forming some sort of real bond or connection with their British family has, this week, taken a massive hit.

Meghan first aired the allegation during a televised interview with Oprah Winfrey in March 2021. Picture: Netflix

How much harder will it be for Charles to ever really get to know his American grandchildren now that the youngest prince will one day know that, according to his mum, his grandfather had “concerns” about his skin colour while he was still in utero?

The situation was parlous enough already.

November marked four years since a baby Archie flew the ten hours from the UK to Vancouver Island with his parents where they all shacked up in the first mega-mansion in a series of North American mega-mansions befitting an unusually flush Real Housewife that they have called home.

Since then, the now four and a half-year-old has spent a grand total of four days back in the UK, which also happens to be the entire amount of time that his sister has spent back in their father’s homeland. (Consider: Lilibet is a princess of the United Kingdom but has never even spent a full-week on British soil.)

By all accounts, William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales’ three young children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis have only met Archie on a small number of occasions while, as far as has been reported, they have never met Lili.

Archie has barely spent any time in the UK. Picture: Netflix

For four days during the late Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations last year, the King’s five grandchildren were all staying approximately 650 metres away from one another on the Windsor estate and yet was there a jammy play date arranged? Any sort of trans-Atlantic summit of young cousins awkwardly negotiated via stilted messages sent via encrypted servers and with the help of aides in multiple time zones?

Exactly.

While we wait to see what the short and medium-term repercussions of Endgame’s naming of Charles and Kate and the Sussexes’ so-far extraordinary silence might be, let’s you and I take a look at the longer term picture – a longer term picture where it’s these kids, and especially Archie and Lili, who will pay a high price.

It’s impossible to overlook the very human sadness here.

These Sussex tots are growing up without knowing either of their grandfathers, one of them having sold out their mother by giving portions of a letter to the Daily Mail and staging paparazzi photos for dosh and the other having been ending up on the opposing side of the dynastic bust up of Megxit.

Right now, it’s hard to ever see that changing and it’s hard to see a future where Archie and Lili will have any sort of meaningful relationship with their British family.

Lilibet Diana was born and is being raised in the US.

Harry and Meghan moved to the US in early 2020. Picture: Alexi Lubomirski/Handout/The Duke and Duchess of Sussex

In November, the Times reported that Harry and Meghan would not “decline an invitation to spend time with His Majesty” for Christmas, a testing of the waters that was met with an implacable ‘no way José’ from the Palace and the sound of an old bakelite handset being banged back into its cradle.

His Majesty’s unwillingness to see Harry and Meghan is eminently understandable, the King having no interest in helping them incidentally create new Netflix fodder or having to enjoy his double portion of hard sauce across the table from two people who have earned tens of millions by telling the world what a plonker he is.

But, what about the Sussex kids?

Archie has never spent the festive period with his grandfather and never gotten to partake in the staunchly Teutonic celebrations that the Windsors favour to this day. (We can blame the staunchly Saxon Prince Albert for that one, a man whose greatest achievements include, popularising Christmas trees and installing indoor plumbing for Buckingham Palace. Please note my admirable restraint in not having used the expression ‘royal flush’.)

My point is, in all of the tempest and the interviews and the tears and the finger-pointing and the cheques and the ‘senior palace sources’ popping up to whisper sweet nothings into the British media’s ears, the people I really feel sorry for are the ones high on Octonauts merch and low on ever having met the Archbishop of Canterbury.

You don’t have to be any sort of vociferous Sussex or Wales fan to see the pathos of this mess of all of their parents’ (and grandparents’) making.

There is also the wider question of what this cousinly estrangement could mean down the track when the current crop of kids hits adulthood.

In the UK we might see George, and likely Charlotte and Louis by default, dutifully suiting up daily to fly the flag for King and country, the three of them, by that stage, the only working members of the royal family, aside from their parents potentially, left.

The three of them. Everything will rest on the three of them. Just imagine the pressure and the workloads that will be brought to bear here, even to just fulfil the basic requirements of a constitutional monarchy.

Meanwhile, over in the US, having grown up in the shadow of Uncle Sam and the Stars and Stripes and Oprah popping around for kitchen suppers, Archie and Lili will be two adults with titles that inextricably tie them to the monarchy and yet no practical or emotional connections to the crown.

That duality of these inherently opposing identities seems liable to cause no end of headaches down the track.

Their otherness as members of the British royal family brought up on American soil, wholly unique in Hollywood, will ensure a lifetime of endorsement deals and light TV hosting gigs and toothpaste commercials will be shovelled their way.

No matter what, their actions, their marriages, and their business dealings will still refract back and reflect on The Firm, a sort of reputational ricochet effect.

Maybe we will see Archie and Lili hungrily pursue private lives in the wilds of Montana – or maybe we will see the first bona fide prince end up hosting The Masked Singer.

Now, this week, piled on top of this already vertiginous pile of obstacles to Archie and Lili ever knowing their British family, we can add Endgame’s revealing of the so-called ‘royal racists’. How will it feel for the prince, at some stage in the future, to know that his mother believes his grandfather and aunt were expressing unconscious bias towards him, before he was even born?

Have this week’s events just further ingrained and further entrenched the chasm between Montecito and the monarchy? Has this Endgame mess ensured this schism will continue to blight the next generation?

For another bit of cheesy adage, they say “it takes a village to raise a child”. Just not, in the case of Harry and Meghan, a village anywhere near the Windsor Great Park or an Albert-approved Chrism

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.