The Royals are finally entering the fray, but it’s a bare-knuckle fight they can’t win
For the royals, this situation is now, to use Oprah’s word, ‘unsurvivable’. The creaking institution cannot withstand this sort of seamy grudge match.
You simply cannot tear your eyes away from them — the greige canopy, the sprinkling of English-style meadow flowers to remind American audiences which broken royal family we’re talking about today. His scuffed, grey-on-black shoe/sock combo, her Fulham-sexy, possibly nylon dressing gown, throbbing with sub-Beyoncean “fertility” energy.
The camera whirls down on Oprah, struggling to contain her excitement at landing her biggest interview since she told Lindsay Lohan to “cut the bullshit”.
“Were you silent,” pounds Oprah to Meghan, as the Kardashian drama music rises, “or were you silenced?”
I don’t think there’s a single person in Britain who doesn’t know the full, unexpurgated answer to this question. Yes, the duchess was silenced — but who wouldn’t want to silence every word of what Oprah cloyingly calls Meghan’s “truth”? Meghan’s “truth”, we’re discovering, is an unstoppable Krakatoa of toxic sniping and petulant Marie Antoinette revelations that is now dragging the entire “Firm”, as even Meghan calls them, down to her level. I’m not sure any of it qualifies as actual “truth” — I’m inclined to believe Meghan wouldn’t know her “truth” if it clopped in on a silver platter from Mohammad bin Salman. But who cares, when there are pregnant pauses to be made and multimillion-dollar deals to be done?
On Wednesday we got the first signs that the Palace — William, really — is finally stepping into this unedifying bare-knuckle fight. The royal family are doing what they usually do when faced with a complicated, difficult, foreign sexpot: they have arranged a trial, presided over, dubiously, by courtiers. Meghan’s a bully, they claim. To which most people said: no, really? Just look at the foul way she spoke to her own father in that letter — she was hardly going to be nicer to her PAs.
There will, of course, be a proper investigation by Buckingham Palace’s HR department, but even this seems laughable — who even knew there was such a thing? Nothing will be enough to stem the flow of radioactive leaks now, no matter how many snowflake courtiers you toss at it. Stuff is already happening at warp speed. In media terms, we’ve reached the freeway and are flying in the chopper 400ft above OJ’s car, clipping the trees as he holds the gun to his head. Don’t they get it?
But unlike in all other royal scandals, there are no signs the car will ever stop. There will always be another interview, another stakes-raising clap back, another round of petty “truth”-telling on what Kate said about tights at the wedding. There will be years of this — attacking the royal family is now Harry and Meghan’s bread and butter. It seems amazing to me the Queen didn’t strip these chancers of their titles and choke off the cash long ago. What do they have to do for that to happen — slap her on live television? If the Palace bullying story is a way of establishing a case to remove their titles, they need to hurry up.
For the royals, this situation is now, to use Oprah’s word, “unsurvivable”. The creaking institution dreamt up by a 25-year-old in 1952 clearly cannot withstand this sort of seamy Meghan v William grudge match, in which at least one of the parties is willing to say almost anything for clicks or viewers. Clutching one’s pearls and screaming, “But she was rude to the staff” is like bringing a tampon to a sub-machinegun fight.
For a British person, it feels strange and devastating. You don’t even have to be that into the royals to feel as if part of our lives is being shredded, one pulsing ad break at a time. It is British reserve v American brashness and balls, and we know who won that fight last time. It’s weird to watch the Queen being dissed by some lightweight who considers the PR manager at Soho House one of her closest friends. It is just wrong.
As for Harry — what sadness. We all know someone who’s been bodysnatched by a partner, cut off from family and friends, iced out of weddings and funerals, grandchildren withheld. Normal people strive for reconciliation: why isn’t that happening here? Instead non-speaks and non-stop one-upmanship is escalating to backstabbing and frontstabbing, all driven by pain. Not only on the part of Meghan and Harry, but William and the others too.
Because deep at the centre of this lies another creeping feeling. Meghan has one solid line of argument: royal life was awful. She probably thought she was going to be fed golden bonbons every day and showered with free dresses. But it isn’t very nice being a royal, is it? Who would want to sign up to the Queen’s arid boot camp of duty and self-denial? Why has the monarch made royal life so unappealing, penitential and hard? It may have worked for her but it hasn’t worked for a single other member of her family, with the exception, perhaps, of Princess Anne, who quietly gets on with it. Because if you had the choice, would you ever inflict being king on your child? You look at the Cambridge children being hustled into their silent nurseries and think: this is cruelty. Harry being made to walk behind his mother’s coffin at 12 was the beginning of the end. It was nothing other than barbaric.
As long as the Duchess of Sussex can convincingly say this, there is no comeback for the Queen. No amount of deploying Prince Edward will hide the fact that making ordinary people — or indeed anyone — be part of the royal family is freakish and inhumane. The only hope they have is that Meghan behaves more unpleasantly than they do — that is to say, more royally than the royals. It’s odd to think their only line of defence so far is to say she is rude to staff — like Prince Andrew, say, or Princess Margaret.
THE SUNDAY TIMES
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