The Royals should be thanking Meghan and Harry for their service
Their obsessive attention-seeking is enhancing the stature of other royals who might otherwise face criticism.
Never mind rail strikes, over the festive period we’re in a for a Harrying. The solo Sussex book is due out at the beginning of January and the him-and-hers Netflix series a few weeks earlier. Or perhaps it’s the other way round; it keeps changing. Either way, a lot of money has gone into making sure no sentient British being will be unaware of these transmissions when they happen.
Are we horrified? An anticipatory piece in Esquire magazine commented that, “ever since the memoir was announced, royal watchers have eagerly awaited its release, hopeful that it might reveal more bombshells from inside the House of Windsor”. But why would “royal watchers” want things to be disclosed that might damage the monarchy they so enjoy watching? Is it possibly true that some of the people professing to be horrified by the prospect of “revelations” from the Californian branch of the family are actually looking forward to just that?
The publisher’s puff for Spare (the cleverly titled Harry book) promises the “story at last” of what he was going through when he walked behind his mother’s coffin in the early autumn of 1997, an image which they describe – with epic insensitivity – as “one of the most searing of the 20th century”. I won’t insult you by attempting a list of alternative candidates: you know them already.
But then the American Sussexes are not blessed with the most sensible of friends. The Robert F Kennedy Ripple of Hope award, for their lonely fight against supposed racism in the royal family, is an almost perfect example of lazy, wealthy American liberal condescension. It is almost as though it was designed solely to make the pair even more unpopular among their critics.
Of whom I am not one. I am an agnostic on the question of whether the Sussexes are good or bad people, not least because I don’t know them and they don’t really matter in a material way. The more babies the Waleses have and the longer they survive, the more distant Harry becomes from ever being head of state. He was always destined to become increasingly constitutionally irrelevant as he got older.
His wife is a star and, as Tina Brown reminds us, stars have shelf lives. Their series can be cancelled. Their only way of staying “important” is to produce “hits” – books, podcasts, stories, films, self-help nonsense, recipe books – and, if nothing else works, appearances on reality shows. Some of this will be about money. But a lot is clearly psychological. Among some people there is a need not just to be seen and appreciated but to be constantly inside other people’s heads – to be what you might call a “psychic imperialist”.
In Meghan, it has become increasingly clear, Harry both sees and needs to see the recreation of his martyred mother – shunned by the establishment and hounded by the press. This is the story they tell themselves. Each time they come under fire from the tabloids or the talk shows, there is more vindication for their paranoia, another turn of the ratchet. So they do a Diana: reach beyond the murderous hacks and the corrupted press offices to commune directly with their public.
Diana, of course, was the ultimate psychic imperialist. “I will be Queen of people’s hearts,” she told Martin Bashir in a line I don’t believe he wrote for her. It is an utterly mad sentiment. And reading it should remind us that almost every negative thing said about Meghan was once said about her posthumous mother-in-law.
But to be colonised in this way, to have your heart invaded by a Diana, you have to sign up to it. And this, not Megan’s Paltrowism or Harry’s self-pity, is what interests me most. Just look below the line of almost any posted piece about Meghan and you will see a speed and strength of response that is out of all proportion. Folk who will happily give the husband of the King’s niece a pass on going to the jungle with Matt Hancock in search of himself, a shedload of money and a slice more of fame, will shred the Duchess.
It goes both ways of course. Polling from September showed that among those aged 18 to 24 Harry topped the list of “favourite royals” at 29 per cent with his wife second, ten points behind. Among the over-65s Harry was nowhere and Meghan came two points below Andrew. This suggests firstly that our views of the royals are substantially our projections onto them. And secondly that these prejudices are partly generational.
The American-based British-born conservative Andrew Sullivan (60 next year), discussing the Duchess and her sister-in-law on his podcast recently, practically cast them as millennial Maleficent versus Briar Rose. “What level of narcissism is required to get in there, become the perfect princess, whine and then storm out?” he asked of Meghan. Whereas Kate was full of “charm and grace and beauty and a good mother”.
So the two women become proxies in a particularly soggy part of the generation/culture war. The young, reared on Kardashian Kulture, tend to imagine they identify with Meghan. She’s rich, beautiful and speaks the language of love, glamour and hurt – the language of Instagram. She is a strong woman because she tells you how weak she is. She is resilient because she is fragile.
Equally, the boomers loathe her, seeing in her the things they fear they have provoked in their own children: peanut allergies, dyslexia, ADHD and neediness. Whereas they possess in Kate the archetype of the pretty, dutiful, smiling, uncomplaining mother. The perfect stoical helpmeet for a future king.
But it strikes me that Meghan may be fulfilling another function. It’s often said she and Harry are damaging the monarchy, but I wonder if the opposite isn’t true. The monarchy feels solid in a period of flux. The Queen was succeeded by the King, while prime ministers rose and fell, prices just rose, living standards just fell. It seems a rock in a choppy sea.
But the monarchy is also a peculiar institution, staffed by hugely wealthy, privileged and unaccountable individuals and their highly manipulative entourages. It is not impossible in hard times to resent their high living and envy their comfort. Instead, however, we can argue about Meghan and Harry and whether they are awful people, and we can call her a narcissist and call him a thicko, and the egalitarian lightning is conducted away from the important part of the monarchy to strike in California.
Hating on Meghan is safe republicanism. We should thank her for her service.
THE TIMES
