Clutching at the last flickers of goodwill, Kate and William must know the show’s over
Even if no one had snubbed the couple or made a mockery of them in Jamaica, there would have been muttering about how embarrassing the whole thing was. For royals, tours are now lose-lose affairs.
Who on earth would be a royal? It is like being a Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain. You spend hours sweatily staring down the barrel of a single photocall, only to self-incinerate in wild flames after one tiny fatal error.
The catastrophic picture, for example, of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge grasping the fingers of Jamaican children through a harsh wire fence.
At some point, possibly on a past royal tour, this kind of spontaneous japery would have prompted high fives all round. Now we’re told the royals look awful for doing it, like a pair of rich white colonials inspecting caged brown people. It was a disastrous photo at the end of a disastrous tour.
What struck me was how neither Kate nor William even deserved the criticism: I don’t think there are many who believe these two are genuinely bigoted or rapacious colonialists, any more than the average person. Raheem Sterling, a rich footballer who joined them on tour, did the same thing at the same time without being labelled a disgrace. But every time they appeared, it was hard cringe as they paraded seigneurially in diplomatic colour-coordinated outfits, or, as the tabs mortifyingly called them, “flagwear”.
In Belize one engagement had to be cancelled because of protests. In Jamaica the prime minister actually told William and Kate that Jamaica was “moving on”. I found this incredibly rude – why meet someone if you’re just going to insult them? But if there’s more intrinsic political value in telling a pair of royals to get lost to their faces than in being polite to them, then you are officially in a post-royal world.
The question now is: why prolong their misery? Why continue making this benighted family do all this dismal glad-handing when we know that they cannot win? What does it say about us as a nation, that we pick over their humiliation for our entertainment? After many months of hiding from a deadly virus, everyone should have known no one is going to be up for two Sloaney honkers swanning around on an open-topped Land Rover in expensive headgear, least of all the fiery Jamaicans. What will it take to restore order? Not William grovelling about slavery.
The problem is that royalty is in itself a bad news story – it encapsulates the idea that one person is born with jewels and houses and another person isn’t. The point of tours is to dazzle us into a kind of flag-shagging zone of mindless nationalistic love so that we can forget this, while marvelling at how these strange chinless specimens can work a maternity unit, and wondering what Kate’s brooch can mean.
What tours aren’t about is being reminded of the true origins of, say, the royal family’s wealth and power, or its peculiar obsession with the Commonwealth, a now heinously outdated “family of nations” set up by the Queen as part of some never-ending global photo opportunity. Why did she want to be adulated by loads of brown people? It just seems weird now. Did she feel guilty for what we’d done to them? Or did she want to use the grinning locals to draw a veil over this history?
Even five years ago it seemed natural to see a sunburnt Prince Edward being hoisted aloft on a wooden throne by semi-naked grass-skirted men, but now it is, as William might say, “abhorrent”. Given he is a man at the top of a firm whose sole business is PR, it is amazing to me he didn’t see that the tour could never have been successful.
Even if no one had snubbed them or made a mockery of them in Jamaica, there would have been muttering about how embarrassing and forelock-tugging the whole thing was. Even if people had only praised Kate for her Aids-era Liz Taylor evening dresses or her haircut, there would have been uproar that she was being “objectified” – even though the single central principle of the royal family is that people must turn into mute objects. For royals, tours are now lose-lose affairs.
It will take a genius of world-beating proportions to steer the family out of this contradictory mess. And, well, call me cynical but I don’t think they have one. As an insider puts it, the trouble with the Cambridges is they have no idea how to look modern. They’ve hired a load of “middle-class civil servants” who push them into podcasts, stunts and collabs with Peter Crouch, at which they are breathtakingly unnatural.
By contrast, wily Charles, an enemy of the modern world, surrounds himself with prehistoric crustacean snobs who insist on maintaining the fiction he is special. This is terrible, but at least Charles knows who he is: a man who refuses to squeeze his own toothpaste. William and Kate meanwhile chase the dumb influencer crowd in competition with the Sussexes.
When Meghan arrived in the family, the royals fell on her as someone who would help them solve their problems, but there was a snag. She pretended she didn’t care about precedence or hierarchy, but it turned out she did, as much as the rest of them. She took one look at the Queen posing with Prince George and decided to leave the country, raging incorrectly to Oprah that they wouldn’t grant her son a title because they were racist.
In a world where people like Meghan can get away with this, the royals must know that they sit at the top of a toxic, now-useless pecking order that no number of podcasts will make seem any more acceptable. Royal tours, with their dishonesty, faux smiles and synthetic servility, must be the first thing to go. You don’t need “diversity on a team”, as one of Meghan’s flunky journalists put it, to make this world more equal. You need: not royals.
The Sunday Times
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