Harry and Meghan interview: Celebrities like the duchess are there to be eaten

Harry and Meghan is not really a story about royalty. It is about celebrity. Royals are just an easy target not least because they aren’t supposed to fight back.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle with Oprah Winfrey. Picture: CBS

I love it when newspapers go mad. Not just peculiar but positively fruitloop. One famous, beautiful example appeared in the Peterborough Standard in 1979, when a report about a jubilee committee ceremony at a library somehow got garbled up, with all the important words meshing into Jabberwocky. “The jubremony at the library,” it says, desperately. “Thrremony at tremony at the libremony at the libraremony at the library.” It’s like some broken news robot has finally had enough.

Yesterday (Monday), worldwide but particularly in Britain, there was a news meltdown of another sort. For its purest form, I would direct you to the Mail Online where, for a time, 30 of the top 31 stories were about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. “Oprah Interview Bombshells …”, “Meghan Makes Sensational Claim …”, “Harry’s Rift With Charles …”. On and on as you scrolled down the page. It looked deranged. Inanity becoming insanity. Thrremony Harry and Meghanarry at the library.

It is not strange, though, that the media go wild for the Sussexes, any more than it is that readers do. These are beautiful, photogenic people embroiled in fascinating circumstances and anybody who isn’t intrigued to some degree is just trying to make a point of not being.

There are hooks all over the place. Royalty is Britain’s oldest soap opera and the couple’s claims of familial queries over the skin tone of their baby highlight attitudes to race that I, as a cheese-white Ashkenazi, am better placed to listen to rather than comment on. But I recommend returning to Mail Online and considering the single sore-thumb, non-Sussex story sticking out among those aforementioned 31. Which was about the suicide last year of the TV presenter Caroline Flack.

The front pages of the UK papers today. Picture: Getty Images.

Harry and Meghan is not really a story about royalty. It is a story about celebrity. It is the story of Marilyn Monroe and Britney Spears. Of Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain. Of Madonna and Sean Penn getting married on a clifftop in Malibu, if you remember that, and the paparazzi turning up in helicopters and Penn shooting at them, reportedly, with an actual gun. And yes, it is about Princess Diana and the Duchess of York, too, but they muddy the picture. It’s prominence that spurs our prurience. Royals are just an easy target. Not least because they aren’t supposed to fight back.

“My father and my brother,” said Harry, “they are trapped. They don’t get to leave.” Then, later, “For the family they very much have this mentality of ‘This is just how it is, this is how it’s meant to be, you can’t change it, we’ve all been through it.’”

Harry and Meghan speak with Oprah Winfrey. Picture: Screengrab

For younger Meghan fans, who perhaps think a lie about who cried because of who over flower girl dresses is the meanest thing ever written about a member of the royal family, this last point should be a corrective. Spats, affairs, alcoholism, toe-sucking, idle chatter about being a tampon – such violations have been the meat of tabloid royal coverage for half a century. Yet the rule for the royals has always been that you shrug and open another hospital wing. And, when off-duty, you exile yourself from popular culture into a safer world of game shoots and house parties.

There are few alive as famous as you – stars of film and music, the odd supermodel maybe – but they treat you like the cool kids at school treat the headmaster’s son when he joins them for a fag. So, after youthful shiny promise, you retreat into distant, middle-aged pomposity. Until you are properly old, when the public becomes fond of you again, basically as your reward for staying alive.

Seek to resist that royal midlife crisis, though, and you have your work cut out. News, media, comedy, satire, the Netflix homepage: all these things sneer at you every day. When Meghan says, “I just didn’t want to be alive any more” there will be plenty prepared to dismiss it as hyperbole or melodrama. Forget she’s a royal, though, and just think about the level of daily, grinding attention we’re talking about. Far more than Kurt or Amy. Let alone poor Caroline Flack.

Away from royalty, we are well aware of the conflicting impulses of the colossally famous, craving attention and loathing it all at once. Why should she be so different? At the very shallow end of public life, I know plenty of journalists whose day can be ruined by a tweet. Now imagine being in as deep as the Sussexes.

But I’m not sure that a confessional interview is the way out. Has any celebrity, ever, managed to “let-me-tell-my-truth” their way to serenity? You don’t calm the sharks by throwing steaks at them.

Before the interview was broadcast, a pair of YouTube pranksters called Josh Pieters and Archie Manners had asked some royal commentators if they’d dissect it anyway. They were quite game and, in a couple of cases, even fell for the pranksters’ deadpanned questions about Meghan’s fictional love for the Balham Donkey Sanctuary and her equally false refusal to take a Covid vaccine.

This is the royal media hinterland and it will never calm down. It does not serve a different clientele to Oprah Winfrey’s interview but exactly the same one, which is insatiable. You might as well try to soothe a rash by scratching it. If a central plank of Meghan’s misery was the palace’s failure to take legal action over unflattering stories on her behalf, what does she see happening now? There aren’t enough lawyers alive.

Yes, I see the irony; I’m part of it, me, right now, and you too, for reading. What are we supposed to do? This is the news. They made the news. We are all broken robots. Meghanharry. Tremoney Meganharry at the libremony. Pages of it. On and on.

The Times