This royal game show is only going to get worse
If the adolescent Harry found the flashbulbs of tabloid photographers hellish, consider what George, Charlotte and Louis face in a world where everyone has a camera in their pocket.
The field behind the pub, the musical rendezvous with seals, the torn necklace . . . All the tawdry, diverting trivia spilling from the pages of Prince Harry’s memoir has tended to obscure what the book is really about, its implicit thesis. For Spare contains an argument, though it is an argument Harry is perhaps only half-conscious of making and one for which he is undoubtedly an imperfect messenger. It concerns the cruelty of modern monarchy. Not its cruelty to its subjects but to the royals themselves.
To be born royal in the 21st century is to be entered, via a genetic lottery, into a lifelong and potentially life-destroying game show. From childhood you must prepare for a life of ritualised public humiliation. You must accept that your most intimate erotic conversations will end up online, that the country will pore over pictures of you dancing or sunbathing, naked or worse. Every stroll, every holiday, every drunken night, every hungover morning, every ill-expressed opinion and every sexual indiscretion is public property.
The notion that the public have a right to the entire lives of members of the royal family is recent and still being tested. It is not at all clear that it is compatible with the institution of monarchy.
We are accustomed to the idea that monarchy requires the consent of the public. As soon as the masses decide they no longer want the House of Windsor, other constitutional arrangements will be found. But what the publication of Spare has emphasised is that monarchy also requires the consent of the royals themselves. If the men and women born into the royal family find their situation intolerable, as Harry did, it is within their power to turn on the institution they believe has persecuted them and leave - or try to destroy it. Of course, the petulant, nouveau-Californian Duke of Sussex is not a sympathetic bearer of this message. Many of his readers will object that if you’ve got to weep over your misfortunes somewhere, Sandringham is hardly a bad option. They may note with equal justice that accidents of genetics have landed men and women in infinitely worse pickles than the millionaire global celebrity inflicted on the Windsors.
But this is beside the point. It scarcely matters whether or not we think the royals are hard done by. What matters is whether they think they are.
For royalty to work, the royals have to want to be there. And in Harry’s account, even allowing for the distortions of his furious resentment, the royals are ambivalent about their lot. The King, who once complained of the “utter hell” of being Prince of Wales, comes across as a melancholy, dutiful man who has grimly consented to lash himself to the mast of an institution for which his talents have ill-suited him. With his love of Shakespeare, architecture, classical music and history lectures, he would perhaps have led a happier life teaching at a minor independent school. William and Kate lead bland and constricted existences. “If I had a choice, I wouldn’t want this life,” Harry writes. I wouldn’t either.
The searchlights of media scrutiny and the multitudes of internet moralists poised for outrage mean monarchy is hospitable to a much narrower range of personality types than it once was.
In the 19th century the institution was able to accommodate (with some grumbling) both the grief-ridden anchorite Queen Victoria and the roistering Parisian debauchee Edward VII.
Today the model of royal personality pioneered by Elizabeth II is the only one that works: moral, loyal, dutiful, somewhat dull. No vice can be permitted because the smallest peccadillo feeds months of headlines. Even eccentricity is dangerous, as Charles spent most of his royal apprenticeship discovering.
The personality of an Elizabeth II is a once-in-a-century event, perhaps rarer. It is naive to imagine that future generations of Windsors will resemble the late Queen and not her errant grandson. Our culture is changing. We are less unquestioningly dutiful than our ancestors, more committed to personal freedom and personal choice. The Windsors of the future will not be exempted from these trends.
Importantly, the modern world is increasingly hostile to privacy. If the adolescent Harry found the flashbulbs of tabloid photographers hellish, consider what George, Charlotte and Louis face in a world where every one of their peers at school and university will be armed with a video camera in their pocket. Half of TikTok is schoolchildren filming one another. Every stupid, drunken incident during the adolescence of the second, third and fourth in line to the throne will appear online. A remark the nine-year-old Prince George was reported to have made in a playground argument last year - to the effect that he shouldn’t be crossed as his father would be king one day - has already been gloated over on Twitter as proof of his precocious arrogance and entitlement.
I cannot see how this state of affairs is sustainable.
The greatest threat to the future of the monarchy does not come from without (public support is remarkably sturdy) but from within. Who knows how future royals - exhausted and furious, their minds warped by public scrutiny - will lash out at the institution that has tormented them. There will be more royal memoirs. There will be more Harrys.
The Times
