Without gossip, Harry and Meghan are nothing

A new book on Harry and Meghan exposes the emptiness of royalty once all that irritating pomp and ceremony are stripped away.

Without the gossip they abhor, the Sussexes are meaningless. Picture: Getty Images.

There’s just not enough there. This is royalty’s big problem. There is a swirling maelstrom of duty, and familial rifts, and hats, and writs, and gossip, and more hats, and medals for you’re not sure what, and awful friends, and dogs, and horses, and palace disasters, and occasionally a meaningful brooch but more often than not just another hat. And really not very much else.

Think of it this way. Think of September 2018, when the new Duchess of Sussex, who by this point had been married to the new Duke of Sussex for four months, got out of a car at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and closed the door. “Meghan closes a car door”, reported the BBC, almost immediately, and the world’s news media sat up and paid attention. “Is there anything Meghan Markle can’t do?” pondered a correspondent in The Washington Post, not entirely ironically. Funny, yes, but probably also a bit wearying, if it’s you. “What a strain,” you might think. “What a terrible distraction!” Only, from what?

The fuss is the job and the job is the fuss. That’s it. That’s the whole royal deal. This is the context in which to read the past few days of extracts from Finding Freedom, the new book about the Sussexes’ brave decision to move to America because the Duchess of Cambridge made the wrong sort of eye contact with Meghan at a memorial service and also once didn’t offer her a lift to the shops in a Range Rover. And it is also why, despite their ceaseless desire to be known, and understood, but correctly, their efforts will only ever be a Mobius strip, turning inwards, forever, upon themselves.

The cover of Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of A Modern Royal Family.

Harry and Meghan attend the annual Commonwealth Service at Westminster Abbey earlier this year. Picture: AFP

Royalty is completely preposterous. Everybody knows this. It’s awful, too. It is fame as a chronic, genetic condition from which nobody recovers. In a global context, to be a top-tier British royal is to be halfway between being the Dalai Lama and Kim Kardashian, only without having achieved your own spiritual enlightenment or bought your own bottom. Not long after the Sussexes announced their big move several newspapers reported that they had chosen, as their public life template, Barack and Michelle Obama. It wasn’t even a joke. Ah, the audacity of hope.

That story may not have been true, of course. Lots of royal stories aren’t. Maybe most aren’t. In my first job in what I suppose we could tenuously call “journalism”, on a gossip news website, I was blessed with a senior colleague who specialised in predicting royal pregnancies that never happened. “It’s not not true,” he’d protest, “it’s just not true yet.” His other great maxim, which he’d brought over from the tabloids, was “royals never sue”. Harry and Meghan have heaved that one right out of the gilded carriage window, most notably with their legal fight against The Mail On Sunday after it published a letter from her father.

In April they announced a boycott of most British tabloids. “What they won’t do,” the couple said, in an odd third-person letter about themselves, “is offer themselves up as currency for an economy of clickbait and distortion.” In other words, they were choosing to simply leave the conversation. Enough of the tittle tattle and the gossip, they were saying. It is not what we want to be.

What could be more royal than bickering with your family? Picture: AFP.

And yet here comes Finding Freedom, which is exactly like everything they hate, except this time it is nice about them and only nasty about other people. On every page, nameless “friends” turn up and share everything, right down to which of them first said “I love you” and what the other one felt about it. I’d remind you at this point that Harry is 35 and Meghan is 38. Their many “friends”, it seems, are about nine years old. Officially, the couple did not co-operate but they definitely aren’t complaining, either. Which shows you, I think, a flaw in their plan to escape the media beast. Because they want to escape it by riding it. While, simultaneously, milking it. And you just can’t do that. Not even if you have very long arms.

It is early days, I know, and there has been a lot on. But the new Sussex world does not, from a distance, seem to be working out that well. Despite their lawsuits, they do not appear to be in the tabloids any less than before. Last week they began another lawsuit, after paparazzi drones hovered over their home in Los Angeles. It is quite hard to tell what the Sussexes are up to over there – beyond looking upwards sometimes, irritably – or why, or where they reckon this is all going.

They are not the Obamas, and they probably know it. Nor, though, are they Hollywood royalty, despite being royalty, and almost in Hollywood. For to be royal, almost by definition, is to be famous for nothing. You can do wonderful work and many royals do – hooray the good ones – but you will never be your work. You will always be the thing that was there before. And they still are.

What could be more royal, in fact, than bickering with the rest of your family via things your semi-imaginary friends have told the newspapers? This story, I think, is already a tragedy. In America, the idea was, they could be royals without all that silly old embarrassing nonsense. No pomp, no ceremony, no dogs, no horses, no palaces, no silly hats, and most of all, no gossip in the newspapers. That last one, though, is hard to get rid of. Particularly if you ditch everything else. Without it, you might find, there’s nothing left.

The Times