It’s not just the Sussexes who need to grow up: it’s all of us
One often has cause to wonder about the general sanity of the British media, and indeed the audience they provide for, but the Angel Falls of finger-wagging, blandishments and polarised hyperbole which has greeted the latest going-on in the court of Windsor does give cause to wonder where the ideals of the Fourth Estate have gone to for the moment. And it is not only a fixation for these isles; America seems transfixed by the words of their new visitors, whose every word was treated with a reverence which matches in comparison only with the Pope on a foreign trip, the preachings of Christ himself, and perhaps just about that for the occasional expostulations of the late Princess of Wales, thirty years ago.
In case you have forgotten, this country is still mired in the most draconian measures that the republic of Cromwell would not have dared to enforce, and is threatened by an immediate economic downturn not seen since Queen Anne was on the throne. Yet from the most chin-stroking broadsheet to the pithiest tabloid, the front pages and quite a few inside ones will be showered in the familial shenanigans of a faraway couple whose tangible importance to the British constitutional system is minute. Yet none of us, it seems, can turn our eyes away from the spectacle, as the latest accusations against “the Firm” grow louder. We may well be about to see some stoic stiff-upper lip before the noise becomes deafening.
Firstly, the names. Both the Sussexes are middle-aged people who deserve to avoid the sobriquets which have gifted such an incongruous and eventually pernicious familiarity to so many younger royals before them. They are not, however much we want to them to be, characters in a fictional soap opera. They are real, and at the moment, far too real for the turreted occupants of Windsor Castle to take comfort from. As with the jovial referrals to our Prime Minister, the seemingly harmless nickname affords a level of juvenility we could all do without.
But I fear this is all in vain; the revelations and accusations revealed to Oprah Winfrey mean that there is no hope the story is going to disappear from our screens for some time to come. Not that the story should instantly be done away with. Meghan Markle’s claim, that her husband was questioned about the race of her baby before he was born — or (according to Harry) his parents were even married — will linger long in the consciousness of millions when they see the next hand-waving ceremony from the top of the Palace, and it would be facetious at least to dismiss her claims to have been nursing suicidal thoughts during her time as an active royal. Whether much of this will be believed, or responded to, will be down to the notoriously febrile vox populi upon whom the couple have, despite their remonstrations to the contrary, relied to feed their seemingly bottomless appetites for attention.
Assuming, of course, that this attention is positive. For the other main pain the pair have apparently endured is that of a lack of privacy. “What did they expect?” you may well ask, and I’ll get onto that later. But Markle certainly should have been warned of what was coming, and it could only have been a deliberate lack of preparation from those above, or a wilfully misleading marriage proposal, which made her think her future life was going to be a hagiographical sunlit road. Her husband, of all people, knew how unrealistic this was, and there is not much to his claim that a mainly white, male-dominated media was hostile to the black, glamorous young princess who seemed destined to shake up the Sloane-dominated boudoir which Kensington Palace had always been. Even so, she was, in her own words, ignorant of “what the job was” when she became engaged to Windsor — was unaware that she would have to “come from freedom” to take up her new life.
Yet the hypocrisy of the Sussexes’ platitudes is nonetheless impressive. Their demand for privacy, it seems, does not conflict with the various political interventions they have treated us to, nor the sumptuous pictures released of them to celebrate their children. Nor the new podcasts and television material they will provide for giants such as Netflix or Spotify, which seem to be just about as public as one could get. All this merely highlights the main hypocrisy: the Sussexes claimed they needed privacy from press intrusion, while also complaining that their voices were “silenced” by the Royal apparatus. That this comes from within a country which, by virtue of an antiquarian and mainly impotent Treason Felony Act, still forbids any public agitation for the abolition of the Queen’s role, this seems an odd complaint. That Meghan Markle had ever expected a right to voice her own concerns about anything apart from the colour of her palatial blankets, seems even odder. Evidently the brief did not get through; as a Royal, one does not speak out. As Elizabeth Windsor has shown herself for these last seventy years, it is a matter of saying neither too much nor too little, and hoping that most of what one says is swiftly forgotten. Markle never comprehended this. Yet she tried to promote such a modern — dare I say, democratic — mindset, that she paid the due in giving up her Royal status.
Yet the desire for a public voice obviously ran out when the press dared to investigate her own life. Whatever the morality, or lack thereof, in the Mail on Sunday’s investigations, the couple’s response is at once striking and yet unremarkable. Having lapped up and encouraged all the public adulation which greeted the engagement and preposterously bland spectacle of their wedding three years ago, they evidently had not reckoned with the depths to which many papers will dive in order to fulfil such a demand for publicity for their readers. Evidently, the Sussexes are only content when the publicity they receive and the personal details they reveal are positive. Not that this is anything of a novelty; it is the normal response of burgeoning celebrity partnership. But it is a mendacity which cannot last long before the guile of public opinion finds them out.
That the popular media were unduly critical of Markle is undeniable, if depressingly inevitable. For, given Harry’s grief-ridden upbringing and his service in the army, the establishment was never going to come after the male side of the family particularly hard at all. The ready-made narrative already had it that only an awkwardly modernising princess could have brought him to such a radical move as to abandon their duties, and that Harry has been simply dragged along by his manipulative partner to damage his relations with brother, father, and grandmother. That Markle wasn’t the eternally grinning, grovelling cartoon beauty which her husband’s mother had been, or the all-right-and-proper-frightfully-nice Kate Middleton, meant that her delinquency was to be given short shrift before too long. For such disdain to be heaped once again on a mentally vulnerable young woman, shows up the narrative the glossy media was all too keen to tell.
Yet the conclusion of many, dragged out by the very commentators who help to feed the onslaught, that it’s all the fault of either the ravenous newspapers they depend on, or solely the boundless arrogance of this unhappy pair, is facile, and lazily so. And it will help perpetuate a saga which the tenor of this country’s discourse could certainly do without. What made Markle and her husband so unhappy, what made them silence their opinions in what is apparently a free nation, and what made them decide that any influences of the modern world weren’t going to breach the cracks of their regal incarceration, was the system of the monarchy itself, and the power the Royals still cling onto. Could the Prince of Wales, the drivelous dauphin, really be expected to be the compassionate father to a pair of sons who have gone such different ways? Is the gross public experiment, which the contrasting situations of the Dukes of Cambridge and Sussex constitute, really a fit show for the progressive times we are assured we live in? Is not a family, and indeed a democratic society, which endorses the medieval primogeniture which most of our neighbours would scorn on their own shores, fit to be consigned to the annals of history, for good? May we even, as the world gawps mercilessly at its screens to ingest every word of two exiles from such an archaic clique, stop imagining ourselves as the calm, secure prefect in the common room of nations, and perhaps instead the trembling hanger-on, bent on grasping for the irretrievable past?
The long list of unfortunate Royal interviews — including such deceptive spectacles as Martin Bashir’s 1995 audience with Princess Diana, and the sinister hilarity of Prince Andrew’s grilling by Emily Maitlis two years ago — did not get another entry in this instance, though any serious interviewer could easily have made sure the opposite was true. The Sussexes’ attempt could never have been the same as the predecessors; Oprah Winfrey was never going to interrogate them, and her questioning technique resembled that of a PR executive than the scrutiny of a Maitlis. For all the platitudes of “telling your truth” and the spectacularly cringe-making associations with the Little Mermaid, this was an American talk-show — a cesspit of adulation and supposed compassion the likes of which no public figure in Britain could have dreamed of enjoying.
Oleaginous though it may have been, the Oprah interview was nonetheless an embarrassment for the American tell-all facade which hides sycophancy and identity politics under the supposed veil of fair-handed inquiry. A balanced interview this most certainly was not; Winfrey did not once bring herself to pose a searching question, or counter the dross about how “time heals all things” and how the two “collided” as star-crossed lovers, fighting against the nasty old Firm whom they have now so traduced. Many across this country at least, will, I suspect, be wondering how the Duke of Sussex could muster enough gumption to praise his grandmother while simultaneously trashing the institution she heads, and all the while as her aged husband is languishing in hospital. All of this, let us not forget, at a time when the monetary concerns of a couple of celebrities residing in California should seem comically irrelevant.
Yet, as many Britons would probably accept, the Royal Family provide entertainment before all else, and I would hazard to say that without it they would be nothing. However we may like to gloss over it, Britain is still widely viewed as a post-colonial power before everything as well, and the monarchy which has survived the loss of empire is seen as a harmless relic. That people still come to worship such a relic is apparently sufficient to let us carry on with such an institution, and the bumps on the road — the names most of us know: Wallis Simpson, Margaret, Diana, Meghan — are just momentary slips which give some extra colour to the whole charade. For, if Markle has forgotten one thing, it is her place in that family, in which she is a distant relation to the only woman who has any real influence. And now, as she prepares for a life of lucrative exile in glitzy California, she may well feel the wrath of a British public who don’t like to see their most loyal leaders undermined. Indeed, her very origins, outside of the traditional mould, made sure that the press would try to find her out. Now they have, and both of the pair are having to reap the consequences of departing from the path forged for them, based on the values of a 16th-century court.
The idea that the British love an underdog always seems wrong to me, seeing as their favourite figurehead is a person whose birth made sure she would be the main overdog if ever there was one. That we have all been so captivated by the most recent episode shows that the entertainment the Royals provide goes far beyond that of the normal celebrity drama, obvious since there is still leverage, power and influence to be had from behind the gilded throne. The gut instinct of many who feel loyal towards the institution which has propped up this country’s non-existent constitution may want to tell the Sussexes to grow up. I will not say they are wrong to do so. But if Britain is ever going to shake off some of its dusty, parochial shackles of past patriarchal power and become the real democracy it should be, then it needs to get out of its own childish fantasy just as much. That this Disney-like couple will help matters by their ill-grace does not persuade me, but the whole affair highlights once again the mendacity with which the notion of a progressive Britain is still so avidly upheld.
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