I want to post the whole of the Economist leader - it's so well written, thoughtful and devastating to M&H' .
But it also represents a burning of bridges. For the duchess at least, there will be no going back.' (In full here
https://archive.ph/Q1PSq
The palace’s nightmare made flesh
www.economist.com
That interview
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle take on the firm
The palace’s nightmare made flesh
The British monarchy’s record of absorbing outsiders is patchy. In recent times, it has had one outstanding success (Kate Middleton, Prince William’s wife), several modest successes (including Sophie Rhys-Jones, Prince Edward’s wife), a few questionable results (among them Sarah Ferguson, Prince Andrew’s ex-wife) and two stunning failures (Diana Spencer, the late Princess of Wales, and
Meghan Markle, Prince Harry’s wife). On March 7th the world was treated to dramatic evidence of the latest disaster, in the form of an interview which Prince Harry and Ms Markle—the Duke and Duchess of Sussex—gave to Oprah Winfrey, America’s most famous talk-show host.
The revelations in the interview were in part familiar. The loneliness of which the duchess spoke, and the lack of support from within the “firm”, echoed Princess Diana’s experience. “This was very, very clear,” the duchess responded to a question about whether she was having suicidal thoughts. “Very clear and very scary. I didn’t know who to turn to in that.” A new factor, and a particularly explosive one, was race. The duchess, herself mixed-race, said that when she was pregnant with her son Archie, her husband had told her there were “conversations about how dark his skin might be”, and she implied that the issue was connected to decisions about her son’s title and security for the family. Both declined to say who had raised the issue, though Ms Winfrey later said Prince Harry had told her it was neither the queen nor Prince Philip.
The couple’s evident closeness during the interview underlined another big difference between their situation and Princess Diana’s. They are together, having left the country—rather as Wallis Simpson, the last American to marry a senior member of the royal family, and Edward VIII did, when they went to live in Paris. The painful consequences of Prince Harry’s decision to move to America for his relationship with his family also came out in the interview: for a while, the prince said, his father stopped taking his calls.
These revelations indicate what is presumably part of the purpose of the interview. There has been plenty of criticism in Britain of the couple’s decision to
leave the country for California, and of their attempt to retain some of the privileges of royalty while doing so. A prime-time slot with the world’s most famous interviewer—who is also a friend, and attended their wedding—is a good way of putting their side of the story. Such exposure should also enhance their celebrity and popularity, on which their
income depends now that they have been financially cut off by the royal family. But it also represents a burning of bridges. For the duchess at least, there will be no going back.
Two days after the interview, the palace issued a neutral, conciliatory response: “the issues raised, particularly of race, are concerning…they will be addressed by the family privately.” But it included a carefully worded phrase casting doubt on the notion that the couple’s account was the objective truth: “some recollections,” it said, “may vary.” And somebody, whether inside or outside the royal household, had launched what looked like a pre-emptive strike. After the interview was recorded, but before it went out, a complaint made against the duchess in 2018 by a senior member of staff was leaked to the
Times. Jason Knauf, at the time press secretary to both princes, wrote to Simon Case, then Prince William’s private secretary and now head of the civil service, saying that she had “bullied two pas out of the household”, and was bullying a third. The timing of the leak of a complaint from two and a half years ago suggests that a point was being made: when a relationship breaks down, there tends to be fault on both sides.
Beyond the sniping, the fundamental problem, with which Princess Diana struggled, is clear. Being a royal is about serving an institution. It does not work for those who crave individual attention. The job requires self-effacement, at which the queen, who has not said a single interesting thing in public in her 70 years on the throne, has excelled. That’s not because she is a boring person, but because she understands the demands of the job. The Duchess of Cambridge, aka Ms Middleton, is, similarly, brilliantly bland. The Duchess of Sussex is not; and her complaint in her interview that while she was a royal she was not allowed to talk to Ms Winfrey without other people in the room demonstrated her failure to grasp the need to subsume individual needs in those of the institution. Given the potential impact of such an interview on the monarchy, it would have been bizarre for the household’s communications chiefs to allow her to negotiate with the world’s most powerful interviewer by herself.
As it is, the duchess has done the interview on her own terms, and its consequences are exactly those that the palace dreaded. It has exposed the royal family to criticism to which it cannot properly respond publicly without getting into a shouting match that would damage the monarchy further, and it has sharply divided opinion (see chart), thus undermining the institution’s unifying role. Younger Britons—along with Americans—are more likely to take the view that the monarchy and the British press are institutionally racist, that the duchess should have been given more support and that she is justified in airing her grievances in public. Older Britons are more likely to be of the opinion that she is an adult who should have thought harder about the job before signing up to it, that if she was depressed, her husband, who founded a mental-health charity, could have got help for her, and that the couple have wilfully and selfishly damaged an institution to which Prince Harry’s grandmother and father have devoted their lives. Britain’s reputation as a socially liberal, racially tolerant country has taken a hit, too.
Yet the interview may do the monarchy less damage than the current furore suggests. Earlier, similar troubles did not much dent its popularity. Even during the split with Princess Diana, it barely budged. That may, of course, have a lot to do with
the queen. Ironically, given her determination to obscure her personality, she is personally very popular. When she dies, things may look different.
Editor's note: This article has been updated since publication to note the palace's response
This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Taking on the firm"
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