Sussexes can never escape
What an illusion freedom is. The Sussexes think they can achieve it by giving up royal perks and appearances. Fat chance. They carry their cage with them: now and forever they are paparazzi fodder.
Canada may be a big place, but everyone has a cellphone, and the couple’s images are worth money. If one of them frowns it can boost a magazine’s circulation. Its cover will claim they’re fighting, which will be confirmed by the ‘‘palace insider’’ who is – I always think – the writer’s own keyboard.
Why? Because we need occasional relief from the fabulous Kardashians, who can’t get enough of what Meghan doesn’t enjoy, and even internet porn can pall, I should hope.
True, we live in times of massive intrusion into everybody’s lives. The royals, though, live in a kind of nostalgic peep show where they’re seen at church, producing babies, visiting charities, or opening flower shows, eternally fascinating to mass media for reasons that mostly escape me. Born into celebrity, that wasteland of trivia, they didn’t ask for it, nor did they earn it.
The Hollywood red carpet Meghan could have known is nothing compared to The Royal Show. Actors can send their spangled outfits to the cleaners and get on with real life afterward. They can eat junk food unnoticed, and when they go home, there’s no pack of paparazzi hoping to catch them trip and fall over.
Meghan is attractive and photographs well, with a sunny smile, but a lens focused on anyone night and day could make them paranoid. As for Harry, his mother being hounded to her death by paparazzi would naturally be on his mind. Princess Diana was no more prepared for being royalty than Meghan was, even though she was an aristocrat.
Iclaim a small insight into privacy problems. My paparazzi was a mother who adored being photographed herself, and thought I’d be like her. I wasn’t. I’m like my father, who in photographs I have mostly looked uncomfortable and a bit goofy. Like me.
It was torture for me as a kid to be photographed, especially when there were other people around to stop and stare. I posed with sheepdogs, cats, a concrete frog at the Botanic Garden, with children I didn’t know on my first day at school, playing the cello on my grandmother’s porch, wearing a rather nasty floral dress she’d made me – there was no end of opportunity. She did it all for love, I guess. I was, and am, ungrateful. To this day I dread the camera she loved so ardently. I stared and squinted into the sun too often so she could get a better shot.
Of course Meghan was photographed in Canada, the moment she appeared in public. Of course the local airport was staked out by photographers waiting for Harry’s arrival. There is nowhere to hide, not even in vast Canada, and on top of that, the country’s biggest newspaper is sniping at their plans to live there.
The Duchess of Cambridge was welcomed as a royal, and adored. Prince Andrew can have sleazy mates, and no-one really cares. But Meghan is a woman of colour, has suffered from a negative press, and the link is racism. It’s obvious. She seems harmless, and having a dysfunctional family is no crime. Who doesn’t?
As targets of media intrusion, and potential targets of random flakes, fans and terrorists, I suspect the Sussexes will find the safest life for them is being fulltime royals, the very thing they don’t want to be. Such safety comes at a price only they can afford, but it comes at a hefty personal price.