Why does everything Harry and Meghan say sound like a low rent greetings card?
VETERAN Sussex watchers were yesterday in their power-showers, trying to scrub clean after the latest hosing of treacle from Meghan and Harry.
The couple had issued another of their press statements, this time about child safety on the internet.
Such announcements have become a regular part of the Sussexes’ modus operandi, linking them to a topical issue on which they can parade their empathy.
Their statement, not for the first time, was peppered with American emotionalism, tearstained platitude mixed with a certain self-serving preachiness. Florid, banal, breathy, reeking of opportunism, it is an art form the exiled royals are fast making their own.
Commenting on a US Senate hearing into dreadful instances of internet child abuse, the duo applauded the ‘ bravery and determination’ (one noun alone will never do) of parents whose children had suffered.
As they clawed their way into the circle of virtue – outta the way, people, this is about us – the Sussexes boasted that ‘over the past few years we have spent time with many of these families, listening to their heartache and their hopes for the urgent change that is needed’.
This was ‘an issue that transcends division and party lines’. They also disclosed that one father had told them ‘if love could have saved them, all of our children would still be here’.
Journalistic scepticism may seem harsh given the sensitivity of the issue at hand; yet when an issue is this delicate, would it not be seemly for minor royals to keep their self-promotional psycho-babble to themselves?
This is not the first time that Prince Harry and his actress wife have contributed their unremarkable thoughts on a raw area of public debate.
If they did so spontaneously after, for example, having a microphone thrust into their faces at some public event, it might feel all right.
But the Sussexes come out with sentimental saws on the level of low-grade greetings cards, and they do so by placing them under the ‘news’ section of their personal website.
Sorry, but this is pure PR puffery. ‘Turn pain into purpose,’ said Harry at a World Mental Health Day event in New York in October. As it happens, he was talking about how those who suffer misfortune can sometimes become stronger as a result.
‘Days are long but years are short,’ added his consort at the same event.
Eh? It’s the sort of inscrutable gibberish guru Master Po used to say to Grasshopper in the 1970s TV show Kung Fu.
OR TAKE this corker. ‘I’m confident,’ said Meghan, again on mental health, ‘that with more ears and awareness and visibility of what is really happening, we can make some significant change together.’ More ears? Are two not enough for anyone?
As part of her payback to Netflix, from which she and her husband received millions of dollars, the Duchess disclosed that in her wedding speech she spoke of ‘the everlasting knowing that, above all, love wins’.
If you said that at most English county weddings there would be a ripple of mirth and a teasing forest of fingers down throats. Heaven knows what Harry’s old muckers made of his bride’s claim.
Guy Pelly must have almost done the nose trick.
But Meghan appears impervious to British taste. She is immune to the most diabetic-high levels of rhetorical saccharine.
Along with the unfortunate, droopy-tailed Harry, the duchess is a devotee of California psycho-babble and of anxieties being worn as social and political badges.
Look at me, these say, I’m sensitive, I’m not a viciously ambitious, multi-millionaire, West Coast actress cynically adopting positions for career purposes. I’m a genuinely humble, vulnerable, touchy-feely soul. And if you suggest otherwise my attorneys will bust your ass.
If British politicians issued the sort of emetic press releases that Harry and Meghan do, they would be swiftly denounced for gross misjudgment and for trying to surf on other people’s misery. Again, you may think this a harsh comment.
YOU may say ‘ but Harry and Meghan are not politicians’. I am afraid I would disagree with you. They are behaving in an intensely political manner, beating their breasts for public consumption. Note, too, the repeated calls for ‘ change’. These smack of political campaigning.
The Sussexes may think that their press releases are powerful and poetic. To British tastes they will, possibly, more likely look manipulative and opportunistic.
Merely as literary ventures, they are cloyingly mawkish, viscous in their sentimentality.
Whoever writes them has the prose style of a schoolgirl diarist. It is sad that the prince has lost sight of the British virtue of understatement. When it comes to expressions of sympathy, less is always more.
Instead, we are subjected to this mush and gush. On Planet Sussex, ‘light’ is always being ‘shined’, be it on empowerment or inequality. Trite stylistic doubles are deployed.
Writing in Elle magazine, Meghan said that women should ‘focus less on glass slippers and more on pushing through glass ceilings’. And then there was ‘a ripple of hope can turn into a wave of change’ – a phrase the couple pinched off the late Robert Kennedy and used at some humanitarian awards in 2022.
There is much ‘ focusing on wellbeing’ and ‘ relating to shared experiences and challenges’ and ‘discovering of opportunities for growth’.
‘Mentoring’ is a must-have, both for mentors and, dreadful word, ‘ mentees’. And ‘ hearts’ are invariably ‘heavy’.
Other people’s disaster and grief are ridden like trams.