JENNIE BOND This is painful and damaging for the Royal Family.. & the rift may take years to heal
Family bust-ups are never pretty. The best you can hope for is that the punches are at least thrown in private. But, when they are played out on a world stage like this one, they become as ugly a spectacle as a cage fight.
So, with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in one corner and the House of Windsor in the other, is the whole edifice of monarchy under threat?
The answer is no. Harry is now sixth in line to the throne. The chances of him becoming king are negligible. And, in any case, he and Meghan have made themselves largely irrelevant to the future of the monarchy.
They have stepped back from royal duties, become a commercial brand, and sold their story to a different queen: the doyenne of chat shows, Oprah Winfrey.
The consequences are painful for the family, liberating for Meghan, but constitutionally unimportant.
There is no comparison with the abdication crisis in 1936, when Edward VIII abandoned his throne for the love of another American divorcee, Wallis Simpson. The result was, overnight, we had a new king, George VI.
It doesn’t compare with the War of the Wales’s in the 1990s, when Charles and Diana were involved in a prolonged, vitriolic public fight as their marriage disintegrated.
The debate back then was whether the Crown would have to skip a generation because a divorced king would not be acceptable. And could a man who had admitted adultery, then divorced and who would possibly remarry, be a suitable candidate for his role as supreme governor of the Church of England?
But this crisis is clearly damaging to the Royal Family: deepening the rift, hurting more feelings and bruising more egos.
Meghan is a woman who seems to divide opinion. I have to admit I have been surprised by many people in my own generation, the
Former BBC Royal Correspondent
older generation, who have viewed her with suspicion since she came on the scene. They predicted that it would all end in tears.
For myself, I thought she was a brilliant addition to a modern monarchy. A mature, independent, confident and spirited woman of dual heritage struck me as a valuable asset for the Royal Family.
The younger generation have tended to side with the Sussexes. Harry has always been popular: less formal, a bit mischievous and
with his mother’s sensitivity and compassion. In fact, both William and Harry have played a large part in recent years in making the monarchy cool and relevant to young people. And that is vitally important if it is to survive.
Younger people tend to question why Meghan should have been required to conform to age-old traditions.
Why did she have to fit into this most rigid mould and give up much of her independence? Why is the fabric of Palace machinery so stuck in the past?
And I think they have a point.
When Meghan was a young girl, she was perplexed by a questionnaire which asked her to tick a box about her ethnicity. Her father is white and her mother is black. Which box was she to tick? Her father had tried to help
I hope Charles is still talking to Harry and Meghan, and offering them fatherly advice
JENNIE BOND ON FALLOUT FROM A PERSONAL FAMILY TRAGEDY
matters by giving her a Barbie doll family for Christmas. He bought two sets, took them apart and remixed them to create a black mother, a white father and a child of each colour.
And when Meghan told him about her dilemma over the questionnaire, he simply told her to “make your own box”.
Those words have stayed with her and when she found she did not fit into the Palace mould, she set about forging a new role and path for herself and her husband. If we try stepping into her shoes, it is obvious why life in the royal fold would be difficult. For a woman of colour, whose ancestors were once slaves, it must be hard to accept that you are now unequal. When you arrive at an official event with the family, you must take your place behind others. Because your husband was the spare, never the heir, you must walk submissively behind your brother-in-law and his wife.
You must curtsy to people in order of precedence, and your diary must be arranged around theirs if they are higher up the pecking order.
Personally, I think these old-fashioned rules need a bit of shaking up. I quite accept it is appropriate for the Queen to arrive first at official functions but why can’t the rest of the family just rock up together?
When we saw William and Catherine and Harry and Meghan walking alongside one another at Sandringham a couple of Christmases ago, no one fainted, and no one was sent to the Tower.
I have never curtseyed to any member of the Royal Family – and I’ve survived to tell the tale. Maybe they all need to loosen up a bit.
All of this is a personal tragedy for Prince Charles. He has witnessed his sons suffer the trauma of losing their mother and seen their once strong and supportive brotherly relationship fall apart. It is tough for any parent to watch children feud. To see it happen in public must be gut-wrenching.
Charles should understand the pressure Meghan felt under. He was once rejected by a spirited girlfriend who refused his proposal of marriage.
Amanda Knatchbull, Earl Mountbatten’s granddaughter and now Lady Ellingworth, later explained her decision. She said that marrying into the Royal Family would involve “a loss of independence unlike in any other marriage and an absolute surrender of self to a system”.
The Prince commented that her answer had only served to confirm his own belief that to marry into the House of Windsor was a sacrifice that no one should be expected to make.
I hope Charles is still talking to Harry and Meghan and offering them fatherly advice. As with many family quarrels, the passage of time – in this case possibly years – may soothe the hurt feelings and heal the rift.
But for now, the Royal Family – and I suspect most of the country – believe that with all the suffering and damage caused by the pandemic, we have more to worry about than two very wealthy and privileged individuals complaining about their lot in life.
HOLLY, 37, earns £31,000 a year and stands to see her take-home pay rise by £5.25 a week. She says...
Health workers have had a real terms wage cut of 15% to 20% in the last decade. Pay has a direct link to staffing and patient safety. Why would you want to get into tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt to train to be a nurse, to do a job that is underpaid and undervalued?
If staff aren’t paid what they deserve and what is needed to keep staff in the NHS and attract people into it, it will have a direct effect on the NHS’ future. The suggestion of 1% by the Government is nothing short of an insult. We have worked tirelessly through the pandemic in awful conditions, while being inadequately protected by the wrong levels of PPE, we have shown our worth. The country has been kept going by all essential workers, it’s time the Government paid us all fairly.
alised and exhausted. Many were thinking of leaving. Now more have had their minds made up for them. “They’ve put their lives on the line, supported families unable to visit dying loved ones and nursed Covid patients back to health. “Ministers say they value everything health workers have done. Four days ago, staff discovered what the Government really thinks.” BMA council chairman Dr Chaand Nagpaul urged ministers to “do the right thing”