The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Time for royal reality check
It’s very hard, especially if you are not a monarchist, to feel sorry for royalty. No matter how naturally sympathetic and fair-minded a person you are, there is always the vague feeling that, living a life of such privilege and entitlement isn’t much to beef about in the great scheme of things.
But even I can find it in my hard old republican heart to feel sorry for the not-even-royal-yet-and-she’s-gettingthe-dirty-end-of-the-stick Meghan Markle, as she contemplates what is meant to be the happiest day of her life tomorrow. And the not-at-all-royal Thomas Markle, her hitherto happily anonymous dad, currently suffering from what sounds very much, to the admittedly fact-lite outsider, like stress-induced health problems.
By entering into an alleged paid agreement with the pestering paparazzi, he certainly made his own pact with the devil. Hell mend him, you might say. Perhaps he thought by exercising what he might have seen as a bit of control over the situation, he could make it more bearable. But all this begs the question of why did he have, or was he allowed, to do this in the first place?
Even a man who worked successfully in the cut-throat world of the Hollywood film industry can have had no idea (and has obviously not been enlightened by those in the know about such things) of how these people behave and how far they are prepared to go to get a saleable picture for a tatty tabloid.
You could argue he’s a chancer trying to cash in on his daughter’s unlooked-for rise into what still passes for the upper echelons, even in this day and age.
The Markles (leaving aside any invidious comparisons with the clan into which their relative is marrying) certainly haven’t covered themselves with glory when it comes to family solidarity. But just because you are related to someone doesn’t mean you have to like them or even get on with them. They maybe aren’t the sort of people who would do much for the property values in the leafier suburbs of Windsor if they moved in next door but when you look at it in the cold light of day, they have basically been hung out to dry and left to deal with it themselves. Badly, as it turns out.
The depth of the irony of Piers Morgan calling Meghan’s half-sister Samantha a media vulture on TV the other day is hard to quantify.
You’re not telling me that the mills of royal administration, although they do, in the words of the old proverb, grind exceeding slow, couldn’t see this coming a mile away. And if they didn’t, they should have.
Prince Harry is probably too loved up and preoccupied to have kept his eye on this particular ball, although that argument doesn’t sit well when he and his brother have made it explicitly clear over the last 20 years that they blame the worst excesses of certain sections of the Press for the death of their mother.
Perhaps that is the price of having people to do things for you instead of doing them yourself.
Maybe the Markles wouldn’t have taken kindly to being told what to do from on high. I’m not saying that such interference (or even basic assistance) would have shut up Samantha Markle or prevented Thomas Jun from putting pen to paper to warn off Prince Harry before it was too late. But if the palace had been doing its job, none of this need have happened.
The privacy of public figures is, ironically, one of the great debates of our time, what with Hugh Grant, Hacked Off, Levison et al. Those who perpetrate this kind of intrusion will still justify their existence by claiming (and probably rightly), that there is a market for the images they take and/or create.
You can go back to the Victorian era, seat of so many of the supposed family values that inform our public life today, to the political commentator Walter Bagehot. He not only perpetrated that oft-quoted remark about royalty, referring to the mistake of “letting daylight in upon the magic” but also noted: “Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated upon one person doing interesting actions.”
Only in this case, the attention goes much, much further, taking in those who come close to them, like moths to the proverbial flame, who are regarded by one side as fair game and by the other, it would seem, as mere collateral damage.
That observation of Bagehot’s seems, in the 21st Century, to have turned into not so much the paying of attention but a particularly unhealthy form of voyeurism. We (and I use the term loosely) feel we have to be able to see and watch everything, that we have a right to do so. But perhaps in the wake of this latest royal debacle, we also ought also to take a good, long, hard look at ourselves and decide if we actually like what we see.