The country the Sussexes describe is not the only I live in
YESTERDAY was International Women’s Day, which, as a father of four girls, I take a keen interest in. Notwithstanding my wife and my daughters, though, I had a couple of other women on my mind.
One was Meghan Markle, who is back on our television screens and on the front pages of all our newspapers. The other was Harper Lee, the legendary author of the modern classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, in which she first wrote the muchparaphrased line that you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family.
Indeed. Harry, Duke of Sussex, didn’t choose his family. He and his elder brother, the Duke of Cambridge, have had a far from conventional life. On a human level it is difficult not to sympathise with their story. They have existed, from birth, in a goldfish bowl; the public have had a front row seat for every truth and every rumour, every success and every indiscretion, every triumph and every tragedy, including the most unimaginable of all in the loss of their mother at a tragically young age.
Few would choose this life.
I am a republican. I’m not a particularly exercised one; I wouldn’t go on a march and I don’t think about it a lot, but as a general democratic principle I am not well disposed to a hereditary head of state.
Self-evidently, I don’t know and have never met any of the protagonists in the extraordinary breakdown of relations in the royal family. And I think it is important that columnists like me, who are offered a platform, work hard to ensure that we write with care when we are dealing with the real feelings, of real people, in a real family.
That works both ways. Twitter demands you pick a team, but in the real world, you can see all the dimensions.
I have real empathy for the Duchess of Sussex. More so than for the Duke, who is no longer a young man and who should by now have learned to deal with his boundaries. The total consumption of the Duchess’s life by royal family membership will have been extraordinarily hard to deal with. There is a difference, in this way, between her and the Duchess of Cambridge; being from the UK and having met her husband as a young woman, her adjustment will have surely been easier than that of an American who had no real opportunity to ease herself into an alien life.
Her mental ill-health as a result of this life, the intensity of which one suspects she misjudged, is unsurprising, and it is something which should concern the royal family. Indeed, it should lead to a rethink of how they integrate their in-laws. For far too long, we as a society have swept mental ill-health under the carpet and failed to recognise its social, economic and most importantly human costs.
Nonetheless, I also find myself harbouring a huge amount of sympathy for the Queen, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cambridge. Because, whether it is poorly intended or simply poorly advised, I find it difficult to escape the conclusion that, since their relocation across the Atlantic, the Duke and
Duchess of Sussex are guilty of a consistent display of tone-deaf, selfserving, self-pity.
Again, there are human beings involved here. The human being most under attack by Harry and Meghan is the Queen, whose husband is currently in hospital, perhaps seriously ill. There are rules that young boys learn when growing up, and one of them is “don’t slag off your granny on Oprah when your grandpa is in hospital”. When you have a go at your father and your brother in the same breath, you cross a line of decency which most of us everyday people can see clearly.
This is made all the more indigestible because it is being perpetrated by Harry and Meghan to people whom they know cannot answer back. The Queen cannot jump on to Graham Norton’s sofa at the weekend to spill the beans; the inability to behave in that manner is one of the many sacrifices which someone born into royalty must endure.
It is troubling, furthermore, to be expected to believe that the primary ambition of the couple was to exit stage left and live a private life away from the public eye. Their actions, the latest and most blatant of which is the Oprah appearance, but which was preceded by a long list of attention-seeking and financially lucrative engagements, do not permit that to be believed.
And to hear people who have just signed a $100m deal with Netflix talk of the woe of being cut off financially, during a time when millions of people in Britain are in the process of losing their jobs, shows an almost unimaginable lack of self-awareness.
That would all be fine, I suppose, if it stopped there. The he-said she-said publicity storm could have been cocooned, to a degree, as a family matter which did not particularly affect anybody else.
However, the constant interjection of race into the feud means that its impact is far wider and more pervasive. And it is this with which I have the most personal difficulty. I understand that for a white man to opine on alleged racism against a mixed-race woman is a minefield in itself. However, I simply cannot equate the country which the Sussexes describe to the country in which I live.
That the media dislikes the Duchess is not in dispute. That the royal household dislikes the Duchess is also, most likely, indisputable. But it is possible to dislike someone of mixed-race without being racist.
Indeed, given that the couple received relentlessly positive media coverage right up to, and including their wedding, during which the Prince of Wales walked the Duchess down the aisle, with 100,000 fans waiting outside, the allegation of racism is hard to swallow. Are we to believe that the press, the fans, and Charles himself only noticed later on that she was mixed-race, and then turned against her?
I may have read this completely incorrectly. And if I have, if it becomes clear that the royal household, the press and the British people are characterised by an entrenched racism, then I will write another column disowning my previous judgment.
But for now, I can’t accept that we are a country of racists. If the Duke of Sussex wanted to leave, he was right to do so. But he should show more respect for the people who raised him; the people who can’t answer back. And he should go quietly.
If the Duke of Sussex wanted to leave, he was right to do so. But he should show more respect for the people who raised him