Moving home is one of the most stressful things you can experience that doesn’t involve ill-health, divorce or bereavement. This is surely all the more true in cases where you are changing not just residence or location, but entirely different continents. So would such a major life event be made more or less stressful, do you think, were it to come accompanied by over a dozen pages of commentary in the Daily Mail? National politics, the climate crisis, the Strait of Hormuz… Every one of them has been kicked back to the middle of the paper to clear room for the fact a family of four are relocating to England after six years in California.
Not that Britain’s Seriously Popular™ midmarket newspaper is alone in acting like the exact location of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex matters. Both the Sun and the Telegraph trumpeted the news under the banner “EXCLUSIVE”, which raises some questions about whether our leading journalists actually know what words mean. The Daily Express is polling on whether the taxpayer should be funding security, even though we know it won’t be. Someone at the Guardian is very pleased with themselves after getting a Lorde lyric into a headline.
The BBC, meanwhile, notes that Harry and Meghan are “experts in surprise”, with the clear implication that there’s something distinctly shady about not having let the world’s media follow every twist and turn of their decision making process. I want to be angry with the Washington Post’s claim that the story has “hit Britain like a thunderclap”. Reading the coverage, though – pausing a moment to notice, with shock, what it is I am writing right now – it feels a lot like they have a point.
And this is just the start! Already we’re several days deep into speculation about what Megan’s mysterious new acting role is. As the weeks roll on, you can expect further discussion – about the exact location they will live in; the plans for Archie and Lilibet’s education; how the other royals feel about all this; how the royal correspondents who make their livings explaining how the royals feel about stuff, like earthbound Metatrons, feel about all this… The notion that, since the Sussexes don’t receive any public funding any more, this might be none of our fucking business, seems not to have occurred.
A volume of coverage substantial enough to wallpaper over the entire Isle of Wight surely raises two questions. The first is why the media seems so obsessed with a story that is, let’s be honest, not particularly important. The obvious answer – because the public are – is not meaningfully an answer at all, merely a more precise way of phrasing the inquiry.
Answering that question feels like it might deserve more space than this column is able to give. For the record, though, my theory is that human beings have a deeply felt need for stories to act as a prism through which to reflect their own lives and, where medieval peasants had Biblical parables and the Greeks had gods and heroes, today we have celebrities. Reducing the social function of the royals to the level of the Brad/Jen/Angelina love triangle may seem, at first, like a comedown for a family who claim direct descent from Woden and believe they have a god-given right to rule. Actually, though, it’s a role they’ve been playing for centuries: witness the way variants of the “good brother/bad brother” story seem to play out every generation.
The other question is: why on earth are the Sussexes putting themselves through all this? We know that the vampiric nature of royal coverage is one of things that caused the couple to flee these shores in the first place, because it’s something they’ve talked about extensively in interviews with venues they considered more genial. Even if they had not done that, the recent failed privacy suit against the publishers of the Daily Mail would have been a pretty big clue. This might be considered ungrateful, but – well, if the press had been implicated in the death of your mother, you’d likely be a bit prickly too.
Given all that, why come back to the lion’s den? Meghan’s mysterious new job is surely one reason; the desire to be close to family another. (King Charles very obviously adores both his kids, despite the determination on the part of some newspapers to pretend otherwise.) But I wonder if another factor is that he has little other choice. Prince Harry may be desperate to get away from the British press. But he also needs money, to protect his family from its intrusion. And that very same press remains by far the most enthusiastic market for what he has to sell. That is the poor man’s tragedy: nobody leaves the firm.
[Further reading: My fears for a divided kingdom]
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Subscribe here to commentI had a similar experience back in the 1990s. I went to the US and spent 4 years there, got green carded through the ‘Green Card Lottery’ and then got really homesick. I missed the bolshie atitude of the English and their surly nature. I think if truth be told Harry is the same. He must be fed up with the polite nature and well turned out attitude of the Americans he mixes with. He wants a bit of banter with the lads! Megan’s probably got a job on Eastenders! Leave it out, that’s a bit strong! And I missed the footy!
Cromwell had the right idea about what to do about ‘royalty’. Let’s party like it’s 1649!