Going back to acting would be Meghan’s latest self-reinvention, but then self-reinvention is what actors do all the time. It’s also a distinctively American practice, which like many things in the States has its origins in Puritanism. The greatest self-reinvention of all is the crisis of spiritual conversion, after which you aren’t the same person as you were before. You turn from a sinful world to a regenerated one, and there seems no reason why this remaking shouldn’t become a perpetual way of life. When it does, it’s commonly known as postmodernism. The self is plastic, protean stuff, clay in your hands to be molded this way or that depending on how you happen to be feeling. Does Madonna even remember being part of the English squirearchy in a previous incarnation, riding her horse in the Cotswolds? The only force which binds together your various identities is the will to succeed. If that means making jam or dressing up in a giraffe costume, so be it.

In the 19th century, the world was seen as in constant flux, but there was a stable point in the midst of this mutability: the self. It was a kind of substance, rather like the body but invisible. In our own time, flux has invaded the inner sanctum of the self and scooped it out. As Oscar Wilde remarked, truth is one’s present mood. This is all very different from the traditional bourgeois idea of selfhood. One of the great revolutionary breakthroughs of the European middle classes was the notion of self-determination. You were no longer instructed what to think and do by feudalist, monarchical, autocratic regimes. Instead, you decided for yourself. You wrote your own history, rather than playing a humble role in a pre-scripted narrative. The creed of liberalism was born. It was advances of this kind which caused Marx to admire the middle classes so much, a fact of which most of them seem nowadays to be oblivious. To be free meant not just to be unshackled, but to construct your own destiny without the interference of others. What was important wasn’t simply what you did, but the fact that you did it. To that extent, it was an adolescent kind of ethics. Yet it had world-shaking political implications, not least when the idea of self-determination was applied to nations as well as individuals. The result of that was the unleashing of one of the most transformative political forces the modern world has witnessed: revolutionary nationalism.

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There’s a difference, however, between self-determination and self-invention. To shape your own identity suggested that you had such a thing already. The problem was that someone else — the state, the church, the nobility — was forbidding you to be your own master. It wasn’t a matter of plucking your selfhood from thin air, but of being allowed to realize a self which was in some sense already given. Self-invention, however, is a different affair, because now the self becomes nothing more than the story of its endless refashioning, like the life-history of David Bowie. If who you are is somehow given, then this restricts what you might do, and is thus an obstacle to complete freedom. For total freedom, you need to abandon all ideas of a set identity and simply make yourself up as you go along. The result of this, however, is a freedom which is purely empty. It’s what you get when you push laissez-faire to an absolute limit.

Negative freedom of this kind wants to cut itself loose from all external determinants. Like God, it is purely self-creating. Aggressively independent of Nature, history, heredity and environment, it relies on nothing outside itself in order to be itself. This isn’t true of a lily or a can of beans. Nor is it true of an animal like a badger or a zebra, which is completely shaped by the species to which it belongs. And despite the liberals, it isn’t true of human beings either. Freedom doesn’t mean being unconditioned. It means being conditioned in a way which allows you to transform what conditions you. Take language, for example. Language molds our consciousness to its roots, but we’re not just passive effects of it. On the contrary, to be brought up in a language is to learn how to use it creatively, producing utterances we have never heard or spoken before. We start off with the alphabet and end up writing Paradise Lost. To some extent, then, we can determine whatever it is that determines us. And this is what we call freedom. It isn’t true on any significant scale for badgers or zebras. Badgers and zebras don’t have any history of their own (though they may occasionally play a role in ours) because they aren’t built to be able to reconfigure what makes them what they are. They can only be what they are, so that their life is safer than ours but probably more tedious too.

The contrast with humanity is clear. “I can be anything I want!” is one of the most mindless of postmodern mantras, not least in the United States. The problem with this vision, as the Romantics discovered a long time beforehand, is that any actual achievement or identity is automatically diminished. To act is to limit a self which is pure, infinite possibility. For this reason, true freedom would be not to act at all, and so would be purely negative. What Meghan discovered to her dismay was that even the role of princess was imprisoning — that what looked like liberty was more like a privileged form of incarceration. In a notable paradox, those at the very top of the tree, and thus (one might have thought) most free of restriction, may turn out to be the most rigorously scripted of all.

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As an actor, Meghan was able to choose her parts and could always shift from one to the other. She also got to choose her role as Duchess of Sussex. The Duke of Sussex, however, had no such privilege, as he has made a point of complaining. Like most of us, large chunks of his narrative were written for him by others. Few of us are self-authoring, given that being around the place involves having parents, and having parents involves being part of a whole world without ever having been consulted on the matter. But Harry is less self-authoring than most of us and now wants to claim control over his own story.

This idea of life-as-story is a particularly fashionable notion at present. Not everyone thinks of their life as a narrative. You could see it instead as a cycle or a montage or a mosaic, not to speak of a heap of fragments. “Narrative” suggests a certain shapeliness, whereas some of us regard our lives, rather as Henry James saw the realist novel, as “loose baggy monsters”. A human life doesn’t always have the clarity and coherence of a parable. “What’s your journey?” suggests that you feel yourself to be en route to a destination, but we don’t all live with some grand goal in sight. There isn’t that much continuity in every human existence. The philosopher Galen Strawson thinks it not only true but transparently obvious that who he is now isn’t who he was at the age of 10. Besides, everyone’s narrative includes a lot of other characters who usually turn out to be hard to control, as well as spawning a whole series of sub-plots which refuse to slot neatly together. The view that everything in the world conspires with everything else to form a luminously intelligible whole is known as paranoia.

Having been scripted by others, though, Harry is now eager to script himself — or, as he would say, own or take control of his life-story. It’s revealing, however, that he thinks of his life as some kind of property, to which his relation is one of proprietorship. You don’t own your life any more than you own your body. You can’t leave it in a pub by mistake, or swap it for someone else’s. Harry and Meghan think in acquisitive terms even when it comes to their very existence. Your life is a commodity to be invested on the most profitable of terms.

Which is to say, in the current barbarous jargon, that you’re a brand, just as your hair-style or apple chutney is. And that’s where the problems begin. Because a brand is precisely something you can’t exert complete control over. It’s a relational matter, in the sense that whether it takes off depends on the public. In striking out for freedom and autonomy, then, you find yourself the puppet of forces which are entirely anonymous, just as a toothpaste manufacturer does. You can try to fend off that anonymity by writing “Love”, “Meghan” or “As ever” on your products, as though you have a fierce personal affection for every potential customer, but that won’t fool anyone. The fickleness of consumers forces you into yet more desperate or ingenious self-reinvention in order to stay in business. In an age of self-determination, you find yourself adrift in a market in which nobody can be entirely self-determining. Postmodernism marks the point at which the logic of the marketplace begins to infiltrate the ways we think and feel.

In any case, no one can shape the course of their life in isolation from others. To form one’s history collectively is known as democracy. For two people to shape their selves in and through each other is known as love. Let’s hope Harry and Meghan keep on doing that. There may not be much more left.

I have been thinking about that woman lately, because the son of the woman she was weeping over has come home. Yesterday, Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, returned to Britain after six years in Montecito, California.

Let me declare my interests, or rather my lack of them. I hold no brief for the Sussexes. I have not tried the podcasts. I am dimly aware of the jam. I have sat through small bits of the Netflix series, in which two people who moved to California to escape publicity narrate their private lives to camera for six hours. Nor do I much care for the House of Windsor: an emotionally refrigerated dynasty whose one redeeming feature is a hollow, ironical humor flapping at the edges of an inflexible sense of duty. Asked to choose between Montecito and Balmoral, I would ask to see the wine list.

But the return interests me, and not because of the personalities. It interests me because in tragedy nobody gets out of the house. That is very nearly the definition of the genre. Orestes is raised abroad and comes home to engage in matricide; Hamlet is called back to Elsinore by a dead parent who declines to stay dead; the House of Atreus runs on a curse that no amount of relocation can outrun. I once wrote a book about tragedy, and the sentence in it I stand by most firmly is this: “We are still prisoners of the family, even a queer family.” The Windsors are our House of Atreus, with better catering and worse weather. Harry’s flight to California was never the end of the play. It was the interval, and the strawberries and cream have now been eaten.

In an article for The New York Times, under the headline “Don’t Harry and Meghan Know Better?”, Roxane Gay reads the return as she read the exile: as a parable of race. The monarchy, she observes, has cheerfully tolerated wife-beheaders, a Nazi-sympathizing abdicator and a prince who kept up his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein after the conviction, but it could not abide a black woman. About the tabloids she is simply right: the coverage of Meghan was vile, and the family’s refusal to defend her contemptible. And yet race explains less here than it appears to. The machine that mangled Meghan had already destroyed a white, aristocratic, impeccably virginal teenager called Diana Spencer, and it has chewed through every daughter-in-law fed into it before or since, whatever her color or her postcode. The Firm is an equal-opportunity destroyer of daughters-in-law. Gay ends her article with James Baldwin’s question — “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” — and it is the right question with the wrong arsonist. The house was burning long before the Sussexes arrived. What breaks people in that house is not their difference from the family. It is the family.

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Which is why Diana remains the far more interesting figure. I was moved by her death and take no pride in admitting it, being the kind of right-thinking soft leftist who can quote Tom Paine from memory after a couple of drinks. But what happened in September 1997 still strikes me as thrilling, and I persist in thinking it was almost revolutionary. For about a fortnight, England stopped being a Protestant country. The shrines, the votive candles, the flowers rotting in their cellophane, the icons of a wronged woman, the pilgrims sleeping out on the Mall, the conviction that grief must be displayed rather than swallowed — this was a populist catholic insurgency, catholic with a small c. It was an eruption of everything the Reformation was supposed to have buried, directed squarely against the stiff-necked Anglicanism of a family whose head is, after all, Supreme Governor of the Church of England. The irrational national feeling on which constitutional monarchy depends — the affect that it exists to capture and sedate — detached itself from the living sovereign and fastened onto a dead woman whom the family had cast out. The Queen was obliged to come down from Balmoral and bow her head to the coffin of her discarded daughter-in-law, more or less on the instructions of the tabloid press. It was the nearest thing to a revolution I ever expect to see in England in my lifetime, and it was conducted entirely in flowers.

Perhaps Diana damaged the House of Windsor beyond repair. The Firm survived, as firms often do, but like a bell with a crack in it: it still rings on the hour, but the note has never been true since. Everything after — the confessional television, the disgraced uncle stripped of his dukedom, the warring sons, the memoir with its frostbitten confidences — is aftershock. Harry is his mother’s heir in everything except the ability to carry it off: the same weaponized publicity, the same faith that feeling trumps protocol, the same slow discovery that the media that loves you is the media that eats you and will kill you.

So why is there no republic? This is the genuinely strange thing. The monarchy has given the British every possible reason to be rid of it, and yet the republican groundswell obstinately fails to swell. The polls barely move; abolition remains the hobby horse of those of us who own a copy of Rights of Man and hum “Jerusalem” in the shower. Personally, I would prefer a republic. But honesty compels a look at what happens to republics. The United States rid itself of George III and then spent two and a half centuries confecting substitute royalty: the Camelot of the Kennedys, the dynastic ambitions of the Clintons, the Obamas’ court in its tasteful exile, and now a president who has gilded the Oval Office like a Bourbon with a credit line. Abolish the monarchy without abolishing the need for one and you get kings anyway — elected ones, who are worse, since there is no constitutional plumbing for removing them gracefully.

Americans desire monarchy more than anyone. I discovered this in Washington DC on the night Diana died. I was there for a political science conference; a Brazilian waiter broke the news over a late dinner, and he had to repeat it three times before I believed him. I then sat in the lobby of the Sheraton until four in the morning, watching CNN try to assemble the story from scraps while respectable, indeed some world-famous, political theorists wept openly around me. The network’s instinct, in the absence of a court of its own, was to ask Tom Cruise for comment. A republic in mourning reaches for the Hollywood aristocracy, which is the only one it has.

The reason is that politics runs on fiction, and there is no unleaded alternative. Hobbes knew this: the state is an artificial man animated by an “Artificial Soul”, and what keeps the many obedient to the few is not force but opinion and imagination, or perhaps just fancy — the stories we seem to need to keep telling. The question is never whether we live by fictions but which ones, and whether we know it. The British monarchy is a fiction that insists it is a fact: as recently as 2023, a 74-year-old man was anointed with holy oil behind a screen while Handel played, and Parliament looked on as if this were normal.

Wallace Stevens dreamed of a supreme fiction — a fiction we know to be a fiction and believe in anyway, with our eyes open. A republic worth having would be exactly that: a crownless constitution held together not by sacred oil but by the revisable consent of people who know they made it up and might therefore make it better. Whether human beings can be governed that way — whether we can live without kings and queens — is an open question, and the evidence of the past decade is not encouraging. We seem to want thrones the way we want sugar, and the diet versions fool nobody.

Meanwhile, the play resumes. Harry comes home like Orestes, though with more limited plans, one hopes, for the family reunion. Like Hamlet, he is called back to Elsinore by a ghost, and his ghost has been visible for nearly 30 years, on tea towels and old mugs. There will be school runs and security disputes and a reconciliation with the crowned father reported by the very newspapers whose destruction Harry has sworn. Nobody gets out of the house. The best you can negotiate is a room of your own in it.

Monarchy, in the end, is not the oil, the orb or the man in the golden coach. It is a stranger weeping on public transport for a woman she never met. Can we live without kings and queens? The truth is, we have never seriously tried.

I, for one, eagerly await the big reveal. But it’s hard to imagine that whatever Harry suggested could be worse than what Archewell ultimately produced. Apart from a 33-minute holiday special, released in December 2020, the couple’s sole Spotify output was Archetypes, which described itself as an effort to “investigate, dissect, and subvert the labels that hold women back”. Having listened to it, I can confirm: the above is less a mission statement than a strategy akin to the one employed by high-school students looking to pad the word count. (“Webster’s dictionary defines an archetype as ‘a very typical example of a certain person or thing.’ In this essay I will…”.) Meghan appears in conversation with women who, like her, have done extremely well for themselves — the first two episodes feature Mariah Carey and Serena Williams — but who, like Meghan, can still pluck a narrative about being held back by misogyny from even the most stratospheric level of success.

The Archetypes post-mortem has included damning allegations about Meghan’s lack of involvement, including that she pawned off the actual interviewing onto a producer and then recorded herself asking the questions later. Andy Cohen, host of The Real Housewives, who appeared in the final “binary breaking” episode (so-called because, unlike previous episodes, this one had men in it), has described this as “an insane rumor”; from the perspective of a famous person, like him, it is. It’s very clear, listening to the podcast, that Meghan did indeed interview her celebrity guests. It’s equally clear, however, that these are the only guests she talked to.

The academics, journalists, or even just less-famous celebrities whose voices are included on Archetypes were apparently pre-recorded with a producer, with Meghan’s reactions spliced in afterward — sometimes with unintentionally hilarious results. “I mean, isn’t that all so interesting?” Meghan coos, after a lengthy diatribe from the episode’s featured professor about “women and femmes and minoritised people” and “normative social constructs and normative social patterns”. (If by “interesting” you mean “indecipherable”, then yes, very.) And yet, the podcast needs these voices, not only to give it the gloss of a serious exploration of its subject matter, but to counteract the substanceless quality of Meghan’s interviews with fellow celebs.

Of course, Meghan is very busy and important and not obligated to talk to anyone she doesn’t want to; of course, she’s entitled to only speak with people as famous as she is, while leaving her producers to deal with the rabble. But this is undeniably at odds with the relatable image she’s been attempting to sell since Megxit, whether it’s one-on-one with Oprah or to millions of viewers on Netflix: the image of the royal princess turned humble truth-teller. Meghan (who, lest we forget, started out as an actor) is not so much an engaged host as playing the role of one, and hence Archetypes is not so much a podcast as an incredible simulation thereof. You know that saying about a stupid person’s idea of a smart person? This is like that, except it’s a narcissist’s idea of what it would be like to be curious about other people’s lives. When news broke this week that Harry’s own favourite (albeit sadly unrealised) podcast idea was to interview Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump about their childhood trauma, was anyone surprised? At the end of the day, the Sussexes invariably circle back to the only topic either of them are interested in: themselves.

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Not that I blame them. This is, if nothing else, a solid business strategy: the relentless commitment to monetising one’s own life story is itself archetypal of the modern age, not to mention classically American. And despite the entertainment value of Bill Simmons describing the couple as “grifters”, this is not quite the right word for what Meghan is, nor for what she tried to do with her now-defunct podcast. Grifters are typically in it for the money, but the nature of the Spotify contract more or less meant that she could have farted into a microphone for an hour and still get paid, but Archteypes is what she made. She chose the podcast medium; she chose this particular format. Perhaps it is worth asking why.

Is it just that this type of vaguely woke social commentary is cheap and easy and ubiquitous, the lowest-hanging fruit on today’s cultural landscape? Or is it that in our attention economy, wading into the shallowest point in the culture wars — where the activism of the keyboard warrior meets the relatability of the lifestyle influencer — is one of the few ways left to make a name for yourself that doesn’t involve reality television?

Other creators — almost always women — have tried in various ways and forms to leverage this approach to content. Sometimes it works, at least for a while: remember when Hannah Gadsby’s audience-scolding anti-comedy special Nanette was the most celebrated cultural product of 2018? Sometimes, as with Chelsea Handler’s Netflix documentary about reckoning with her white privilege, it’s an unmitigated disaster: the Rotten Tomatoes rating for Hello, Privilege. It’s Me, Chelsea is a dismal 11%. It helps when the creator, or host, is willing to make it personal, and on this front, there are glimpses within Archetypes of what could have been a successful product — one that interwove Meghan’s own struggles with its broader feminist theme.

The problem, in the end, is not Meghan’s story. It’s Meghan herself.

A hallmark of the best podcasts, and what is sorely missing from Archetypes, is a sense of intimacy. The content of an enjoyable podcast is often secondary to the connection you feel with it, whether it’s a sense of sitting in on a lecture from an expert who is passionately obsessed with his subject — as in My Favorite Murder or The Rest Is History — or of overhearing a conversation between interesting people who are also interested in each other — as in Blocked and Reported, or The Unspeakable.

To be clear, Archetypes failed not for lack of trying: Meghan dutifully mimics the format of other, better podcasts, leaning into the microphone and addressing the audience in a direct, confessional tone. But these moments are so obviously scripted — in the sense that a practised actress with a trained voice is reading lines off a page — that they ring hollow. The overall impression is of somebody who knows all the words, but can’t hear the music; a person more concerned with image than connection; a woman who wants to present herself as relatable while speaking only to people as famous as she is. It’s ironic, for someone who fled the UK to escape the constraints of a highly managed life. She seems more boxed-in than ever.

There’s an interesting moment, in the final episode, when Meghan laughingly declines Andy Cohen’s offer to develop a Real Housewives-style series just for her. It’s interesting because, in some ways, this does actually seem to be what she wants: to be the simultaneous hero, author and star of her own life story, reclaiming her narrative in the manner of a Kim Kardashian or a Paris Hilton (also a guest on Archetypes). But to do this, and to make it entertaining, would require ceding control of her image — and it would require being unscripted, sloppy and real in public in a way that she’s clearly uncomfortable with. The Real Housewives do not care what you think of them. The Sussexes clearly do. Harry is currently fighting three lawsuits with British newspapers.

It’s no surprise that Meghan was drawn to the idea of podcasting, the dream of a conversation over which she has total control. But for Archetypes to work, its host would have had to recognise that the point of interviewing other people is to tell their stories, not to use them as a vehicle for telling, and retelling, your own. But even Meghan’s dialogues with celebrity guests have a funny way of circling back to become all about Meghan herself — her Cinderella story, her identity struggles and her yearning to be affirmed and accepted, first by Hollywood and then by the Royals.

And here, though evidently without meaning to, the podcast does manage to fulfil its promise on one front: if you were looking for a 12-hour portrait of the archetypal narcissist, you could not do better than this.

The history of how this idea of individual choice came to dominate our moral landscape is complex and interesting. What began as a worthy cry of individual freedom against exploitative elites — the state, the medieval church and so on — greatly exceeded its intended power, eventually becoming a weapon that could bend reality around the will of individual choice. These days, for example, I can be a woman simply if I choose to be one, irrespective of any biological givenness. Philosophically, this means there are no givens that human will cannot and should not be able to overcome. Truth requires a possessive pronoun, making it submissive to individual will: my truth. All that matters is the choosing. There is only one core moral situation and that is when I point to something and say: “I want it”. The paradigmatic setting for moral reflection has shifted from kneeling in the church pew to standing in the shopping aisle.

Capitalism inevitably plays an important part in this story. The soft Left critique is that capitalism is poor at redistribution and poor at cleaning up after itself — that it doesn’t price in its effects on the environment. On the plus side, it has lifted billions out of poverty and has liberated hitherto oppressed individuals from the restrictions of traditional moral values — the power of the “pink pound”, for instance. In this way, capitalism is a kind of solvent against the weight of tradition: the dollars in my pocket free me to be whoever I want to be, whatever I want to be. Dalit billionaire Rajesh Saraiya is no longer untouchable. How can we not cheer such liberation? My wallet says that I don’t have to abide by your values. For “choice first” liberals, this is all to be counted on the positive side of the register.

We could call this the “Montecito perspective”, but Marx explained it best: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” The Netflix Queen, luxuriating in her ghastly Californian mansion, is a surprising example of precisely what Marx described — her exaggerated bow to the monarch making a mockery of the respect that such a gesture is designed to articulate.

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This is why the “Montecito perspective” contrasts so directly with the “Buckingham Palace perspective”, which is what makes the whole Harry/William drama so much more than a mimetic rivalry between siblings. They are archetypes of two fundamental and bitter political adversaries: very roughly, tradition and the ethics of the market, old world power and new world power, England and America. People will keep on making programmes about Harry and Meghan not because they are intrinsically worth watching, nor because they provide us with any new information about their perfectly ordinary romance, but rather because they reference a very primitive kind of disagreement about the nature of moral reality. Harry and Meghan are compelling in their own way because they are absolute true believers in the kind of moral vision they propound. In direct contrast, many believe that what they think of as being good is the very thing we now need saving from: an ethics indistinguishable from narcissism. The crack between us reaches down to the very bottom.

From the Palace perspective, we are born into a network of relations to which we are obligated from before we take breath. William would use words like “duty” and “service”, a crucial aspect of which is the belief that my life is not all-about-me. It’s not about my will or my having chosen something. Not even about my own personal happiness. I live in the service of something greater than myself. As today’s episodes reveal, while William was somewhere up the M1 opening yet another Community Centre or Homeless Project, Harry was in the departure lounge, giddily breathing into his mobile phone: “We are on the freedom flight.” Little wonder so many of us saw his abdication of responsibility as a betrayal of duty, to both his family and to his country — which, given the nature of the obligations he was born into, amount to the same thing.

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Imagining a happy-ever-after Disneyfied version of royalty, Meghan can be forgiven for not having fully appreciated all of this. Monarchy is not glamour and power; it is bonded servitude — and servitude, as the Queen herself well knew, inspired by a king who divested himself of power to come among us as a baby, one who “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2). Harry had the perfect role model to appreciate all this in his grandmother. Unlike his wife, he should have known better. Was that shame on his face as he watched his fairy princess effect an apparently hilarious parody of the bow? If not, it should have been.

“No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation on another man,” wrote that patron saint of neoliberalism, Ayn Rand, in The Virtue of Selfishness. This amounts to much the same thing as: “I didn’t ask to be born into this family.” But we all come from somewhere, rooted in a place layered by generations of expectation. And the moral call of such expectations cannot be escaped from simply by relocating to California. There is no psychological tabula rasa to be found, even in the land of reinvention. You take your story with you, and especially so if you are a member of the Royal Family. Harry has not freed himself; he has chosen a very empty form of exile. He has sold his birthright to Netflix, and he has sold it far too cheap. All that Hollywood adulation and California sunshine will not be able to quell the emptiness within.

***

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Instead, it was extreme privilege that defined royals back then. Today a very large part of the public can afford fancy dining, expensive hotels, and foreign travel — at least from time to time — and most can expect to retire to a comfortable bed in a pleasantly ambient temperature. But not so long ago these were the prerogatives of only a small share of the population, at the top of which sat royalty.

Yet despite their elite lifestyles, monarchs and their consorts can tell us a surprising amount about how life in Britain has changed over the past 300 years, and in no department more than that of demography. In fact, the whole demographic story of Britain since the early 18th century can be told through the reproductive history of four queens.

Let’s start with Queen Anne who came to the throne in 1702. Her sister Mary had died childless in her early thirties — a death immortalised by the funeral music of Henry Purcell, who followed her to the graveyard within less than a year. Mary’s husband William III — first cousin of Mary and Anne as well as Mary’s fellow monarch — died some years later in his early fifties with no heir, so the throne passed to Anne. By the time Anne died, just short of 50 years of age, she had apparently had 18 pregnancies, and although one of her offspring did make it past infancy, he did not survive his mother. And so, with Anne’s Catholic half-brother excluded for religious reasons, the call went out to distant — Protestant — relations in Hanover.

The reason that Anne’s reproductive failures are of interest is that they stand as an extreme but not atypical example of the sad human condition for most of history, during which not even royalty could shield an individual from the cruelty of nature. This was the unchanging world which the Reverend Thomas Malthus described a century later, in which humans bred like rabbits and died like flies. Populations pressed forwards like Europe’s in the Middle Ages, only to be pushed back by plague or war. Ultimately humans stretched the limits of the planet’s carrying capacity at a time when crop yields were still very meagre and hunger never far off for most of the population.

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But the world which Malthus described as eternal was coming to an end. Already in Malthus’s day, death rates were plunging, life expectancies extending and the population growing rapidly. A few years after his death the young Victoria came to the throne: her reign would redefine population patterns in the British Isles and set a precedent which was to spread well beyond it. Victoria had nine children and each of them outlived her, even though she managed to live a good three decades longer than Anne. Again, this is exemplary of trends at the time but a rather extreme example; infant mortality remained very high and only began falling towards the end of Victoria’s reign. To be survived by nine out of nine children was indeed a feat, but far less miraculously atypical than it would have been a century or two earlier.

Britain’s population explosion under Queen Victoria was one of the most significant events of the 19th century. As well as providing a ready labour force to transform the country into the workshop of the world, it supplied a huge excess population that settled in colonies from Vancouver to Tasmania. The Anglosphere as we know it today could not have come into existence without the millions who left the British Isles and settled new lands, creating Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And until the latter years of the 19th century — when other European countries started to follow suit and export their surplus citizens — the people of the United Kingdom provided the bulk of the inflow that turned the United States from a handful of colonies hugging the Atlantic in 1800 to the behemoth it was becoming a century later.

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Sinn Féin won the demographic war

By Paul Morland

Just as Queen Anne and Queen Victoria represented the demography of their ages, so too did Elizabeth the Queen Mother. A Scottish aristocrat and one of ten, she married the future George VI, one of six. But, typical of a generation which came to reproductive maturity in the inter-war years, Elizabeth and her husband did not follow in the fertile footsteps of their parents but limited their progeny to two. Already before the First World War family sizes were shrinking, with a fertility rate in 1914 in the UK of about three children per woman. By 1939, it was down to two. This was the next phase in what we now call the demographic transition, a change which happened first in the UK then spread to the rest of Europe and to North America and in more recent decades to the rest of the world. After a period of falling death rates, a more urban and educated population produces fewer children, as they have more hope of their survival.

But demography would not be so interesting if it did not have twists and kinks. The Princess Elizabeth, our present Queen, defied the demographic trend of low birth rates and small families by marrying younger than her mother and having twice as many children. And again, she was typical of her generation. After the Second World War there was a perhaps inevitable baby boom as the men returned home and a certain amount of catching up took place in terms of family formation. But with some ups and down, the baby boom went on for the best part of two decades, creating the baby boomers of whom those of us born in 1964 (including Prince Edward) represent a final hurrah.

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Is Elizabeth II a bad mother?

By Tanya Gold

After Elizabeth II’s final child was born, the country’s fertility rate again began to tumble. Each of her children has produced just two, representative of the country as a whole. And although the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have bucked the national trend by having three, Meghan and Harry certainly represent a large swathe of their generation by not only stopping at two but making an environmental virtue of the fact.

Perhaps it is surprising that so much of our demographic history can be seen through the lives of four women who were so exceptional in terms of their social status. But maybe we should not be shocked that, as well as being heirs to the throne, each royal generation also exists in its own time, influencing and being influenced by the wider trends around them.

At its best, this is a noble impulse: to recognise how women, so often denied direct access to the levers of power, have had to find other ways to wield it. To give credit to the mothers, sisters, wives, and girlfriends of great men who had to content themselves with pulling strings behind the scenes rather than wielding swords on the front lines. But at worst, this feminist narrative has a dark underbelly: if behind every great man is an even greater woman, then who will you find standing in the shadow of a man who did terrible things?

Two years ago, the internet was on fire with debate about the disgraced financier and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself while awaiting justice for his crimes. The investigation into his death is ongoing, but meanwhile the investigation into his misdeeds has found a new villain. Epstein isn’t just gone; he’s quickly being forgotten, relegated to a supporting role in the scandal that bears his name. Our focus has turned to Ghislaine Maxwell, whose status has grown so great in the wake of Epstein’s death that she has all but eclipsed the man without whose bad acts there would never have been a story at all.

Much has been made of Maxwell’s relationship with Epstein, including her possible complicity in his crimes. The charges against her include enticement of minors and sex trafficking of underage girls, with several women alleging that Maxwell recruited them to work with Epstein in full knowledge that he would abuse and assault them. (She has denied all the allegations.) But it’s Maxwell herself who is increasingly the object of fascination and derision.

In 2019, when Epstein was arrested and charged with sex trafficking, Maxwell was covered as more of a curiosity than an accomplice — let alone a puppeteer pulling his strings. Even Vicky Ward, who has said her reporting on the sex abuse scandal was removed from her Vanity Fair profile of Epstein — allegedly because he put pressure on then editor Graydon Carter — did not seem comparably suspicious of Maxwell’s character at the time. “Full disclosure: I like her,” Ward wrote. “Most people in New York do. It’s almost impossible not to.”

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Why Jeffrey Epstein deserves to be forgotten

By Louise Perry

Needless to say, there are no such disclosures to be found in coverage of the case today. Instead, Maxwell’s guilt is treated as a foregone conclusion in most public conversation about the case, to the point where her recent fretting over the possibility of a tainted jury pool doesn’t really seem so far-fetched. The word most commonly used to describe her in the press is “monster” — as in “Ten Monsters of 2020”, and, “Donald Trump Just Wishes This Monster Well”, and “Ghislaine Maxwell Called ‘the Real Monster’ as New Legal Hurdles Emerge”.

A new documentary, Chasing Ghislaine, promises to take us behind the scenes of Maxwell’s “twisted and chilling partnership with Epstein”. But the public narrative has already promoted her from partner to boss. Maxwell was “worse than Epstein”, per one alleged victim. Another calls her “the power geisha orchestrating everything for Epstein’s maximum delight”. Still another told 20/20 that “Ghislaine was 100% the lady of the house at Jeffrey’s. He made that very clear. We knew who was in charge and it was Ghislaine.”

“She was vicious, she was evil and she was a woman,” Virginia Giuffre, who is expected to give evidence at Maxwell’s trial, told CBS News last year. “Jeffrey was a sick pedophile, but she was the mastermind.”

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Britain should decolonize the Commonwealth

By Sarah Ditum

It’s worth remembering, here, that the feminist narrative of under-appreciated heroines has a misogynist cousin. The female villain who wields power in the form of manipulation is an ancient fictional archetype; from Eve and the apple on up, it serves to tell us that it’s women’s ambition which forms the true roots of men’s evil deeds. In Snow White, it’s the power-hungry and jealous queen who orders a huntsman to cut out the heart of her stepdaughter. In Shakespeare, it’s Lady Macbeth who gets stuck with indelible bloodstains on her hands.

These narratives serve men. The more we dwell on the idea of a conniving female pulling the strings, the less responsibility we assign to the man pulling the trigger — or in Epstein’s case, committing the assaults. In fact, the more we hear about Ghislaine Maxwell, the less agency Epstein seems to have. He was just a big, dumb animal; she was the one bringing him fresh meat, the brains of the organisation.

Taken to its natural conclusion, this type of rhetoric leads us to a place where men can’t be held accountable for their choices at all, if there’s a woman somewhere in the vicinity who could be seen as a behind-the-scenes manipulator. It’s how we decide that Prince Harry is just a hapless lump acting at the Machiavellian whims of his wife; it’s how we turn our attention away from men who commit violence in favour of pointing fingers at the mothers who raised them. At what point does giving due credit to women become just another way of excusing men?

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Did Bill Cosby deserve to go free?

By Kat Rosenfield

Feminism requires finding this balance. If we believe that women have agency, we can’t give this one a pass for her involvement with a monster; we must embrace the radical notion that Maxwell is a person as capable of evil and avarice as anyone else. But there’s a fine line here between feminism and sexism — and between justice and vengeance — when we set out to condemn the nearest woman in the place of a dead, bad man.

There is an aggressive fervour surrounding Maxwell’s impending trial, and a thirst to see her punished in every possible way before that it even begins. Images from pretrial hearings show her shackled, her hair lank, her face bruised. In a recent dispatch from Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, she described being kept in solitary confinement in a rat-infested cell, assaulted by guards, and given food crawling with maggots — all of which were promptly celebrated by her detractors as no less than she deserves. The fact that Maxwell’s guilt hasn’t yet been determined by a court of law is irrelevant to the public glee at seeing her suffer. She’s too good a villain.

And unlike Epstein, she’s still here.

I once saw a television debate between the philosophers Ernest Gellner and Charles Taylor in which they suggested that humankind could be divided into the Tough and the Tender; I think I probably score high on the Tough side of the spectrum. I know that mental illness is real; it killed my son and has blighted the life of my best friend. But I do believe that many people could make themselves better. Resilience is like a muscle which grows weak with lack of use; human beings are born tough, but the fussing of an over-cautious society weakens them.

Mental illness has gone from being an ailment that we dare not speak of to one that we cannot escape; whenever I turn on Radio 4, I guarantee that the words “mental health” will be spoken within ten minutes.

But it’s not just a media problem; Ulrika Jonsson recently stripped off “to highlight the importance of men’s mental health” and to urge fans to donate to the charity StrongMen. What did her naked body have to do with it? I suppose 30 years ago it might have cheered some sad men up. But as it was, it was hard to define exactly who benefited.

Meanwhile, criminals are being spared jail for the sake of their mental health, the most recent example being when a cocaine-crazed driver left a nursery nurse with a fractured skull after running her over while talking on the phone and doing 63mph in a 30mph zone. Yasmin Jenkins was left in a coma and she is unable to return to work. But when sentencing her attacker, Clare Cassidy, earlier this month, Recorder Robert Lazarus noted: “You have a history of long-term mental health problems and I accept you are genuinely remorseful. I also note your mental health problems may deteriorate if sent to prison.” So that’s alright then!

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What I've learned about suicide

By Julie Burchill

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that he “avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can”. I thought of him as I picked up the latest book by Matt Haig, who has perpetuated his own troubles very successfully indeed. The Comfort Book is the latest in Haig’s canon of woe, preceded by Reasons To Stay Alive (2015) and Notes From A Nervous Planet (2018). It is, we’re told, “a collection of consolations learned in hard times and suggestions for making the bad days better”.

One of the signs of serious depression is the inability to be creative, but Mr Haig, who attempted to commit suicide aged 24, has been a veritable one-man library-stuffer, writing eleven children’s books and seven novels since he started out in 2004. He has, since then, also been signed up to something called The Mental Health Speakers Agency, along with Love Island’s Dr Alex and Blair Island’s Alastair Campbell. According to his profile, “Matt’s refreshingly honest and composed approach to a heavy topic makes him a hit time and time again” — which made me laugh as it sounds like an escort agency. Still, I’m sure it’s a lovely little earner; singing the blues will soon have you rolling in the greens.

Which brings us back to The Comfort Book. It’s very much what I think of as an UnBook, the sort of thing people who don’t like reading give to fellow illiterates at Christmas. If it were a garment, it would be a onesie. If it were food, it would be mashed potato. If it could speak, it would say “I’m here for you”. Keen not to startle us, Haig soothes us with an almost tangible hush: “You can place it beside your bed or keep it next to the toilet. You can throw it out of the window.” Option three, please!

He also reassures us that “You can tear out the pages”. But where to start? There’s so much to loathe: “We are all things. And we connect to all things. Human to human. Moment to moment. Pain to pleasure. Despair to hope.” “You were born worthy of love and you remain worthy of love. Be kind to yourself.” “Walking one foot in front of the other, in the same direction, will always get you further than running around in circles.” “It’s okay to be the teacup with a chip in it. That’s the one with a story.” It’s like that all the way through.

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Meghan's empty confession

By Louise Perry

But do we really need encouragement to be any soppier than we are? We are already a society in which dealing with one’s emotions privately is equated with “bottling it up”, which must surely lead to mayhem in the future. Indeed, this is the central argument of the current war between the Windsors and Sussexes; that processing and mastering one’s feelings alone is some sort of sham. But seeing the photographs of the Queen having a laugh at Royal Ascot last week, and comparing her resilience to the Sussexes’ ceaseless whining, this seems a spectacular own goal. All we see in the wars of the Windsors is an attempt by the Sussexes to “strength-shame” anyone who won’t put their personal problems in the shop window for all the world to pick over.

Of course, the mentally ill have always been with us, and always will be. But surely every other person didn’t have issues until they realised that it would get them attention? Rather like what one does in bed, a person’s neuroses are generally the least interesting thing about them, unless they are profoundly dull. Look at Churchill; a lifelong sufferer from severe manic depression, frequently suicidal — “I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through… I don’t like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water” — but he never let it get in the way of leading a tiny nation into battle against the might of the Nazi war machine.

When I was a girl, I couldn’t wait to be a grown-up. I imagined that adult life was dangerous and exciting, and I was eager to get out into the fray. But now the craze for over-protecting children (as I write, doctors have just begged parents to stop bringing record levels of children suffering from colds to A&E!) has spread to the adult world with its endless waffle about pampering, self-care and me-time — and “journaling”, of course, so we can all have a chance of producing our very own Comfort Book.

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Talking of which, I must admit that I suffered a touch of “low mood” myself — quickly mutating to high dudgeon — on seeing my adored Stoics quoted in this quivering blancmange of a book. Far from feeling the need to cosset and baby ourselves, Marcus Aurelius said that the strong — which most of us are and which just a few, like my poor son, are not — should positively give thanks for misfortunes: “It’s unfortunate that this has happened? No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it — not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. It could have happened to anyone. But not everyone could have remained unharmed by it.”

Indeed, if you must seek advice on how to live life, have a look at The Daily Stoic website; just ten minutes of study a day will turn your attitude around, as it did mine. There are even a few good self-help books — The Power Of Now, Feel The Fear And Do it Anyway — which see the world clearly as the big bad beautiful thing it is, and advise extreme boldness in engagement with it.

If you want to live your one and only life in a self-soothing fashion, go ahead. But don’t be surprised when you’re on your deathbed with only half a life to look back on. Because fortune favours the tough — and has a habit of swerving the tender.

To circumvent this, they projected all that patriotic feeling, all that flag-waving and ceremony and ritual, onto one family — who weren’t even British originally. So instead of days commemorating national independence, or great military victories against rivals, which would all feel a bit foreign and vulgar, they celebrated the birthdays, weddings and funerals of this one family, who they both venerated and sort of tormented (their loutish media even hounded a princess to her death). What a strange country.

It’s testimony to the British monarchy’s continual survival and relative strength that the decision of an Oxford College common room to take down the portrait of the Queen feels significant.

While it’s sad on the one hand, it also seems strange and archaic that they even had a picture of the Queen in the first place. It would be like finding out that real-life prison crime lords had pictures of Her Majesty in their cells, like Noel Coward in The Italian Job. Or that they were still playing the national anthem before gigs, as in the Beatles’ day. A cultural revolution has swept the country, and the monarchy remains the last vestige of the old order.

Despite our common disagreements over life at the top of Maslow’s pyramid, the monarchy has so far largely avoided entanglement in our culture wars, possessing a fairly impeccable record on race and espousing a more general British Niceness that covers most ranges of opinion. (It’s telling that the Queen’s removal was spearheaded by an American student, unironically protesting “colonialism”.) Yet that will start to change, and as we live through the final chapter of the second Elizabethan era, more trouble lies ahead for the Royals.

The monarchy’s great skill is to build a narrative, in particular to preserve the fiction that the nation is an extended family, with the Windsors as its representatives. Their life cycle is celebrated as the nation’s, their joy is our joy, their sorrow is the same as the blows and hardships we endure.

Royal weddings become a symbol of the nation’s hope and optimism, and the family’s most recent high point was the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Even I was rather surprised by how much I enjoyed the day, watching with four generations of in-laws; because modern life so unnaturally starves us of the endorphins produced by group activity, it can feel exhilarating when things are done together.

It even got me ruminating on the meaning of monarchy and its role within a hyper-social species such as ours, as well as the importance of ritual. Although in fairness, I had started drinking at 11am on a Friday, which might have had something to do with it.

Even in my area, one of those pleasant London inner suburbs where luxury beliefs are the norm, there was a pile of unsold Guardians the next day while all the copies of the Mail and Express had gone. (The only other time I’d seen that in Haringey was after the riots that summer, reflecting the most basic of human instincts – venerate the chief and protect the tribe from violence.)

More recently, we shared in the family’s sorrow at the funeral of Prince Philip, who would have turned 100 today. As well as his work with charities and the Duke of Edinburgh scheme, much of the funeral television coverage featured married couples who, like the Queen and Duke, had enjoyed or endured decades of marriage together, and so the royal union came to represent their own. The Royal Family’s suffering was theirs, just as their joy was, which is why Britain’s small band of eccentric republicans always have such a hard time not appearing mean-spirited.

Yet the royals are not ordinary people; indeed, in some strange way they are throwbacks to the pre-Christian world where the separation between divine and mortal was ambiguous. It’s well known that Prince Philip was worshipped as a god on one island, but as a reader on The Rest is History podcast pointed out, Philip was the closest modern equivalent to a hero from legend. Like Aeneas he had to flee his homeland following a war in the land of Ilium, and came to wander the sea like Odysseus; he fought heroically in war, was a great chariot racer (he was even a pilot) and married a foreign queen before achieving divine status.

This is Britain, though, and unlike the ancients we don’t like boasting about great deeds of war and renown. So he just became known as Phil the Greek who liked insulting foreigners.

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Philip, Prince of Nowhere

By Ed West

The thing is, we aren’t at all like these people — which is why the system works. Meritocracy is, to mangle Churchill’s famous quote, the worst system except all the others. It’s better we reward people for gaming the Oxbridge system or making a pile in finance rather than for their ancestor’s ability to swing a sword on horseback. Yet it also creates numerous problems of its own, some of which are eased by monarchy.

Chiefly, there is the quite serious problem of runaway status-anxiety, which manifests itself in all sorts of problems, ranging from mental health to over-spending to political radicalisation.

Royalty takes the pressure off. Prince William is roughly my age, but I am never going to compare myself to him, nor feel like a failure in comparison. In contrast, I might compare myself with that pillock from school or university who goes on to become far more successful than me.

Meritocracy also wears down the sense of noblesse oblige, the idea that elites have a duty to care for those less fortunate, and to feel humble and grateful. There are now almost no mechanisms for suppressing the ego and narcissism of the ruling class, and so the Royal Family are almost a freakish exception in this regard.

The rituals associated with monarchy may seem arcane and even absurd, but they provide a function in drawing prestige and splendour away from the powerful. The unchanging nature of ceremony removes the individual ego, and where people in power innovate, they also reflect their own glory. Tradition is about sublimating narcissism, why is why non-traditional ceremonies — secularised weddings or “naming ceremonies” — make everything about the individual.

The Blairite love of abandoning tradition was a symptom of an extreme lack of humility. When the boss changes the ancient dress-code he may be being nominally progressive, but he’s also asserting his dominance; the new rituals reflect the new lord’s worldview.

The Royal Family remain far more liked and respected than the people who would replace them, but that is the nature of modern democracy, a degrading popularity contest which inevitably leads us to feel contempt for those in charge, often quite rightly. It’s why more democracy is not always a good idea.

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Who destroyed Prince Harry?

By Ed West

There has, in recent years, been quite a bit of research showing the benefits of monarchy in raising social trust and even increasing economic growth. It partly explains why monarchies are associated with political stability, and account for seven of the 10 least corrupt nations on earth. If you were going to live in any country on earth and all you knew about this mystery place was whether it was a republic or monarchy, you’d obviously go for the latter. The worst outcome would be Saudi Arabia; in contrast the depredations possible under a president are limitless – Syria, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan… the list goes on. If you were to expand that test to the last 200 years, then the contrast only becomes more extreme.

Yet all these arguments are essentially utilitarian; that the monarchy has proved its “historical utilitarianism” just as with Chesterton’s Fence. Yet fences may still rot, and all ancient institutions, whether of monarchy, Church or nation itself, depend on some myth-making and targeted amnesia. Like Tinkerbell’s fairies, they only exist so long as people believe in them. If people still think the Church plays a useful role in social capital but don’t believe in the Resurrection, the Church will still die; likewise, with the monarchy.

Few people believe the coronation represents God’s choosing of the monarch, and not that many even care about the national church she leads, but more importantly, few really buy into the myth of their being the nation’s guardians, or that their sovereignty and higher status is somehow natural or justified. Perhaps more seriously still, the 2019 proroguing controversy removed any doubt that the monarch is utterly powerless. The idea that Her Majesty was a check on overmighty politicians may have been a myth, but it was one we all pretended to believe in.

Without that shared belief, the monarchy lacks the moral support it needs to face some rough years ahead, not just with the scandal of Prince Andrew, the fall-out with Meghan and Harry, and the damage to the next king from The Crown. It is quite seriously unpopular with younger people, an age divide that, like many things, is relatively recent.

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The Royal Family always wins

By Will Lloyd

Despite all this, the Royal Family is in ways well-suited to 21^st century politics, in particular the recent fact of multiculturalism. Monarchies are historically more tolerant, and Daniel Finkelstein’s grandmother’s saying, “While the Queen is safe in Buckingham Palace, we are safe in Hendon Central”, reflects a real historical truth.

The polarisation problem, too, favours our Queen. The monarchist argument used to be that without her, we’d get President Blair, but more likely Britain would have a presidential figurehead – like in other former monarchies such as Germany, Austria and Ireland – and it would be someone like David Attenborough.

Yet whether even Attenborough qualifies anymore for that role, modern societies don’t produce “national darlings” anymore, neutral figures beloved by the collective nation. Almost no public figure is apolitical today, just as few areas of life are apolitical, because we are going through something akin to a reformation.

That is bad news for the royals, since monarchies have usually found great religious divides difficult because, from the time of the Emperor Justinian onwards, they have sought to be neutral yet often ended up antagonising everyone. At some point the House of Windsor will need to decide on which side of this cultural divide it stands, because a more general British Niceness won’t do anymore. Their predecessors the Stuarts faced the same question – and they chose the losing side.

The first belonged, to Piers Morgan, who was forced to quit Good Morning Britain after six successful if noisy years for daring to express disbelief at a number of the Duchess’s claims. The claiming of the second scalp, however, has attracted far less attention — even though it serves as an equally, if not more, damning parable for our times…

Do facts still matter? On the face of it, that question appears to have a straightforward answer: of course facts matter; fact-checking is a divine skill and the best defence we have against so-called “fake news”. But in today’s troubled climate, you’re increasingly likely to be given an altogether different response: “Facts? Why are you demanding facts. Don’t be racist.”

Just ask Ian Murray, who until this week was the executive director of the Society of Editors, but now finds himself jobless. The Society attempts, in its own words, to “fight for media freedom”. But as Mr Murray (no relation) has discovered, media freedom is just as elastic as almost every other freedom in this freedom-less age.

In this regard, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s interview with Oprah Winfrey was something of a litmus test. In a free society, people would be able to watch it and draw a number different, but acceptable, conclusions. In an unfree society, however, only one permissible opinion would be allowed. If the past days have taught us anything, then surely it is clear that we have failed this test. The second reality has been borne out, and, as a result, Mr Murray has been forced to end his career.

One of the most disturbing accusations levelled by both Harry and Meghan during their interview concerned the toxicity of the British press, in particular the British tabloids. But a claim does not become true simply because a Duke or Duchess says it. Indeed, it is striking that while the comments made by the Sussexes on the Royal Family have been heavily scrutinised in recent days, their accusations against the British press have managed to slide by, accepted as though they were simply fact.

It didn’t matter that their claims — presented, it should be noted, more as assertions — were particularly egregious: that the reason why Meghan and Harry had come in for criticism from the British press was because Meghan identifies as black, thus implying that the British media is racist.

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How Meghan won

By Douglas Murray

In the face of such damning charges, it is striking that much of the media has chosen to keep its head down; the Guardian proved a notable exception, predictably endorsing the Sussexes’s worldview. As for the others, I suspect their silence come from a simple and understandable desire not to get in the line of fire.

In the end, the only person brave enough to stand up for Britain’s newspapers turned out to be the since-departed executive director of the Society of Editors. In a statement issued after the Sussexes’s interview, he rightly pointed out that the British press “is not bigoted and will not be swayed from its vital role holding the rich and powerful to account”. It continued: “It is not acceptable for the Duke and Duchess to make such claims without providing any supporting evidence.”

In itself, such a statement should have been unremarkable. But as the fall-out from the past few days has shown, demanding “supporting evidence” can you turn you into a pariah.

In this instance, I suspect that’s probably because when the Sussexes and their supporters talk about racism towards Meghan, genuine examples are never forthcoming. For example, at one point during the interview, Oprah launched into a monologue detailing how Meghan “became the target of unrelenting, pervasive attacks” when she joined the royal family.

To illustrate her point, a selection of allegedly racist headlines from British newspapers appeared on screen. Pretty damning stuff, you might think. Except for the fact that a significant proportion of the headlines were taken completely out of context. More than a third of the articles shown during the interview were from American and Australian publications. And in the case one of the most egregious headlines — “Meghan’s seed will taint our Royal Family” — Oprah failed to mention that the purpose of the news story was actually to expose racist comments made by a model.

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Why is the woke mob so scared?

By Douglas Murray

Point this out to the Sussexes, though, and no doubt they’ll respond that their treatment has still been particularly unpleasant. But such a claim wrongly assumes that other members of the Royal Family have managed to avoid intrusive or negative coverage from the media; or that, when they have, it hasn’t amounted to much. When Meghan, in her Oprah interview, acknowledged that the Duchess of Cambridge had been branded “Waity Katie” by the media for waiting so long for Prince William to propose to her, it was telling that she went on to conclude, with Oprah’s encouragement, that Kate’s unpleasant experience didn’t compare to her own.

As it happens, I find it rather telling that Meghan chose this particular example to illustrate media intrusion into Kate’s life. For when it comes to intrusion, is there anything more intrusive than the publication of photos, in the French press, of the Duchess of Cambridge topless? Unpleasant as it may be, it’s the simple truth that the world’s press is intensely interested in every aspect of the Royal family, and that they are interested in it because their readers — the public — want them to be.

That’s why Ian Murray was entirely right, as the head of a body representing editors, to push back against the unsubstantiated claims made by the Sussexes; to say that if high-profile figures such as Harry and Meghan are going to accuse the press of singling them out, let alone being racist in the process, then they should show proof.

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In a reasonable age that would be a reasonable demand. And that was the only mistake Murray made: forgetting that this age is far from reasonable. The Society of Editors was soon targeted by the usual online activists and Murray was forced to resign, announcing that he had to “take the blame” for his initial statement. “While I do not agree the society’s statement was in any way intended to defend racism, I accept it could have been much clearer in its condemnation of bigotry and has clearly caused upset,” he said.

A new statement from the Murray-less board made the necessary confession, acknowledging that there is “a lot of work to be done in the media to improve diversity and inclusion”. The society went on to promise that it “will reflect on the reaction our statement prompted and work towards being part of the solution.”

So another person finds themselves without a job and another institution bends towards the dogmatic orthodoxies of the time. There are ugly winds in the air. And with evidence and facts unable to save us, I fear Mr Murray’s scalp will not be the last.

“Your truth”. That phrase slipped off Oprah’s tongue with such ease during her interview with Meghan and Harry. But on this apparently simple construction hangs a question that has divided us with an explosion of animosity: how many truths can there be?

With the new world once again pitted against the old, I find myself reminded of the words of another Royal confidante, those of Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “To thine own self be true,” he advised his son. This sentiment seems to encapsulate so much of what is philosophically at stake in this interview, with the Prince and the Princess expressing “their truth”, a truth that was as much a function of the need to be true to who they are, as it was a reference to objective reality.

Put aside for one moment the on-going debate about their claims concerning Royal racism, for it seems to me that there is a troubling tension between two meanings of truth going on here: being true to yourself, something we have come to call authenticity, and truth as an empirical statement of fact.

The former was largely conceived by Rousseau and is often known as “expressivism” — the idea that, as the philosopher Charles Taylor describes in his magisterial Sources of the Self, “the moral or spiritual order of things must come to us indexed to a personal vision.” And this is where we divide. For some their “personal vision” is a hallmark of truth; for others it is very much a reason to be suspicious of it.

Here, too, it’s worth returning to Hamlet — not least because it is impossible not to be struck by the parallels between its title character and Prince Harry. For Freud, Hamlet represented an archetypal example of the Oedipus complex: a kind of childhood compulsion where a son develops an unconscious sexual desire for his mother and a sense of rivalry with his father.

Joseph Schwartz, in his definitive history of psychoanalysis, Cassandra’s Daughter, sees this “sexualisation of the mother-son relationship” as “part of the dynamic of the Victorian patriarchal family”. He continues:

 “This family romance is dominated by an absent authoritarian father who, arriving home, asserts his own needs over his children’s by making overt or covert sexual demands on his wife. The wife, resentful of abandonment by her husband and of his authoritarian attitudes, lavishes attention on her son. And the son, perceiving rivalry for the mother’s affections expressed in sexual terms, responds in kind.”

It is hard to read these words and not be reminded of the relationship between Charles and Diana, a woman “resentful of abandonment by her husband and of his authoritarian attitudes [who] lavished attention on her son”.

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Britain should decolonize the Commonwealth

By Giles Fraser

If Freud has taught us anything, it is that we may not always be the best judges of who we really are, let alone what really drives us. That is the very point of the unconscious; we are run by forces that we do not always properly understand, which are often repressed, working away in the background without us being fully aware of them. And if this is the case, then the problem with “my truth” is not just that it can fail to describe objective reality, but — and this is crucial — that it may fail, just as much, to describe subjective reality too.

That is not to say whether we should or should not believe Meghan or Harry. Instead, Freud’s work simply demonstrates that phrases such as “my truth” are not always helpful, either objectively and subjectively. It presumes too quickly that there is little more to inner truth than simply what you feel. But as the psychoanalytic experience so often demonstrates, “my truth” also requires a kind of discipled critical vigilance — the sort of push-back provided by a skilled analyst.

All of us are complex creatures; we are often a mystery, even to ourselves. And being at the intersection of Royalty and celebrity no doubt makes one’s life confusing in ways that are unimaginable to most of us, especially given that both are objects of considerable projection. It cannot be a coincidence that the stories that Freud most associated with the Oedipus complex — Oedipus Rex and Hamlet — are stories about princes.

None of this would matter so much were it not for the fact that the “truth” expressed to Oprah has the capacity to undermine one of the constitutional foundations of this country. It is one thing to sit on a couch in front of a therapist and work out your issues in private. I have done so myself and recommend it.

It is quite another to sit in front of millions of people, giving a half-interview, half-therapy session conducted by an unchallenging friend and neighbour, and for others to take this on face value. The stakes are far too high to allow “my truth” to go unchallenged. At the end of Hamlet, most of the protagonists lie dead; the court in ruins. “To thine own self be true” may have a nice ring to it. But it remains very poor advice.

Alas, the story did not have a fairytale ending. Sarah died, aged just 40, from tuberculosis in 1880 after travelling to Madeira to convalesce, Victoria by now queen of much of Africa.

It was not so unusual for the Queen of the Whites to play host to an African girl. As ruler and empress of much of the globe, Victoria saw herself as the benevolent ruler of a family of nations, of all shades of humanity; at the same time, millions of her subjects at home lived in abject poverty, and when Miss Davies was growing up barely 1.5m could vote out of a population 20 times that.

Most American men, in contrast, could choose their head of state, thanks to the revolution that had ousted Victoria’s grandfather. The creation of Jefferson, Hamilton and the other Founding Fathers had been a tremendous success, not just in terms of wealth and power but in fulfilling its high-minded hope that all men might be able to pursue happiness. President Andrew Jackson was raised in the Waxhaws, a backcountry region of the Carolinas, the son of Irish immigrants, and had gone on to the White House; Abraham Lincoln grew up in a log cabin and reached the very top.

Yet Sarah Davies could never have dreamed of dining in the White House. Although there had been black guests since the time of Lincoln, the first African-American to be invited to have dinner at the president’s home was Booker T Washington – in 1901. Even then, it caused such anger that it wouldn’t be repeated for decades.

Such a visit would have raised few eyebrows in Britain, where Queen Victoria’s circle hosted people from various backgrounds, as did those of her successors; George V, in particular, had views on race that were unusually liberal for the time. The House of Windsor, whatever their other, many faults, have always stood for what most regard as basically decency on the subject — which is why perhaps the most damaging revelation in yesterday’s Oprah Winfrey interview was Meghan Markle’s suggestion that Harry had heard “there were concerns and conversations about how dark [Archie’s] skin might be”. The Oprah interview has placed race at the heart of the royal fall-out, and, as a result, the British Royal Family has been cancelled by American progressives. The Windsor family fall-out has, unfortunately, become part of The Discourse.

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By Kat Rosenfield

Obviously the royal family should be cancelled by progressives; hereditary monarchy is, after all, a very reactionary concept. Americans cancelled the monarchy in 1776. Yet monarchies have also historically been, paradoxically, more racially tolerant than republics.

The America that rebelled against Victoria’s grandfather came to be both more egalitarian and at the same time more racially conscious and prejudiced than Britain; it developed a “colour bar” and “one-drop rule”, ideas designed to separate races into a hierarchy (although these ideas were far more pronounced in the South). Most African-Americans, when given the chance, sided with Britain in 1776, as did pretty much every Native American, because they rightly understood that as racial outsiders they were better off with a monarch ruling an empire, rather than an egalitarian republic from which they were excluded.

But these American ideas about race did not develop back in Europe; they didn’t even develop in some other parts of the Americas. Modern academia, largely colonised by the American narrative, is obsessed with ideas of “whiteness” and race even though they make little sense in the context of pre-20^th century British and European history. At the end of George III’s reign, life expectancy among slaves in Trinidad was 17. For the working class in Preston it was 18, while in Liverpool it was 16. What on earth does “white privilege” mean in the context of 19^th century Lancashire? What does it even mean in 21^st century Lancashire?

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Is Prince Harry the new Edward VIII?

By Tanya Gold

It’s an American concept, fitting the fact that Americans historically had far more antagonistic views about race. During the Second World War the behaviour of British people towards black soldiers — and the behaviour of British women in particular — shocked US soldiers stationed here. Indeed, it was the objections of US servicemen to sharing a hotel with a black man that led to British courts reaffirming that segregation did not and could not exist in England.

That racial attitudes in Britain were not as harsh as those in America partly reflected demography — there just weren’t many black people until the 1950s — but they were also the product of the hierarchical, class-bound nature of British society. In contrast to the awesome ascent of Jackson and Lincoln, Britain didn’t have a working-class MP until (arguably) 1874, 30 years after a mixed-race man of African heritage first sat in the Commons. The UK didn’t have a working-class prime minister until 1924. No one born in a Cornish mining community could have risen to the top in Victorian England. They certainly wouldn’t have been invited to dine with the Queen.

In Britain class differences were far more important than race and were often so highly formalised as to resemble segregation. When Blackburn Rover’s Jimmy Forrest became the first professional — i.e. working-class — footballer to play for England, he had to wear a different coloured shirt to his gentleman team mates. “Professional” players also had to have separate dressing rooms. That kind of open snobbery has always been anathema to the US, even if it had its own class system and elite schools.

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The fantasy of English freedom

By Ed West

In contrast, various Indian cricketers played for England in the Victorian and pre-war period, five of whom had princely titles, men such as Iftikhar Ali Khan, the 8th Nawab of Pataudi. Of course, there was racial prejudice. Had the Nawab of Pataudi turned up in a Victorian pub, he might have been treated as an outsider in a way that Jimmy Forrest wouldn’t have been. But among important people who mattered, there would have been little doubt who came further up the pecking order.

Even monarchy itself is by nature multi-racial; whether or not George III’s wife Queen Charlotte really had African ancestry, royalty has always been mixed, since the earliest “peace-weaver” princesses of the early middle ages. Yet Harry and Meghan’s marriage was treated by an America-brained press like it was an earth-shattering event, when hardly anyone cared about the racial angle, another dog that didn’t bark for the media. And now, thanks to our own Americanised discourse, we’re forced to see everything through the narrative of race rather than the more salient issue of class — even the tragic self-destruction of a family the Americans decided a long time ago they wanted rid of.

Occasionally people will suggest that those of us concerned about the dogmas of our age are tilting at windmills. “Intersectionality”, they say, is something that is only really understood and talked about on a few American university campuses. The “critical race theorists” do not dominate anything much beyond the unreadable journals that they like to play with — and advocates of the “privilege” hierarchy as the best tool to understand human existence have not caught on much beyond their rarefied university circles. There are any number of reproaches to such a complacent viewpont, but it is certainly an illustration of how far beyond rarefied circles these ideas have actually reached that they have penetrated even the head of Prince Harry.

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By Sam Leith

It is no special slur against the second son of the Prince of Wales to point out that nobody would have placed him as a theorist of any kind until this recent stage in his life. A year ago, I noted the oddity of the Queen’s grandson lecturing people about racism through the medium of Vogue magazine. After all, why should critical race theory be of any interest to readers of the fashion magazine, other than the fact that Vogue — like GQ and a number of similarly vapid-turned-woke magazines — has fallen for the same cultural moment that has so swept through the mind of Prince Harry.

In Vogue a year ago, the Prince could be found saying that unconscious bias was “Something which so many people don’t understand. If you go up to someone and say ‘what you’ve just said, or the way that you’ve behaved, is racist’ — they’ll turn around and say, ‘I’m not a racist’. I’m not saying that you’re a racist. I’m just saying that your unconscious bias is proving that, because of the way that you’ve been brought up, the environment you’ve been brought up in, suggests that you have this point of view — unconscious point of view — where naturally you will look at someone in a different way.”

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By Douglas Murray

Yet, as I pointed out back then, a giant train-wreck was awaiting Prince Harry and his Duchess, because at some point the Sussexes would have to contend with the question of privilege, a central plank of social justice theory in which everyone is expected to acknowledge their advantages, be it of race, sexuality, gender or upbringing (generally in that order).

It is possible that when he set off along the path, Prince Harry did not realise that this demand to “check his privilege” awaited him, and that it would be hard for him to play this particular game, considering his grandmother is the Queen of England.

But in his latest media announcement it appears that he has found what he and his spouse may imagine to be a way around the problem — to portray the Prince not as a victim of privilege but as a victim of oppression.

In their newly released video the influencer couple sit on a bench in the garden of one of their homes and deliver a not-remotely-subtle call to the US electorate to vote for Joe Biden as their next president. In response Donald Trump, asked about the video the following day, admitted that he was not a fan of the Duchess and wished Harry a lot of luck “because he’s going to need it”.

One might question whether it’s appropriate for a British prince to advise Americans on who to vote for, and whether it’s any of his business; after all, the British royal family has not played a huge part in US politics since Harry’s illustrious ancestor George III and his rather ill-fated intervention. Indeed British interference in American politics has a somewhat mixed record, the Guardian’s Clark County fiasco of 2000 famously backfiring.

The video was not explicit in endorsing a candidate but neither was it especially cryptic. In the interview, the Duchess made the striking and original observation that the forthcoming election might be the most important election of our lifetimes, and that it was therefore crucial that everybody used their right to vote.

But the couple also talked about the need to “reject hate speech”, and in every way making it clear that the unspoken conclusion of their observations was at no stage likely to be: “And that is why we are asking you to give President Trump four more years.”

It was in this moment that the Duchess and her scriptwriters gave Harry the line that would surely win over any members of the US electorate unsure as to whether they want to receive voting advice from British royalty. For Harry pointed out that, sadly, he was not able to vote in the forthcoming election, going on to explain that “many of you may not know that I haven’t been able to vote in the UK my entire life”.

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Harry and Meghan's embarrassing predicament

By Douglas Murray

It is indeed unlikely that many American citizens are aware of the tradition that requires members of the British Royal Family to refrain from voting in elections. But whether or not others were aware of the precise voting arrangements of relatively minor members of the Royal Family, in his statement there was an undisguised attempt to gain pity — that pity and identification as an underdog that is so crucial if you are to survive in the social justice hierarchy.

If the American public (and the anti-Trump American public in particular) thought they had been disenfranchised over the last four years, imagine if they had been in the slippers of Harry of Wales, had walked his shoes for a mile? He has been disenfranchised his entire life, all of it spent in a deeply personal form of apartheid.

The entire British state had conspired to ensure that Harry — for no reason at all, other than by dint of being a Prince — had never enjoyed the right of the common man to vote for David Cameron or Ed Miliband. I imagine that many Americans watching this message were not just surprised but horrified to discover this fresh human rights abuse — perhaps a newly freed-up Amal Clooney should investigate the case?

It is a small detail, but a telling one. Since they have decided to give up the life of duty that being working members of the Royal Family entails, and swapped this for a life as celebrities and influencers with a social justice agenda, the Sussexes are now in the process of having to square an impossible circle.

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By Mary Harrington

The Duchess clearly feels that the couple have something special that they can give to the world, that through their “fresh content” and sub-Obama style urgings they will be able to do some good as well as make some cash.

But here lies a problem, in that the Sussexes are a highly atypical couple — they do not have an origin story of struggle. The pair cannot claim that they are just like everybody else. They have great wealth and some beauty, and while one of them — helped in no small part by those looks — can claim to have made her own way, the person who sent the couple into orbit was born into the most privileged family on the planet. People like, and are interested in, the Royal Family not because they have struggled like them, but because they see them as different, elevated, dedicated to a life of service for an older way of life.

Cut loose, Harry and Meghan now have to present themselves as somehow similar to everybody else — more relatable, more normal. Because that is a hard thing to do, and obviously disingenuous, so they must talk up any and all “struggles” that they have gone through, such as the barbaric refusal to allow Harry the franchise, in order to more greatly resemble the public they would so like to influence. This may work — but I very much doubt it.

Social justice theory, critical race theory and all the other theories of power and privilege are highly unforgiving doctrines, and try as they might the Sussexes will not be able to reconcile the contradiction between their own lives and the ideology they have chosen. They are playing a game they cannot possibly win. We may pity the Sussexes — but not for the reasons that they imagine we should.

Hypocrisy is the easiest vice to diagnose because one only has to hold one’s rhetorical opponents to their standards and need not articulate one’s own. If you charge me with a sin, moreover, but then prove to have committed it yourself, your shame spares me the burden of defending myself.

This is not to claim that hypocrisy has no immoral implications. It is almost inevitably an act of deception — and a demand that others meet standards one is either unwilling or incapable of meeting. All of us are hypocrites, to some extent, inasmuch as it is easier to say something than do it, but that does not make it right.

Yet I think in most cases it is one of the lesser vices. Consider two men: John and Joe. John is a habitual and callous cheat with no pretensions to virtue and Joe is a religious family man who once betrayed his wife. I think most of us would agree that John’s behaviour is more condemnable — and that Joe’s worst sin was cheating and not hypocrisy. Joe might be more satisfying to condemn, because dragging the righteous from their perch has a thrill which denouncing the lowly does not, but that isn’t quite the same thing.

People on the Right love to talk about hypocrisy, in its undeniable and contentious forms. Check out any Right-wing website and you will find article after article about hypocrisy — and, more specifically, staggering hypocrisy. The “staggering hypocrisy” of the BBC. The “staggering hypocrisy” of Jean-Claude Juncker. The “staggering hypocrisy” of Labour.

But then I love to criticise hypocrisy as well. On the Right, our red meat is an environmentalist who takes a plane, or an advocate of socialism with a second home, or a male feminist who gets handsy after dark. Progressives idealists and scolds who cannot, or will not, live up to their own lofty ideals are entertaining archetypes, who make for good copy, but there are limits to this kind of rhetorical manoeuvre.

First, instances of “hypocrisy” can be nothing of the kind. For example, this year Dan Hodges of the Mail declared that Labour politicians “have to stop being a bunch of holier-than-though, self-serving hypocrites”. What makes them hypocrites? Hodges wrote: “Two years ago, Corbyn announced he was launching a campaign to oppose plans for a range of new grammar schools, roundly endorsed by his Shadow Cabinet. Corbyn attended Haberdashers’ Adams Grammar School in Shropshire. Sir Keir attended Reigate Grammar School in Surrey.”

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Why American lives matter most

By Ben Sixsmith

How is this hypocrisy? What are Corbyn and Starmer meant to do, go back in time and insist on their parents sending them to different schools? Left-wingers who rail against private schools while sending their own kids to them can be accused of hypocrisy, perhaps, but I don’t think we can hold Corbyn and Starmer’s education against them.

A classic example of misplaced hypocrisy-hunting came when Tory MP-cum-“Never Trump” fanatic Louise Mensch scoffed on Have I Got News for You about “Occupy” protestors who had iPhones and bought drinks at Starbucks, prompting Ian Hislop to ask whether one needs to advocate a return to the Stone Age to oppose state cuts. One must be careful that one’s charges of hypocrisy are not just hymns for the choir, intended to affirm Right-wing impressions of coddled progressives without illuminating the smallest substantive insight.

Another weakness with charges of hypocrisy is that using someone’s failure to uphold their standards as a means of discrediting those standards is a classic example of the ad hominem fallacy, or, in British English terms, playing the man and not the ball. I don’t want to be too much of a debate nerd. Such accusations can reveal some things about those standards — not least that they are hard to keep. But it does not prove that they are wrong to hold.

If Harry and Meghan use private jets while handwringing about climate change, for example, it might say something about Harry and Meghan but it says nothing about climate change. If Neil Ferguson meets his girlfriend while in lockdown it might say something about Neil Ferguson but it says nothing about epidemiology. If I tell people smoking is dangerous but indulge in a quiet cigarette behind closed doors, that does not mean tobacco is a health product.

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Where are Britain's conservative philosophers?

By Ben Sixsmith

The ubiquity of these charges would be more understandable if they were effective. The biggest problem with Right-wing hypocrophobia, however, is that it acts as a cheap and toothless substitute for explicating and defending principles and policies. When Gary Lineker attacked people who oppose Britain accepting immigrants who illegally travel across the English Channel, for example, MP Lee Anderson called him a hypocrite for not accepting immigrants into his own home. Lineker then took the wind out his sails by inviting migrants to, yes, live in his home.

To be fair to Anderson, it is relatively easy for Lineker to say this when he has a mansion. Yet it is still lazy and weak to hunt for examples of personal inconsistency when he could have mentioned how accepting such immigrants encourages dangerous, illegal crossings, enables people smugglers, runs the risk of Britain accepting hostile actors, strains public resources and makes a farce out of British border control. Perhaps the latter would have made for a more strenuous and controversial argument but it would have been more honest and more effective — that is, to a conservative illegal immigration in itself is a bad thing, whatever the personal conduct of those advocating for it.

Right-wingers often argue, correctly, that Left-wingers use charges of personal bigotry as a means of avoiding difficult debates. Yet conservatives often do the same with the charges of personal inconsistency. The difference is that bigotry is a powerful charge, while inconsistency has fewer such damning connotations.

Again, this does not mean that charges of hypocrisy are worthless. For example, the enthusiasm with which many leftists greeted Black Lives Matter protests in the midst of lockdowns they had tended to ferociously support might not have proven anything about coronavirus but it was a powerful indictment of their priorities. Yet the Right should recognise their limits, since their opponents use charges of hypocrisy too. Long before the #metoo’d male feminist, the Christian moralist with a colourful sex life, for example, has been a classic archetype, as Jerry Falwell Jr. recently reminded us.

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By Niall Gooch

Back-and-forth accusations of inconsistency have a lot to do with the decline of a shared moral language. In her book Ordinary Vices, Judith Shklar wrote: “This is the normal character of political discourse between irreconcilable ideological opponents… the contempt for hypocrisy is the only common ground that remains, and that is what renders these accusations so effective.”

Leftists, however, are far less reliant on accusations of hypocrisy, preferring charges of cruelty, prejudice and intolerance. This is because progressive values are more fashionable than conservative principles, so leftists have fewer qualms about articulating their own worldview.

This makes it more understandable that Right-wingers hope their opponents will hang themselves with their own cord. But it can also be tedious and ineffectual. It allows progressives to lead the conversation — with their values front and centre, even when they are being criticised — and reduces conservatives to the role of anklebiters. One should have enough pride in one’s own beliefs not to spend all of one’s time holding others to theirs. I mean, if your opponents lived with scrupulous consistency, would you have to admit that they were right all along?