The Vice President has responded by denying he was talking about us, calling the media “hysterical”. History tends to suggest that this will not calm things down. With US tariffs hanging in the balance — not to mention World War III — a distraction must be found to subdue the escalating dynamic. Step forward, Netflix’s With Love, Meghan. There could be no better time for the Duchess of Sussex’s “tips and tricks” on how to become a Californian domestic goddess to finally hit our screens.

In Violence and the Sacred, René Girard argued that when two sides get locked into an apparently intractable feud, unity can only be restored by finding a scapegoat onto which to load the mutual animus by proxy. But not just any “surrogate victim” will do: “all victims [must]… bear a certain resemblance to the object they replace”. To reestablish transatlantic alliances, then, ideally we need a sacrificial object who seems quite annoyingly American (to us), but also quite annoyingly British (to them). And who better than a barefoot Meghan Sussex? Rubbing pink Himalayan salt into British economic wounds, she talks about being “defined by growth” — but also seems to have a not-very-Californian addiction to bacon.

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The ostensible idea of the new show is educational. The Duchess will tell viewers how to become better hostesses by “elevating the ordinary”. This roughly translates as fiddling about with edible flowers and sticking labels on everything, written in elegant calligraphy. She wafts around an enormous Californian garden saturated with so much color that sunlight-starved British retinas can barely cope, gasping at heirloom tomatoes and inhaling various scents through delicately flared nostrils. Then she pads into someone else’s well-appointed kitchen, chops a few things up with a tiny knife, and produces aphorisms such as “rosemary is nice and grounding” and “the brightness of citrus helps so many things”.

She seems extremely keen on managing people’s “experiences”. When someone comes to visit, she wants to give them “a guest experience”; when people drop kids off at a party for Archie or Lili, she wants to give them a “parent experience”. Arranging chopped fruit on a board to resemble a rainbow, she begins with the strawberries, but generously gives the viewer permission to do “whatever feels right for you”. The mantra “Love is in the details!” is uttered several times. Sometimes it’s with a slight air of passive-aggression, prompting the cynical viewer to imagine terrible rows with Harry when he forgets to bring her morning cup of tea.

So far, so stereotypically Yank; but there are weird digressions from the template here too. As I watched, I started to think her time in Blighty had left her with more than a taste for our dry cured pork products and a trauma response to adverts for The Crown. Incredibly for an American showbiz type, she can’t actually pull off all the positivity and quasi-sincerity; she comes across as too self-conscious, and her energy too low. It’s almost as if she is one of us.

The first two episodes demonstrate this most starkly. In the first, her make-up artist and gay BFF comes to visit and she tries very hard to give him a guest experience. The repartee between them is turgid and halting, his gestures are nervous, and they both seem like introverts, dying inside. At one point, he rebukes her for assuming he has a counter in his tiny New York kitchen; at another, he looks at the stunning Montecito mountains and says the quiet part out loud: “I feel like this is all fake.” Hovering in the background, laughing and taunting the dead air between them, are the ghosts of Will and Grace. At times it feels as if she would rather be communicating entirely with labels.

But this is as nothing to the awkwardness between Meghan and fellow celeb “toddler mom” Mindy Kaling in the next episode. The gimmick is that they pretend to host a kids’ party together, minus the leavening presence of any actual children. Over the course of 40 minutes, Kaling’s natural perkiness and gifts for comic timing are slowly crushed into the black hole of Meghan’s earnestness. “I’m so glad you’re here, it’s going to be fun,” our hostess-with-the-mostess says near the beginning, a quick smile reaching neither eyes nor voice. By the end, Kaling is having to conjure up enthusiasm at the world’s least exciting party bags — mini gardening tools, seeds, and compostable pots; not a Haribo in sight — and Meghan, gazing off into the middle distance, is trying to imagine what would be happening at their fake party if there were real people present. “The kids are enjoying it, and then as the kids run off to play, at least the adults still feel they have had an experience too.” “Yes, which is what these are for,” says Kaling, gazing gratefully at her peach bellini.

It’s a mystery why the series starts with these shockers, because the following episodes are a lot better. One can only assume some high-up at Netflix decided this could only succeed as a hate-watch and so frontloaded the cringe. In later ones, our impeccably clad protagonist hosts close girlfriends on various confected pretexts — a Mahjong night, a beauty session — with whom she is much more at ease. The warmth and affection between them look genuine, and especially after a drink or three — more evidence of the secret British heart beating underneath the beige knitwear.

It is at moments like this that the series comes closest to managing what it was presumably always supposed to be: a feast for envious female eyes. It certainly isn’t a cooking show; there’s not even the vaguest pretence at offering recipes. “Who wouldn’t want this?” Meghan asks us as she surveys her bountiful garden, summing up the attitude she secretly hopes onlookers will take to take every bit of her gorgeous life. When she says she wants to show those living “in a little flat in London or small apartment in the city” that they too can have “some small piece of this”, she probably means: why not try making mint tea in a tannin-stained mug to the sound of traffic; or cut up some puny strawberries on a scarred old chopping board, so your toddler can turn up her nose, make sick noises, and chuck them at the cat? That way, you can gain even more clarity about by how utterly unlike your life is to Meghan’s serene and beautiful one.

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But the thing is, it doesn’t work. Alongside his work on scapegoating, Girard is now best known for his theory of “mimetic desire”. He thinks wanting something is just coveting whatever others already have, with no independent appraisal of its value. Most or even all human conflict stems from robotic, envious grasping at what other people want, allegedly. Peter Thiel is a big Girardian, as is Vance, or so they say. I’ve always thought the theory was far too simple. Blatant thirst-trap programmes such as With Love, Meghan are its reductio ad absurdum.

Of course, it’s true that desires can be generated via exposure to others’ desires. Wanting to try what others are already enjoying is a reasonably efficient heuristic, based on the assumption there is something genuinely enjoyable there that I might like too. But it has a limit: just ask toddlers, nonplussed by parental rhapsodising about strawberries, and unswayed by the preferences of peers. Adults, too, have minds of their own, at least sometimes; which explains why populist politicians such as Trump and Vance try to work out what those minds want, then give it to them. If anything, progressives seem more Girardian in spirit, assuming that if policies are presented with enough desirable surface glitter by celebs and influencers, our magpie minds will get onboard with the trend.

But sometimes, the more it seems someone wants you to want something, the easier it is to resist. In With Love, Meghan’s case, the desperation is palpable and it’s counterproductive. The only things worth envying in her life are the odd things here and there that seem real and unforced: her friendships, her love for family and dogs, her appreciation of nature. All the rest — the Le Creuset, the crystal glasses, the perfect blue sky, the irritatingly upbeat music — left me happier than ever with my food-spattered compost bin, my dishwasher-scratched glassware, and the iron-grey English sky. As the woman herself might say, it turns out that my viewing experience has been defined by growth.

Nothing quite boils the blood of middle-aged men more than the departure of the Duke of Sussex for a better life out West, an upside-down Steinbeck protagonist. Most will claim to be enraged by the duke’s abandonment of duty or some such sniffy notion, but we all know that his great crime — greater even than that suggestion that his wife once made the sainted Princess of Wales cry over bridesmaid dresses — is self-involvement. His 2021 interview with Oprah alongside his wife Meghan confirmed our most sickening fears: that the toxic creed of “speaking your truth” had become irreversibly lodged in good old Harry Windsor’s brain.

Despite having two of the most unpopular qualities in British culture — he is, after all, a ginger posho — Harry was always respected among the bulk of the public (who, we must remember, regard the royal family with nothing more and nothing less than detached, bemused affection). He was the light relief to William’s sombre nobility, the cheeky spare who winked at Noughties lad culture and seemed to enjoy his privilege rather than wince at it, frolicking around in states of controversial dress (or undress) and injecting a sense of normality — fun, even — into a unit which had been so wracked by tragedy and, worse, off-putting stuffiness.

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But his capture by millennial therapy culture signalled the death of this happy-go-lucky persona. For those who once grinned that Harry was a “rum lad”, this was a personal affront precisely because of the loss of that pleasing irony, the sauciness and levity which turns even bluebloods into good drinking partners. When the winks stopped, we sobered up and realised we had been sat opposite a quiffed clown, made up to look like a cheeky friend. The slipping of that mask must have hurt — particularly among those middle-aged men, for whom any association with the touchy-feely bollocks of California is not just embarrassing, but offensive.

Prince Harry is, without a doubt, the most millennial millennial to ever have breathed. In his trajectory from cheeky chappy to earnest, self-regarding counselling patient lies the story of his generation’s downfall into cringe. Though he sees his transformation as a journey to his authentic self, it is crystal clear to everyone not living under the glass dome of American therapy-speak that he has simply journeyed from one posture to another, each freighted with unbearable artifice. For the first, 1,000 years of monarchy and the straitjacket of the British class system determined his route from genteel thicko (he left Eton with a B in art, a D in geography and a dash of notoriety for smoking weed) to Army to nice girlfriend called Cressida. Had he been a commoner, he would have ended up as a mid-level consultant in Putney, probably in the shadow of his barrister brother William. Raffles has lost a lot of custom since his enlightenment.

But this second, new persona — one which he hard-launched with the Oprah interview — is no less fated. With the awakening of West Coast elites comes a compulsory set of fixations, which I like to imagine their shrinks laugh about together at dinner parties. First and foremost, the wrongs of your parents, childhood trauma. Of course, Harry has more of this than most, and that is fair enough. But the endless remonstrations with your family, friends and “support network” — and a compulsion to cut them out for historical wrongs — is so distinctively millennial, and something which Abigail Shrier has rightly identified as having engendered complexes and neuroses in people who, for the most part, would have otherwise chugged along without a problem. Harry represents the great millennial task of seeing yourself as a kind of project, and the fallacy that it is not what you do, but how you feel about what you do, which matters.

His description of his teenaged family dynamics in Spare is so typical of the desire to frame ourselves as victims at the centre of a great conspiracy to hurt us, and to seek to “call out” and shame those responsible for the problems they have landed us with for the rest of our lives. It is a selfish culture of retribution, under the guise of “boundaries” and “transparency”, which has motivated Harry and countless other special children who have grown up to be the insufferable, childlike adults we all know. Harry has traded quiet, fair reconciliation for what amounts to a protracted family shouting match at a restaurant, the sulky teenager coming home from university armed with a new vocabulary and a clutch of crimes for which they’ll get justice now. I have been that person — most of us have — but to do so on the cusp of middle age, and via the bookshelves of Waterstones, is quite another matter. And in place of the grown-up realisation that your parents might have had no idea what they were doing either, he has trapped himself in a perpetual fantasy where he is a little Cinderello, describing Camilla as a “wicked stepmother” and his brother as an “arch-nemesis”.

So, childhood trauma? Check. Second millennial mania: a pathological obsession with privilege. If anyone should feel guilty about being a nepo baby, Harry should. But it has consumed his life, so that every sun-soaked, truth-living Californian minute is an act of repentance for chilly privilege in dreary old England. Harry and Meghan’s discussions around race are not the egregious sacrilege some newspapers claim them to be, nor is Meghan unjustified at all in complaining about the hideous, sexist coverage she has had to endure. An old colleague once described her, with great, sickly pride, as the “People’s Prostitute” — and the ire middle-aged men hold for her is definitely about something more than her being annoying. But what really sticks in the craw is not the Sussexes’ progressive values — which I find to be admirable, requiring considerable bravery in today’s media climate — but the damned hypocrisy of it all. It is difficult to be told to “check your privilege” by two Montecitan millionaires, and I fear they represent a very millennial crusade for justice: that is, one which privileges Instagrammable opportunities over substance. Besides, an obsession with one’s own privilege is really another opportunity to practise that terrible habit of the over-therapised — wanging on about ourselves.

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Overall, the Sussexes — and Harry, in particular (we cannot fault Meghan for being from wet-blanket Los Angeles) embody the great tragedy of the millennial: the generation which, faced with new, strange waves of social disharmony, decided to do nothing about it and think about themselves instead. Harry is a harbinger of the turning-inwards of youth culture, a preference for introspection over duty, and the self over the whole. He is, too, a model of the irreversible way American obsessions have crossed the Atlantic, and planted themselves in the formerly funny, sardonic and self-knowing English.

Whether social media’s preference for the mooningly internal over the societal persists for other generations is up for debate; my own has seized it for its brand of activism — for instance, on Gaza — which yet may prove as hollow as the Sussexes’ Archewell Foundation Instagramming. Harry’s millennial earnestness has gone down like a cup of warm Sancerre with Gen Z who are, on the whole, much funnier and much less cringe. And right behind us, Gen Alpha is ready to snatch the crown from their parents’ receding hairlines: Prince Louis will no doubt prove that we ain’t seen nothing yet.

One wonders how Harry’s own story will end. Commentators, admittedly licking their lips over any perceived cracks in the ducal union since day one, have speculated that all is not sunshine and reiki for H&M. Harry’s teenagery conduct has left him rather rootless, and if speculation proves correct that Meghan is having a much better time of it than he is, rubbing shoulders with Ellen DeGeneres and launching lifestyle brands, then the “pootling” prince might find himself up the proverbial creek. If an attempt to rejoin the fold is ever on the cards, it would be to reunite with a family who has grown eminently more loved by the public for each year of his absence. It is hard to imagine Harry ever commanding the affection that Kate does, nor the public ever tolerating a sepia-toned Enid Blyton-style video of the Sussex brood like the one released this week upon the princess’s announcement that she was now cancer-free.

At 40, you may not have to give up the lifelong task of exploring your terribly interesting self — but at the very least, you must have grown up. My own birthday being the day before Harry’s, I’ll raise a glass to the ghost of the cheeky duke: and to all the reformed Eton boys who came before him. Sadly, my special day will not involve the automatic inheritance of £8 million — but at least I’ve got all my hair.

Ever since the cancellation of the Sussexes’ Spotify deal, it’s been unclear what they’d pivot to next. A Kardashians-style reality show? A wellness empire, à la Gwyneth Paltrow? A high-profile divorce with all the sordid trimmings (and, for Harry, perhaps a sheepish return to the royal fold)? But this week, the next chapter of the Harry and Meghan saga was finally revealed: the pair has purchased the screen rights to Meet Me at the Lake, the New York Times bestselling romance novel by Carley Fortune, with the intention of turning the story into an original film for Netflix.

In many ways, this is a logical next step for the couple — especially for Meghan, given her pre-marriage Hollywood career. The path from acting to producing is well-trodden in the film industry, and has been a particular boon for mid-career actresses who want to pivot away from being in front of the camera. Mila Kunis, Reese Witherspoon and Margot Robbie have all become powerhouse producers, with a sixth sense for finding under-the-radar content that’s ripe for adaptation.

And yet, within minutes of the announcement dropping, a negative narrative had solidified. Far from an unremarkable or even savvy move in an industry one of them already had strong ties to, this development was presented as just another example of the couple’s desperation to stay relevant (“Harry and Meghan ‘buy film rights’ to romance novel to ‘revive media careers’”) as well as their eternal depthless narcissism (“Six ways the book ‘bought by Harry and Meghan’ mirrors events in their lives”). Us Weekly quoted an “insider” who seemed to confirm the personal connection: “The story really spoke to the Sussexes and has a lot of parallels to their own life. Harry and Meghan both think it’s the perfect choice.”

But even if we take at face value the alleged and much-discussed similarities between this book and their lives (and more on that in a minute), this all seems fine. I am no particular fan of the Meghan and Harry Post-Royal Tour de Victimhood, now in its third year, but the fact remains that they do have a Netflix deal, and they have to do something with it. Channelling their efforts into scripted media, for a platform full of ridiculous but compulsively watchable romantic fare, is as worthy a project as any. Unless you were hoping to see the couple’s relationship with Netflix implode in the same spectacular fashion as their Spotify one, it’s difficult to see the issue here, let alone be outraged by it.

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But there’s the rub. Weren’t some people clearly hoping for exactly this? At some point, the public sentiment surrounding the Sussexes curdled from curiosity into contempt, from critiquing their various choices to finding fault with every single one of them. This phenomenon was arguably visible long before their exit from the royal family — as Buzzfeed noted in 2020, the British press had, for years, been chastising Meghan and Harry for the very same behaviours that earned Will and Kate effusive praise. Looking back, it’s hard not to notice how thoroughly Meghan in particular was villainised. Everything she did, from touching her pregnant stomach (“Virtue signaling, as though the rest of us barren harridans deserve to burn alive in our cars”) to eating avocados (“a fruit linked to water shortages, illegal deforestation and all round general environmental devastation”) became evidence of her innately terrible character.

With Megxit, there was her ultra-memeable complaint that “not many people have asked if I’m ok”, and then came the Oprah interview, which was met with nothing short of fury. And while even the couple’s fiercest critics used to concede that whatever else you thought of the Sussexes, they did seem to be really and truly in love, that goodwill has lately vanished amid recent rumours of marital discord; now, every step Meghan takes outside her home without Harry is suspicious.

And when it comes to their latest project, every jab reads like the living embodiment of that joke about how, once you hate someone, even the most innocuous things they do begin to seem obscene and infuriating. (“Look at that bitch eating chicken. Why you eating chicken, bitch?!”)

Obviously, scapegoating people has been a part of the human experience since the dawn of time; obviously, there’s a certain amount of fun to be had in ganging up to hate on someone who has been deemed an acceptable target. But the feeding frenzy surrounding Harry and Meghan’s every move reveals the problem with this: not that it’s cruel (although it is that, too), but that being maximally uncharitable has a way of making you stupid.

Which brings us back to the much-hyped similarities between Meet Me at the Lake and the lives of the couple who want to adapt it, which have been foundational to the media coverage of this project, for better and for worse. Having actually read the book, I regret to say that these alleged parallels are absolute baloney, and that any attempt to make this into an example of Meghan and Harry’s desire to make everything about themselves is utterly contrived. The nadir of this is probably the allegation that one of the eerie commonalities between truth and fiction is, and I am not making this up, that the characters in the book at one point drink martinis together: “The Times previously reported that Harry’s favourite drink is a beer — while Meghan loves a martini or two.” Look at that bitch, drinking a martini. Why you drinking a martini, bitch?!

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At this point, it’s hard not to be at least a little sympathetic to Harry’s insistence that he and Meghan have been treated uniquely unfairly by the media, even if the specifics of his complaints tend to err on the side of absurdity. Yes, the couple often behave like a pair of entitled jackasses, but they’re also invariably assigned the role of jackass whether they’re acting like this or not. Of course, it’s easy to understand how a narrative like this becomes so ubiquitous. It’s not even sinister: the people writing these articles have a job to do, and that job is to explain why any of us should devote a single brain cell to the continued, stateside saga of the former Sussexes. And the best way to do that, in a media landscape fuelled by outrage, is to convince people that there’s something bigger happening here than a pair of rich people making a lucrative investment that is basically guaranteed to pay out.

But the truth is that, with the possible exception of its Toronto setting, Meet Me at the Lake has no real parallels to Meghan and Harry’s own meet cute. It’s just a well-written romance that effectively employs all the usual tropes and has inspired an avid fanbase, which pretty much guarantees that any movie based on the story becomes a massive success — any of which would be more than enough reason for a pair of savvy producers to snap it up.

For all these reasons, I expect that Meet Me at the Lake will do well onscreen. It has all the upmarket Hallmark vibes of The Notebook with the sass of a Nineties rom-com: a little sweet, a little spicy, and just enough will-they-or-won’t-they tension to make the ending satisfying. But as for what it says about Meghan and Harry, it’s nothing all that exciting, and it’s something we already knew: they may be a couple of dilettantes when it comes to podcasting or memoir or documentary, but they’ve always had a talent for knowing what a good love story looks like.

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.

Clarkson’s words are performative because they don’t just describe a violent assault; they are one. The ancient Greeks saw a closer relation than we do between verbal and physical aggression: the word “sarcasm” derives from “sarkazein”, a word of theirs meaning to tear the flesh. Verbal onslaughts can be a lot more wounding than physical punch-ups. To adapt the old adage, sticks and stones may break my bones but names will really hurt me.

Although her husband has just published a new memoir, Meghan has always been the focus of the latest moral panic to overtake the British middle classes. These spasms of the national psyche break out from time to time, perhaps according to some secret historical law. The last couple of decades of the 19th century were rife with a loathing of so-called decadence: anarchists, opium dens, sexy French novels, flamboyant aesthetes, most of which could be summarised in two sinister words: Oscar Wilde. (Wilde was also an Irish immigrant, which didn’t help.)

Much of this culture was recycled in the Sixties, though the hair got longer, women could (just about) rebel along with men, and the dope changed from opium to marijuana. Among the targets of the nation’s collective moral wrath were The Rolling Stones, a bunch of innocuous youths who triggered a frenzy of puritan outrage laced with sexual envy. Even The Beatles, goodies to the Stones’s baddies, offended some Americans with their hairstyles. (“What do you call that hairstyle?” a US reporter asked Ringo disdainfully. “Arthur,” he replied.) With the campaigning of Mary Whitehouse, the fear and disgust assumed an organised form, hooking up with the churches and the odd dotty aristocrat. Nowadays, it comes from those who find an orgasmic fulfilment in the roar of a Porsche’s engine.

The characters may differ, but it’s always the same storyline. Traditional values are being corroded by some insidious force. The nation’s fibre is being fatally weakened by (and here you can choose) sex, immigrants, liberal-mindedness, sentimentalism, self-indulgence or excessive sensitivity. Meghan is just a contemporary name for these various forms of pollution. She may be an immigrant from America rather than Albania, arriving in a first-class aircraft cabin rather than a dingy, but the desire to defile her flesh is partly to do with the alien culture she represents, which is not so much the States as California. And California, like Rome, is more of an idea rather than a place.

In the meeting of Harry and Meghan, we could actually see the polluting process in action. In the eyes of traditionalists, an upright young Marine with an  impressively high kill-rate, a credit to the British values of loyalty, duty and self-discipline, had been publicly hi-jacked by an ethnically hybrid, touchy-feely starlet who probably consults her astrological chart to decide which colour of tights to wear. It’s hard luck for Clarkson and his kind that this soap-opera star, far from being just one pesky woman, represents a whole shift in social sensibility. It’s increasingly the sensibility of the young, which means that it’s here to stay for quite a while.

With the entry of this American vampire in London into the highest family in the land, woke culture finally penetrated the inmost sanctum of the Establishment and exposed its uglier features. A royal family which ritually praises diversity in the Commonwealth couldn’t handle it on its own doorstep. The battle is now on between American self-expression and British restraint, feeling and convention, wokery and Windsor. In fact, if one wants to be fanciful about it, the American Revolution is being fought out in miniature for a second time. Once again, an America which felt neglected and mistreated by a stiff-necked British Establishment has spurned the Crown and been driven into revolt.

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“Woke”, in fact, is a meaningless term — a floating signifier you can stuff with whatever you want. As Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian: “a hate figure has been created, a shibboleth, a means by which bigots can identify one another and give voice to their prejudice, without fear of censure.” But though woke may be a senseless term, it’s a highly convenient one. Even puce-faced old buffers in Pall Mall clubs are now aware that it isn’t permissible to be openly racist or sexist, so “woke” acts as a useful displacement. You can’t be anti-women, but you can be anti-woke, which means speaking up for good old-fashioned public-school values. Shut up whining, take your punishment like a man, stop picking over your fine feelings and if your head is reeling with confusion stick it under the shower. It’s a philosophy which can be encapsulated in four words — the Duke of Edinburgh — and Meghan is its nemesis. That the Duke’s exit from the royal stage and her entry on to it should have roughly coincided is neatly symbolic.

Meghan has done for her partner what, shamefully, not a single member of his grotesquely dysfunctional family seems to have done: helped him to come to terms with his grief over his mother’s death. That this involved a dash of spookery and psychobabble is neither here nor there. The task clearly couldn’t be left to men whose idea of how to treat newly bereaved children is to wake them up with the news in the middle of the night and then force them to go to church the next morning. More generally, Meghan showed Harry that he was living in an invisible cage, and smuggled in the crowbars by which he could be sprung. He could now see his surroundings through the distancing eyes of a stranger. His partner, to be fanciful once more, is a Henry James-type American heroine who sniffs a whiff of violence and corruption beneath the elegance of old Europe.

The couple escaped, however, to a place which has more in common with their former prison than they might like to think. Both Buckingham Palace and the Californian elite revolve on myths, images and fantasises. Both are places of staggering wealth and privilege which in the form of Hollywood present a facade of harmony and happiness behind which lurk lethal feuds and rivalries. The British monarchy is the longest-running Reality TV show in the world, an upper-class version of Eastenders. The Sussexes have fled from one arena of unreality to another. Both locations are philistine and semi-literate. The difference is that whereas the new world flaunts both its wealth and its feelings, the royal family coyly conceals both. The former is emotionally incontinent, while the latter is emotionally anaesthetised. The royals are public figures with all the reserve of private ones, while Harry and Meghan now belong to a sphere in which the concept of privacy has no place. The social order the prince has left behind believes in sacrificing the self — in duty, honour and obedience — while the world he has embraced is full of extravagant egoism. Neither of them is much engaged with what one might loosely call reality.

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By Darran Anderson

There are, then, two stories to be told. The first is that of an enlightened, democratically-minded young woman who causes the scales to fall from the deluded eyes of a moderately Tory ex-soldier. In a rare moment of illumination, he realises that he has spent his life incarcerated in a cockpit of snobbery, racism, deceit and emotional violence, all of it served up in the best possible taste, and breaks with a lifetime’s social conditioning to make a courageous bid for freedom. In the second story, an autocratic young prima donna sinks her claws into a former upper-class yobbo-turned-Marine, and persuades him to desert his duties and family bonds for a shallow, enormously lucrative career as a star of the very media he has previously denounced. Converting themselves overnight from glamorous but dignified figures into commodities on sale in the marketplace, Harry and Meghan vilify those closest to them and whine all the way to the bank about the injustices they have endured at the hands of the Establishment.

There is something to be said for both versions. They don’t, however, weigh equally in the scales, not least if one recalls the vicious abuse Meghan has suffered and Harry’s awakening to the shackles in which he had been living unawares. The couple were surely right to make their escape. Nor is there a contradiction between Harry slagging off his family one minute and asking for reconciliation the next. Telling the truth makes reconciliation hard, maybe impossible; but without the truth it will simply be a sham.

And yet, at the same time, my heart sinks. You see, this isn’t just any royal tour — it’s a rescue mission. The itinerary takes in the Bahamas, Jamaica and Belize — all countries where Her Majesty the Queen happens to be head of state. But for how much longer?

Last year, Barbados declared itself a republic — and so it looks like Kate and Wills have been dispatched to shore-up the remaining monarchies in the region. Officially, the tour is about environmental issues, but no one’s fooled. This is very obviously a royal version of Operation Save Big Dog. And I’m not sure that’s at all wise. 

For a start, it raises the temperature. One moment, you’re a Bahamian or a Jamaican getting on with your day, the next a British Prince turns up and suddenly you’re forced to question why you have foreigner as a head of state.

Meanwhile, back home, all the wrong people will be milking the issue. That small band of fervent Remainers who take unwholesome pleasure from any hint of British humiliation will be overjoyed. Last week, they enjoyed a cheap thrill when the Russian foreign minister monstered Liz Truss in Moscow; so imagine what they’ll make of Prince William begging for his granny’s job in Jamaica. The spectacle of the Queen getting the sack from multiple countries would suit the declinists down to the ground. So much for Global Britain, they’ll chirp.

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The solution, of course, is not to rise to the bait. That isn’t to say we should applaud the end of monarchy in Her Majesty’s far-flung realms; but we must accept that any such decision is none of our business. Indeed, Brexiteers, more than anyone, should support the right of a country to assert its independence in whatever way it deems appropriate. 

Besides, there’s nothing new to see here. Most of the nations that have gained their independence from Britain opted for their own heads of state. Some of them took their time getting around to it. The Maltese waited ten years, the Sri Lankans 14 and and the Mauritians 24. When Barbados became independent in 1966, the island’s first Prime Minister warned against “loitering on colonial premises after closing time”. But, in the event, the Barbadians waited 55 years.

I don’t blame them for hesitating. Having a head of state is an awkward business. Do you go for a powerful, but potentially polarising, figure like the Americans? Or do you go down the purely ceremonial route and end up with some has-been politician or boring academic? It’s no wonder that monarchy retains its sparkle. 

However, if you haven’t got a royal family of your own, where do you get one? Newly sovereign nations used to borrow minor royals from other countries. Today, Harry and Meghan might fancy a crack at Canada, but sadly the royal transfer window has long since closed. And so, for fourteen countries — from Antigua and Barbuda to Tuvalu — the default option is to carry on with the same monarch as the British. 

Which is fine, I’m sure we don’t mind sharing. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves that this isn’t an deeply odd arrangement. In fact, it’s very nearly unique. Apart from Elizabeth II, only one other person in the world today serves as head of state in more than one country: Emmanuel Macron, who by virtue of being President of France is also a co-prince of Andorra.  

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So if any or all the remaining realms opt for a more conventional arrangement, we shouldn’t take it personally. Replacing the Queen with someone who actually lives in the country is part and parcel of expressing sovereignty.

Yet sorting out a local head of state isn’t the only piece of post-imperial paperwork to be dealt with. The constitutional relics of the British Empire can be found across the world. Take the Union Jack, which can still be found on the flags of four sovereign nations besides the UK, not to mention several Canadian provinces and Hawaii. It would be understandable if these nations and territories wanted a flag of entirely local design. In fact, that’s what the New Zealand government proposed in 2016, though it was rejected in a referendum.

But if they ever change their minds, then, again, we Brits shouldn’t take it personally. One of the things that most annoyed Brexit voters in 2016 was the EU’s fatuous habit of stamping its flag where it wasn’t wanted — on our passports, on our number plates and on public works built with our money. I’m delighted that other countries have freely chosen to make the Union Jack their own; but should they come to think differently, then a redesign wouldn’t just deserve our understanding, but our respect. After all, we didn’t mind when the Canadians changed their flag in 1965.  

Indeed, contrary to the ravings of progressive ideologues, the British are far from obsessed with the Empire. It is the contemporary Left — not the Right — that can’t let the past go. Yet there is one thing that both sides still fail to understand, which is that the post-imperial era is also heading into the rear view.

As we’re discovering with Brexit, breaking free from a deeply embedded political order takes place suddenly in some respects and gradually in others. But while a transitional phase is inevitable, it is not interminable. Sooner or later, the new order is complete. From that point, it is time to look to the future.

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We therefore need to think about our post-imperial institutions — and especially the Commonwealth. The organisation was created as a successor to empire, a way of fostering relationships with and among newly independent nations. But in the years and decades ahead, the living memories of that time are destined to dwindle away — a fact that will be painfully underlined when our Queen’s long reign comes to an end.

So while there’s every good reason to cultivate friendships between nations tied together by family, language and common values, basing that community on a long defunct empire is going to become irrelevant. If it is to survive for longer than the monarchies of the Caribbean, the Commonwealth will need to move on. The membership of Mozambique and Rwanda, neither of which were ever part of the British empire, should be taken as a precedent not an exception. 

George VI was the first head of the Commonwealth. His daughter was the second; Charles will take over when the time comes. It is an extraordinary thing, based on nothing more than the continued respect of 54 independent and equal nations for one family. How long will that respect endure? There’s something for William to think about while he plays with his son on the beach.

That doesn’t mean I don’t adore reality TV. I’ve loved it in all its forms; the talent shows (The X Factor), the boss shows (The Apprentice), the scripted soap shows (TOWIE) and even the awful squalid ones about hoarding which seem to be the mainstay of Channel 5. I’ve never had a sex dream about an actor or pop star, but at the height of his Kitchen Nightmares I had one about Gordon Ramsay which lasted three consecutive nights. I’m hazy on the details, but it was immensely enjoyable and there was a lot of swearing.

But Britain’s talent shows ran out of talent a while ago: Simon Cowell cancelled The X Factor last year, after 17 seasons; The X Factor: Celebrity (2019) attracted fewer than 3 million viewers during its first live show — its lowest ratings ever. Compare that with the Will Young/Gareth Gates Pop Idol final, which was watched 20 years ago this month by 15 million people; I remember voting ten times for Gates before my husband hid the phone from me.

It’s never hurt that the sort of people I loathe — pretentious, pompous, right-on Lady Mucks — hate reality TV. See Annie Lennox, sneering that The X Factor is “a factory, owned and stitched up by puppet masters”. Lord forbid that people should want to watch something which amuses rather than lectures them.

Though the stories about My Gran Dying And I’m Doing This For Her got a bit much in the end, there were many beautiful moments backstage at the talent shows when a contestant’s working-class family could be seen embracing and praying, giving lie to all the snideness that the masses generally provoke from commentators.

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The kids were refreshingly down-to-earth, too; 20 years ago, reality TV was just a gap year for fit proletarian youngsters. As Saskia Howard-Clarke, from season six of Big Brother in 2005, told me while I was making a documentary called Reality TV Is Good For You: “I knew when I came out of the house there wouldn’t be a limo waiting to whisk me off to Hollywood. I got some nice clothes, a couple of nice holidays. I’ve already got a nice boyfriend out of it. And soon I’m going to get back to work.”

But with the rise of social media, things have changed. Love Island is a springboard for smart, sexy young women (and men to a lesser degree) to monetise their youth and beauty the way a sportsman utilises his skill for that mayfly moment before wear and tear takes over. The suicides of Michael Thalassitis and Sophie Gradon were a field day for loathers of reality TV, but the idea that it was the uniquely empty and narcissistic milieu which caused these young people to take their lives doesn’t explain why, say, farmers — as far from reality stars as one can imagine — have such a high rate of suicide.

There was a great deal of self-righteous crowing when, in 2018, it was claimed that there were more applicants for Love Island — around 150,000 — than there were for Oxford and Cambridge combined. “What is happening to us?” wailed BBC Breakfast’s Dan Walker from his cushy billet. But in an age where social mobility is moving backwards, and in a country where the dull spawn of the famous pick up the few enjoyable and well-paid jobs once open to bright working-class kids — actor, pop star, model, journalist — should we be surprised? There’s also hypocrisy to all the shrieking: it’s fun and easy to be paid to be yourself — that’s what we columnists do.

So when the academic Danielle J. Lindeman, in her new book True Story, damns reality TV with faint praise as “a pop-cultural touchstone that… can help us to make sense of complex social forces”, you can’t help but feel her point is decades out-of-date. Today, reality TV has informed all parts of our culture and democratised it, adding greatly to the confusion and gaiety of nations.

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We live in a world where Margot Robbie obsesses over Love Island; where Kim Kardashian retires from her show to become a lawyer and hold meetings with The Apprentice’s President Donald Trump. Then there’s Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, who have become their very own reality TV spectacle: they are of interest only because they have us on the edge of our seats wondering who the heck they’re going to turn on next. The same is true of Boris Johnson — policy has become less important than whether Carrie Made Him Do It and his ongoing feud with Dominic Cummings.

Faced with these fantasies, both the Left and Right join in condemnation of reality TV’s hold over the youth of the nation, who should be stuck away in their bedrooms studying for Oxbridge rather than having a laugh in swimwear. But as in so many issues, politics has been left behind and the Great and Good can no more hold back the tide of populism than a Love Islander can walk past a beauty salon offering 50% off spray tans.

A recent survey found that those aged 18 to 24 are more likely (42%) than their elders (9%) to believe that “income level is the greatest indicator of someone’s class” and that a major decider of whether one is “upper class” is “going on luxury hotel holidays” and “multiple overseas holidays per year”. The mass exodus of Love Island alumni to Dubai during the first Covid lockdown so they could carry on their “work” as “influencers” personified this dream of being posh.

And in a way, it’s not as foolish as Victoria Beckham being called ‘Posh’ — chasing the sun is what the idle rich specialised in before they had to make it look like they were working. Faced with this new reality TV class, it’s interesting to see how many of the privileged, privately educated youngsters of Made In Chelsea made a reverse journey, choosing to enter the world of commerce rather than cruise on their trust funds.

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More striking, though, was how it was one of the best and brightest reality stars who brought the Dubai influences down to earth. Olivia Attwood — of Love Island, TOWIE and Olivia Meets Her Match fame — was scathing in her mockery:

“So basically being an influencer is actually really hard and I can’t create content for you guys here at home, so I am going to have to go on holiday…. People literally can’t feed their children, and are being given these sad little bags of food from the government… Your ‘hard day’ is creating content that might get nasty comments and someone else’s hard day is a 12-hour shift and zipping up body bags at the end of it.”

It proved that, at a time when real stars of screen and music increasingly scold from the same hymn sheet behind the high walls of their privately-policed gated enclosures  — capitalism is evil; transwomen are women; Palestine is real — the reality stars, unschooled in hypocrisy, can still be a breath of fresh air.

Let other critics sneer at the dreams of ordinary people reflected in reality TV — I’ll take a talent show over a Quality Drama showing the working-class being happy with their place below stairs any day.

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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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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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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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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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.

Their faces drop if I decide to pull out the story of Little Nutbrown Hare and all that “I love you as high as I can hop” stuff. They want mayhem, murder and destruction. And diggers, of course. Lots of diggers.

Which is why I don’t suppose there will be much of an audience in the Fraser household for the Duchess of Sussex’s new offering, The Bench, out next week — a book about the relationship between a father and his son, as seen from a mother’s perspective, all illustrated with some very gentle watercolour images.

Some have argued that it is a bit rich for Meghan to publish a book purporting to extol the virtues of the parent-child relationship when she doesn’t speak to her own father, while her husband has such a massively dysfunctional relationship with his. But I’m not convinced. Philip Larkin was wrong: misery does not cascade down the family tree as some kind of historical inevitability. Children of bad parents can make good parents themselves.

The problem I have with the book is the same I suspect my boys will have. It all looks just a bit too saccharine, too tediously nice. In fact, it doesn’t look like a children’s book at all, but more like an adult fantasy about what childhood should be like. Perhaps it is a work of kitsch make-believe about the kind of perfect childhood the princess wished for herself.

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But the mind of the child is often darker and more troubled than adults find comfortable. And the stories we tell them should help them negotiate what is disturbing about the world, not push it away as though it doesn’t exist.

In 1315, a volcano in New Zealand erupted, spewing millions of tonnes of dirt and debris into the atmosphere. In the years that followed, agriculture in Europe and elsewhere was devastated. The city chronicles in Bristol described it as “a great Famine of Dearth with such mortality that the living could scarce suffice to bury the dead, horse flesh and dog’s flesh was accounted good meat, and some ate their own Children”.

It was from such conditions that terrifying stories like that of Hansel and Gretel were born. Abandoned in the forest by their parents, the young siblings fall into the clutches of a cannibalistic witch who is eventually forced into an oven by Gretel where she burns. The children then escape with her money.

The Brothers Grimm are famous for their 1812 collection of dark fairy tales, the origin of so many of our children’s stories. As well as Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, their collection also includes Godfather Death, The Devil and His Grandmother, The Jew Among Thorns — and yes, they are as bad as they sound. Children’s literature often has a barely concealed dark side; they are horror stories covered in candy floss.

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It’s no surprise, then, that many children’s authors have reached for much safer, more gentle territory. After all, what child could be reasonably expected to sleep well after a unsanitised rendition of Hansel and Gretel? Yet many children do love the darker tales. When Where The Wild Things Are was first published in 1963, libraries refused to stock it, believing its images to be nightmarish and disturbing. But parents soon discovered that children couldn’t get enough of it.

It was much the same with The Tiger Who Came to Tea. I read it to my boys in Hebrew. And though they are too young to understand why that makes the story twice as scary, the idea that some huge terrifying beast arrives at the door, demanding everything that you have, is nonetheless disturbing enough.

But childhood is itself inherently disturbing. And if the Freudians are right, we spend a lifetime in recovery from it. My four-year-old asked us the other day, over breakfast, who was going to look after him when we die. Of course, comfort and reassurance are the right response; Little Nut Brown Hare has a role to play, even though my boys would never admit it.

But the darkness needs to be represented, as much as anything to show them that it can be faced and defeated. That is why they sleep well at night, even after stories of Tigers taking their tea or Max finding friendship among the beasts. Naming these fears shows children how they can be spoken about without crippling terror. Nietzsche said we use art as a lens through which we are able to look at the truth without it destroying us. And nowhere is that more the case than in children’s stories.

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Perhaps this seems a more dangerous truth for those of us who had dysfunctional childhoods, where cold, distant or absent parenting failed to lead us through our own fears — and so, as a result, we still find the darkness overwhelming and terrifying.

In cases such as these, it’s all too easy to imagine how a sentimental Hollywood tale of a princess who grows up to find her prince is preferred to Hansel and Gretel. Which is why I suspect that, even though Meghan has claimed that The Bench was inspired by her son’s relationship with her husband, the book will say a lot more about the Duchess than either of her boys.

This is supposedly to do with the country’s history of serfdom, collective ownership and general misery and oppression. Even before Communism, life in rural Russia was very communal, and late tsarist attempts to introduce private ownership into the Russian village failed miserably. This, combined with the country’s hugely stratified social hierarchy, meant that most Russians had little chance of making it rich. When they did, their neighbours resented it and assumed that they must have done something nefarious and unmerited. Why should Ivan win a million when I’m stuck here?

In America, by contrast, audiences whoop and cheer when Hank or Chuck gets the question right because, even if they’re poor, they think that anyone can make it and maybe they will too. Historically, it’s not untrue.

The Russian view of other people’s financial happiness has its equivalent in the West today with other people’s romantic and sexual happiness. It’s a phenomenon I call “toxic validation”, because the more people make the wrong decisions in their life, the more the audience cheers.

It’s a very modern phenomenon because it’s only recently that we have seen the development of a sort of ambiguous class between celebrities and “civilians”; influencers with a medium-sized social media following who build a relationship with their audience so intimate that they one day might even control aspects of their lives.

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But even people who are not influencers still routinely go online for life advice, and the life advice they receive is invariably terrible. The most popular responses will always be the worst, but more toxic still is the way that people receive validation through social media engagement.

Here, the most popular lifestyle declarations, in terms of retweets and likes, are almost always the most disastrous. They’re the ones where people tweet about breaking off workable romantic relationships over quite minor problems; ending a relationship with a family member over politics; pursuing a conflict with employers that don’t need to be pursued; even self-mutilation — all while being encouraged, praised and applauded by thousands of people.

In many cases, the validation has a political aspect, in particular with regard to sex-positivity: such as when an exploitative narcissist uses ideology to undermine his girlfriend’s natural reluctance, and she tweets “Now he’s introduced me into a polyamorous relationship and although I felt uncomfortable at first I’m doing the right thing and am so happy!” Right?

The correct answer – the American audience answer – is “WRONG! Ditch him!” The social media applauders tell people quite the opposite:  obviously not what you’d advise a loved one.

But while ideology plays some part in this bad advice, the main problem is that these sites give people an audience, and audiences rarely have our best interests at heart; sometimes they are swayed by fashion and sometimes they are just bored and want drama.

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And this danger of toxic validation also applies to genuine, high level celebrities, too, especially if political fashion is involved. Just weeks after his Oprah interview, in which he basically denounced his family as racist, Prince Harry was at it again, talking about his upbringing: “I don’t think we should be pointing the finger or blaming anybody… but certainly when it comes to parenting, if I’ve experienced some form of pain or suffering because of the pain or suffering that perhaps my father or my parents had suffered, I’m going to make sure I break that cycle so that I don’t pass it on, basically.”

Prince Harry was obviously referencing the fate of his mother, but her relationship with the media was far more like that of predator and prey, although also symbiotic; the son, instead, receives toxic validation from sections of the commentariat for opening up, for tackling important mental health issues, for being modern.

“You know what, that happened to me, I’m going to make sure that doesn’t happen to you,” he said of his own troubled relationship with his parents. And he’s of course right, I’m sure. It wasn’t a hugely loving environment, but then the royal family isn’t exactly famous for the whole lovey-dovey thing.

Charles’s own parents went off on a royal tour of North America when he was three and upon their return at Euston a camera caught the young Queen speaking to various family members before briefly patting her son on the head as an afterthought. There is no question that a lack of parental affection continues to hurt right into adulthood, but is Harry benefiting from the validation he gets here? The wisest advice anyone could give him would be to avoid the media as much as possible, never say anything about his relationship with his family, not mention political subjects and instead concentrate on uncontroversial good causes. Every time he does any of those things, he gets validation and becomes slightly worse off; more unpopular, more divisive, less likely to rebuild happy relationships, more likely to feel guilt and self-disgust later in life.

And yet he’s cheered on by an audience that dislikes the royal family, that dislikes the sort of people who are anti-Meghan and who believe public displays of inner turmoil are in society’s best interests. I doubt they are, but they certainly aren’t in Prince Harry’s interests — this is a Russian audience voting, not an American one.

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So why do people validate other’s destructive lifestyles? One reason might be a need for chaos, but another is probably the need to rationalise their own life decisions. This is why, I suspect, so much bad advice is given out by journalists and social commentators — articulate, intelligent people who are often very bad at making life choices, and have been since the days of Rousseau and Paine.

Rousseau wrote a sort-of lifestyle guide to raising children while sending his own poor children to certain death in an orphanage; Paine wrote two of the most influential tracts on human affairs while pissing away his own life on drink. Journalists tend to have chaotic personal lives filled with debt, disastrous relationships and a desperate need for popularity, which is why you should never let them near the levers of power.

And people living distinctive lifestyles feel the instinctive urge to evangelise for that lifestyle, to gather cultural support around it, to encourage others to do the same. No one ever says: “I’ve decided I’m now X or doing Y or living with Z but I don’t particularly want to talk about it and don’t expect anyone else to go along with it.”

In the marketplace of cultural ideas everyone is selling, creating a competition in which values are inevitably changing rapidly. When social norms are ambiguous and up for grabs toxic validation can only flourish, because in the game of life no one is entirely sure what the right answer is to anything. Every question is worth £32,000 and the audience doesn’t necessarily want you to win.

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To return to Russia’s cheery history, after the revolution broke out, the Bolsheviks enacted the first great sexual revolution of the 20^th century. Determined to break the bonds of family, Russia’s rulers encouraged young Communists to publicly denounce family members for opposing the regime, to the approval of their peers and society’s new elites. This same thing happened in Mao’s China, where they were lauded with approval for their fervour in this time of revolutionary moral uncertainty.

Later, when it all sank in, the same people were overcome with guilt, shame and horror at what they had done. They had made a terrible choice. But then people, especially the young, seek validation from the most influential and powerful in society, not from the wisest, or those with their best interests at heart.

The Bolsheviks wanted children to turn against their family members because they saw the family as a rival to state power, but the family was also the source of common sense and folklore, the cumulative wisdom of the ages. It is a rival source of affection, and a genuine one, as Christopher Lasch called it, “a haven in a heartless world”. And it really can be a heartless world — which makes it all the sadder that the toxic validators cheer when a young man denounces his own.

In a boarding school near the Kentish coast, a ruffian sneaks along the corridor, hunting for the rare stamp that will make him rich. In a Home Counties village, a tousled-haired schoolboy lies awake, putting the finishing touches to his scheme that will win the war for the Allies. Many miles to the north, a boat pulls away from Wildcat Island, bound for fortune and glory. And far across the oceans, a group of schoolboys tremble in terror, as their South Sea captors prepare to sacrifice them to their idol …

Such is the world of the classic British children’s story: the world of Billy Bunter and his Greyfriars chums, William Brown and his fellow Outlaws, Titty, Roger and the rest of the Swallows and Amazons, Jennings, Molesworth and the Secret Seven. For more than half a century, such stories dominated the imagination of millions of readers. You can still buy second-hand editions of Richmal Crompton’s Guillermo el Detective, and wonder what on earth readers in General Franco’s Spain made of them.

When I was growing up, the books of Frank Richards, Arthur Ransome and Richmal Crompton were still everywhere, just about. Our local library groaned with stories in which middle-class British children spent their weekends in the barn across the fields and their weeknights sneaking out of the dormitory for some stolen tuck. Raised on the virtues of teamwork and courage, the boys grew up to become hunters, naval commanders and Spitfire pilots. I never found out what happened to the girls. For a boy in the early Eighties, to have been caught reading Mallory Towers would have been social suicide.

I thought of these splendid and now largely forgotten books when I read that a new star is about to join the constellation of children’s writers. Marcus Rashford, footballer and saint, has written a book, or at least put his name on a book by his collaborator Carl Anka. I don’t want to be rude about it: if it encourages football-crazed children to read, so much the better.

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I’ll be as rude as you like, though, about Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’s forthcoming children’s book The Bench. Catchy title! According to the publishers, it aims to evoke a “deep sense of warmth, connection and compassion”. It sounds ghastly. What sane child wants to read about connection and compassion, when they could read Billy Bunter Butts In instead?

My own defiantly non-compassionate copy of Billy Bunter Butts In, first bought for my mother in 1951, is beside me right now. As far as I remember, it’s the first book that I read after lights-out, under the covers with a torch. I was risking my pocket money, but I simply couldn’t contain myself. Would the Fat Owl of the Remove be caned for failing to do his Georgic? Would Stephen Price of the Fifth manage to get his bet on for the two-thirty? And who would win the titanic showdown between plucky form captain Harry Wharton, the colonel’s son, and Herbert Vernon-Smith, cocky son of a millionaire stockbroker, the legendary “Bounder”? (Don’t worry: I won’t give the result away.)

Purveyors of Californian compassion might think this a dreadful book for a boy to be reading in the early Eighties. But I was in good company. In their heyday between 1910 and 1940, Frank Richards’s Greyfriars stories, which ran in the Magnet magazine, were the single most popular narrative in all British fiction. Then as now, some people deplored them. When V. S. Pritchett’s father discovered his son’s stash of Magnets, he burned them in the fireplace and told him to read John Ruskin instead. But Pritchett could not help himself. “One page and I was entranced,” he remembered. “I gobbled these stories as if I were eating pie or stuffing.”

Later, recalling his days teaching the sons of “shopkeepers, office employees and small business and professional men”, George Orwell reported that almost all read the Greyfriars stories and “were still taking them fairly seriously when they were fifteen or even sixteen”.

And in his book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, the historian Jonathan Rose quotes a colliery winder’s son, a Camberwell labourer’s son and the disabled son of two Yorkshire millworkers, all of whom loved the stories. On the South Wales coalfield, a butcher’s boy called Aneurin Bevan made a weekly pilgrimage to the newsagent’s for the latest Magnet. Like many other parents, Bevan’s father, a miner, banned them from the house. But the NHS’s founding father bought them anyway and hid them underneath a local bridge.

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In his famous essay “Boys’ Weeklies”, Orwell argued that these stories formed one of the great bulwarks of British conservatism:

“The year is 1910 — or 1940, but it is all the same. You are at Greyfriars, a rosy-cheeked boy of fourteen in posh tailor-made clothes, sitting down to tea in your study on the Remove passage after an exciting game of football which was won by an odd goal in the last half-minute. There is a cosy fire in the study, and outside the wind is whistling. The ivy clusters thickly round the old grey stones. The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a pound. Over in Europe the comic foreigners are jabbering and gesticulating, but the grim grey battleships of the British Fleet are steaming up the Channel and at the outposts of Empire the monocled Englishmen are holding the niggers at bay…”

Actually, they’re not quite as reactionary as you might think. The working-class scholarship boys are far brighter and more likeable than the aristocrats and stockbrokers’ sons, and they all go out of their way to shield their Indian chum Hurree Jamset Ram Singh (er, “Inky”) from the “colour prejudice” of their American classmate Fisher T. Fish.

But in essence Orwell was right. Greyfriars is a deeply conservative place, unchanging and hierarchical, menaced by an endless stream of loafers, ruffians, footpads and foreigners. I bow to nobody in my love of Billy Bunter, the “schoolboy Falstaff”, the jam-sodden embodiment of greed, laziness, stupidity and cowardice. Though when I was looking for a bedtime story for my son, even I drew the line at Billy Bunter Among the Cannibals.

Bunter wasn’t my only favourite. The first story I ever wrote as a boy was an illustrated sequel to Swallows and Amazons, rather undermining the innocence of Arthur Ransome’s original by equipping the characters with automatic weapons. But today I would give the gold medal to Richmal Crompton, the shy, unmarried invalid whose William Brown stories sold some 12 million copies between 1919 and 1969.

Originally written for middle-class mothers and published in women’s magazines, they chronicled the adventures of a mischievous 11-year-schoolboy in a Home Counties village. And if you’re looking for an antidote to connection and compassion, a repudiation of everything Meghan and Harry stand for, they are perfect.

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For generations of readers, William and his fellow Outlaws Ginger, Henry and Douglas were as familiar as their own friends and family. Then there was the supreme villain for any 11-year-old boy, the terrifying, invincible Violet Elizabeth Bott, a monster of narcissistic self-pity. ‘I’ll thcream and thcream until I’m thick.’ That would make a good motto for somebody.

William himself is an inveterate culture warrior, an unashamed lover of flags and statues, the personification of the anti-woke spirit. Although he chafes under parental authority, he reserves his greatest contempt for idealists, do-gooders, artists and intellectuals. In one story, a League of Nations enthusiast arrives in the village and implores the boys to give up their weapons as a first step towards world peace. William pretends to go along with it, tricks his enemies into disarming, and then seizes their catapults and air rifles and turns them on his foes. Connection and compassion are definitely not his thing.

In another story, with a general election looming in 1929, the children organise their own mock election. Henry, the gang’s brainbox, lays out the position:

“There’s four sorts of people tryin’ to get to be rulers. They all want to make things better, but they want to make ’em better in different ways. There’s Conservatives an’ they want to make things better by keepin’ ’em jus’ like what they are now. An’ there’s Lib’rals an’ they want to make things better by alterin’ them jus’ a bit, but not so’s anyone’d notice, an’ there’s Socialists, an’ they want to make things better by takin’ everyone’s money off ’em, an’ there’s Communists an’ they want to make things better by killin’ everyone but themselves.’

No political scientist could put it better.

At first, attracted by the thought of so much violence, William flirts with the idea of Communism. But eventually he stands as a Conservative, influenced by his father’s friend, a big game hunter from the African veldt. The day of the election comes. Addressing the other children, William simply lists the man’s kills: buffalos, lions, elephants, even hippopotamuses. At last, slowly, grandly, he reaches his peroration: ‘An’ this man is a Conservative. He votes Conservatism at gen’ral elections.’

He wins in a landslide.

Crompton’s best stories date from the war. In one story, William half-hears his family discussing Norway’s Nazi puppet Vidkun Quisling at breakfast, and becomes convinced that a man called “ole Grissel” is at large in the village, preparing the ground for ole Hitler’s invasion. Later, he arms his friends with an air gun, bows and catapults, and scours the lanes for enemy parachutists. An actor appears, dressed for an entertainment at the local aerodrome. The Outlaws knock him senseless and call the police. The man denies everything. But William has a crushing, unanswerable riposte: “If you aren’t a parachutist, why are you dressed up as a woman?”

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Is there any hope for such stories today? Probably not. Given the ultra-woke instincts of most children’s publishers, I suspect they’re sunk forever. There is too much stoicism and not enough self-pity, too much pluck and not enough diversity. I certainly can’t see Meghan enjoying Billy Bunter’s outings to Egypt, China and the South Seas. As for William Brown, his attitude to anti-racism campaigners, curriculum decolonisers and mental health professionals doesn’t bear thinking about. Sad to say, the only reason Richmal Crompton hasn’t been cancelled is that so few people still read her.

For me, though, her stories will live forever. Bunter and William will be charging around my imagination till the day I die, or at least until I lose my marbles. And when I think of Orwell’s imitation, I can’t help smiling in recognition:

“Lord Mauleverer has just got another fiver and we are all settling down to a tremendous tea of sausages, sardines, crumpets, potted meat, jam and doughnuts. After tea we shall sit round the study fire having a good laugh at Billy Bunter and discussing the team for next week’s match against Rookwood. Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever…”

The irony, of course, is that Orwell loved them as much as anybody. He’d have had no time for The Bench, would ole George.

Even two years in I was determined to pour scorn on the harmless young couple: “Prissy… simpering… clothes horse… will only ever be remembered as one of the House of Windsor’s plus-ones… Diana Lite,” I snarked in the Daily Mail of all places.

To be fair, I have always admitted to being just about the worst judge of character in Christendom; put me in a room with three saints and a sociopath and we all know who I’d be blood brothers with by sunrise. True to form, just a few years after laying into the Duchess of Cambridge, I was bigging up a certain American actress thus: “Meghan Markle has never waited soppily for some prince to rescue her. In fact, it seems far likelier that it is she who will rescue the prince.”

What happened to make me transfer my allegiance from Sussex to Cambridge? Two things: hypocrisy and the pandemic.

The first can largely be blamed on the House of Sussex. There is, after all, something grating about lecturing hoi polloi about carbon footprints when your Louboutins are click-clacking up the steps of Elton John’s private jet for the nth time. Later, while their subjects were being told not to leave their houses, there was something farcical about the speed with which the Sussexes struck out for what one feels was their destination all along: a gated community in La La Land; slipping over the Canadian border like draft-dodgers in reverse.

How different from the home life of our own dear future queen. Kate has had a good pandemic, upbeat and modest, sharing photographs of the children and her thoughts on home-schooling; visiting businesses affected by lockdown and just getting on with it. Her appearance at the Sarah Everard vigil was unexpected and beautifully judged; she looked like a thoughtful, sad student performing a silent and simple act of sisterhood.

I couldn’t help but compare it to Meghan’s scenery-eating style of feminism, which at its worst saw her writing “inspirational messages” for sex workers on bananas. We all know a Meghan. Sitting on her throne of sorrows, she is the moist-eyed paragon of passive-aggressiveness, soldiering bravely on in the hope that someone will find the heart to ask: “Are you ok?” As for those not brave enough to break free from the Firm, especially that stuck-up sister-in-law with her stiff upper lip — well, she’s just trapped and bottling it all up. Far better to let it all hang out and hold a pity party on prime-time TV.

How unlike Kate. She seems refreshingly liberated from the modern notion that mithering on about one’s troubles will in some way solve them; the Markle-isation of mental health, whereby the super-privileged signal that they too are in pain, so please don’t envy them all this lovely stuff. The Heads Together initiative — led by the Cambridges and Harry — may tick the fashionable boxes, but it appears to have far more to do with service than with therapy: supporting young people, veterans and homeless charities.

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Meanwhile, the pandemic has made us impatient with the rich and famous lamenting their lives from luxury fortresses, something which led to the all-time low audience for the Oscars on Sunday. In Kate, we see the difference between righteousness and self-righteousness, between stoicism and splattering one’s problems all over the shop.

Everything she did which I judged so ungenerously a decade ago reflects well on her now. “Waity Katie” passed the test which far more aristocratic young women have failed: the ability to stare straight back into a spotlight with perfect self-possession.

Though the likes of me gushed over Meghan for bringing “diversity” to the House of Windsor, we failed to register that the descendant of coal-miners and trolley dollies was equally as ground-breaking, and certainly more mocked by her prince’s inner circle (“Doors to manual!”) than Meghan ever was for her mixed-race heritage. Kate even has an embarrassing relation of her own; frisky Uncle Gary, proud owner of the Ibiza shag-pad known as La Maison de Bang Bang, who was welcomed whole-heartedly to the wedding.

She always gives the impression of having known what she wanted, and to be happy with what she has — an attractive quality in a world where screwing up and then griping about it passes for being “authentic” and where those who wear their troubles lightly are accused of being “in denial”. Much as I adored Diana, and found her expressions of emotion affecting and fresh, such travails are now the norm; everyone has an eating disorder, everyone doesn’t get on with their in-laws.

Similarly, I suspect she knows that another bout of over-privileged marital combat played out at peak viewing time is not something the public wants or needs. No one knows what goes on in any marriage and though the Cambridge’s relationship was subject to the usual tittle-tattle about William’s “affair” and her “rural rival” a few years back, they appear to have come through the rumours even stronger.

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The Royal Family always wins

By Will Lloyd

Most of all, I like Kate for what she doesn’t do as much as for what she does. She will never throw herself down a flight of stairs, have her toes sucked by an ugly American or travel on a plane called the Lolita Express. Not yet forty, she is maturing from a coltish girl to a grande dame; at the funeral of Prince Philip, perfectly coiffed and clothed and masked, I thought she had a look of the actress Claire Bloom, in the way a young Queen Elizabeth did too.

And so the soft spot that even a hardened republican like me has for Queen Elizabeth II appears to be transferring to her granddaughter-in-law, the perfect queen-in-waiting. It’s telling that the only members of the family not to see an upswing in popularity after Prince Philip’s funeral were Harry and Meghan, reflecting as it did a life of service so profound that it was the only time I recall the deceased giving express instructions that they should not be given a eulogy. The fashion for publicly foisting one’s emotions which marked this century’s Troubled Teens is hopefully on the way out, helped along by this young woman of humble origins who appears to believe that “Never complain, never explain” is a pretty good rule to live by.

But a noble aspiration is one thing. The emerging reality looks worryingly like one of those “How It Started/How It’s Going” memes. Take, for instance, his latest gig. He’s to be “Commissioner on Information Disorder” at the nonprofit Aspen Foundation, sitting on a panel holding a six-month inquiry into the spread of misinformation online.

And this is how he announced it:

“As I’ve said, the experience of today’s digital world has us inundated with an avalanche of misinformation, affecting our ability as individuals as well as societies to think clearly and truly understand the world we live in. It’s my belief that this is a humanitarian issue and as such, it demands a multi-stakeholder response from advocacy voices, members of the media, academic researchers, and both government and civil society leaders. I’m eager to join this new Aspen commission and look forward to working on a solution-oriented approach to the information disorder crisis.”

Just cherish every word of that: “multi-stakeholder response”, “advocacy voices”, “civil society leaders”, “solution-oriented approach”. Leaving aside the questionable metaphor in that clunking first sentence (can you be inundated by an avalanche?), here is a full card of Bullshit Bingo. These are expressions that no ordinary English-speaking human being has ever uttered spontaneously aloud or written without irony; they are the zombie catchphrases of a corporate PR department.

I have no way of knowing for sure that this is not how Prince Harry naturally expresses himself. But I hope it won’t be considered lèse-majesté to say, I hae ma doots. And in a way it doesn’t matter. It is a sign of how far in the shit we are that many, if not most, people will assume it was written for him, and won’t think anything much of it.

Not only do we consume misinformation but we expect to, and correct for it, and blithely wave through what looks like misinformation even when it’s contained in the announcement of someone “eager” to embark on a new job waging war on misinformation.

Corporate, comms-style bullshit presented as personal from-the-heart statements is so normalised that it looks like nitpicking to even raise the question. Of course you’re not actually supposed to think that Prince Harry thinks anything of the sort, or that if he did, this is how he’d tell you about it. Don’t be so naive!

You could compare the idiom of Prince Harry’s statement, as quoted last week in the announcement of his last new gig — as Chief Impact Officer (whatever that is) for a billionaire wellbeing startup called BetterUp:

“As BetterUp’s first Chief Impact Officer, my goal is to lift up critical dialogues around mental health, build supportive and compassionate communities, and foster an environment for honest and vulnerable conversations. And my hope is to help people develop their inner strength, resilience, and confidence.”

Italics – my hope; my goal — thus. The statement goes on for ages, so I won’t quote it all, but in addition to “lift up critical dialogues around”, we can tick off “driving advocacy”, “peak performance”, “thought leadership”, “outreach and strategic planning”, “self-optimisation” and many more on the bingo card.

More buzzphrases — but tailored in this case to mental wellbeing corporate nonsense rather than tech-bro civil-society corporate nonsense. This statement was introduced, incidentally, by one from BetterUp’s CEO which ended: “I could go on, but I think he can say it better himself.” It seems to me quite possible that the same person drafted both those statements. But let’s suppose it was not, and that Prince Harry not only spoke from the heart about the Aspen Foundation, but that he spoke likewise from the heart about BetterUp, and that he deftly altered his style on each occasion. In some ways, that would be worse: it would suggest that, rather than just letting these organisations put words in his mouth, he has allowed their empty idioms to soak into his very soul.

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The Royal Family always wins

By Will Lloyd

Some years ago, I was hosting a series of book events sponsored by a hotel chain. When they were being announced, the very nice and amiable PR for the hotel let me have a look at the press release. It contained a substantial quote from me, which he had invented (and which sounded not unlike the sort of thing attributed here to the Prince). He was genuinely surprised, and seemed not a little put out, when I insisted that anything I was quoted as saying or writing should be stuff I myself said or wrote. It was, he said, standard practice to do things the way he did them.

Perhaps it is. But look: the Duke of Sussex is a person who has staked his career and the second half of his life on being his own man. He has made authenticity — “speaking your truth”, as Oprah puts it — his big thing. He and his wife have spoken eloquently of refusing to be part of a system where the image of the Firm trumps the authentic needs and feelings of individuals. And yet here he is, within months, meekly offering himself as a human meatpuppet: his name and image, his personal beliefs and feelings, are available to be presented to the world in the hackneyed corporate cliches of a press release.

Even if you haven’t made a performance of how important it is to you to be your own man, parroting the sort of balderdash that comms departments churn out isn’t a trivial thing. It sells the pass.

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Of course Prince Harry would say — and no doubt truthfully — that he’s only taking jobs that align with his existing beliefs and support the causes he cares about. And perhaps he really does believe that he has a unique set of skills that make his executive role in these organisations worth every penny — that he’s a mental health professional and a shrewd analyst of the information ecosystem. Perhaps he believes that he can meaningfully do multiple senior executive jobs at once, and that his name on the masthead is no more than the cherry on the Bakewell tart.

But the application of Occam’s razor here suggests that it’s the right to have their language issue from Prince Harry’s mouth and have him glad-hand donors or shareholders that these companies are really paying for. They’re using him as… how would you put it? A figurehead. Imagine finding yourself in a job where your only role was to sprinkle celebrity fairy-dust on good causes and mouth strings of empty formal phrases. It sounds pretty soul-destroying to me. It sounds, in fact, a bit like being a member of the Royal Family.

Most of us undertake thorough and detailed research when buying, say, an electric toothbrush. But when it comes to our next head of state, we don’t need to ask any questions because we already know the answer: it’s him with the ears. Dust off the crown and fetch Welby.

Sheer randomness of personnel is what makes monarchy so great. You can end up with a thug, a mystic, a gambler or, as we will eventually, a bloke who genuinely believes he can talk to plants. Greatness can be dunked into the cesspit at any moment. Royalty endures in Britain, not merely because of the pageantry, or the beauty, or its great ennobling truth, but because of its brutal, hilarious irrationality.

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Why it's time to abolish schools

By Will Lloyd

Republicans make the mistake of thinking the monarch rules over her subjects, when in fact she is a form of entertainment put on for her subjects, like those hardworking bears that ride motorcycles at the Moscow State Circus.

Our Royals almost understand this. “I’m not very good at being a performing monkey,” Prince Charles sadly admitted to Jonathan Dimbleby in 1994, unaware that his utter discomfort is precisely what makes him such a consistent amusement.

The monarch, her family, their flunkies, valets, chauffeurs, gardeners, manicurists, toadies, lovers, bodyguards, back-up toadies and piss-pot holders — they’re our subjects. They are more or less down on their knees at this point, existing for the increase, encouragement and maintenance of scandal, gossip and jokes. (Yes: they do fine things for charity, too.) Today’s Cromwells are usually American, and like all Republicans they fail to grasp a simple truth about the monarchy: why overthrow it when it bloodlessly overthrows itself every 25 years or so? The House of Windsor was built on a cliff edge — which is exactly where we want it.

This latest Windsorian plunge off the precipice is presented, depending on the sympathies of the storyteller, as either yet another family’s failure to assimilate an outsider, or a case of an outsider undermining that family’s domestic bliss. She stole our prince! Meghan in this version is a truculent and unsparing monster, rather than a garden-variety social climber, who, Godzilla-like, trashes our Royal city.

It is a flattering tale, in which neither the public’s gluttonous appetite for drama, Harry, nor our Crown Prince shoulders much of the blame for what’s happened. I’m not convinced that Meghan — who appears to be thoroughly consumed by a years-old argument about dresses with the Duchess of Cambridge — is really in the driving seat here. Instead, it is surely Harry in the lead; it was only when he appeared that Monday’s interview became interesting. Meghan was his convenient excuse, his getaway car, his ejector pod — in the same way that a nebulous accusation of racism is Meghan’s way of explaining why the Windsors disliked her. Both of them wanted to go. But why?

Well, it seems clear to me that Prince Harry hates his father very deeply. Watch again that moment when he says Charles stopped taking his calls. Harry’s eyes are so narrow they could be covered with a single penny. If this were the 14^th century, he would be in France right now, plotting his revenge, doggedly raising an army, ready to sail back to England to seize the throne, violently torture Piers Morgan, and place the entire editorial staff of the Daily Mail in a gibbet. Alas, the 14^th century is over, so Harry’s revenge is an over-bathroomed mansion in Beverly Hills and a maximum-damage television spectacular.

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Surely it is oedipal fury that made Harry do this, rather than the press or racism, as he claims. How else are we to explain their move to America, where there is no racism whatsoever, and to Hollywood in particular, where, as far as I can gather, no journalists or photographers have ever been seen?

Not that much will change for them. Harry will still smile when he doesn’t feel like smiling. He will still have to mouth phrases he doesn’t understand at interminable functions. The lost Prince will continue to press through crowds of frozen faces in dire rooms, still less free to bitch and scold than the poorest Laotian peanut farmer. In short, he will have escaped into another effigy of himself. The only thing that must make it worthwhile is the knowledge that he has humiliated his father, the man who forced him to walk behind his mother’s coffin.

The roots of Harry’s rage are, however, far less important than the inevitability of such bitter feuding among our Royals. It has all happened before, and will happen again; this pair of keys comes with the property. The Oedipal skirmishing of the Hanoverians, for instance, lasted for more than a century. George I hated his eldest son, the future George II, who hated him right back. George II hated his eldest son Frederick, whose hatred for his father was only interrupted by a fatal cricket accident (well, perhaps). George III’s eldest despised his father so greatly that… you can see the picture here. The inhuman requirements of monarchical life — Virginia Woolf once compared being a royal to living like a single ant “struggling with a pebble” — make bitter squabbling unavoidable.

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By Giles Fraser

Even so, the griefs and frustrations and embarrassments of Charles do seem like they will stand out in the annals. Even the rare notes of sympathy he receives — such as this Washington Post column by Ben Judah — are fairly worthless. Charles, Judah writes, is not a villain. The Prince has been right about many great issues of the day. He thought the Iraq War was a bad idea. He was a green before it was trendy. Plus, Charles is broad-minded — he gives diplomatic speeches to worthy Europeans every now and then. (Judah forgets one of Charles’s key strengths: he looks authentically comfortable holding a pint of beer — once the kind of trait that swung general elections, before we discovered the joy of calling our political enemies racist.)

The problem with all this is that it does not matter if Charles is “right” about organic farming or interfaith dialogue or anything else. Nobody cares what Charles thinks — he was born to be a symbol, not a newspaper columnist.

As a father and a husband (the first time around), it is fair to say that Charles failed. Standing behind the curtains of history for decades, with all his charitable toiling undone by the simple phrase “God forbid, a Tampax”, has not left us with a dynamic, prudent Crown Prince who is capable of holding his family together. “Nobody knows,” he once moaned, “what utter hell it is to be the Prince of Wales.”

But being put through utter hell is exactly what the public wants from him, and all the rest of them, as this week has shown. Monarchy does not survive on laws and abstractions. The unfair truth is that as long as the Windsors dish up an unpleasant family disaster every generation or so, they will endure. The Firm will keep winning, even when it’s losing. That’s why Charles, when he at last dusts off the crown, will be thinking not the resentments of his son, or the cruel attentions of his subjects, but of his face on the coins.

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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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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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.

“Everyone”? Yes, that’s the claim. And that includes members of the royal family. Markle used her Oprah interview to tell the world about the depth of unhappiness she experienced when she was pregnant with her son Archie.

“I just didn’t want to be alive any more. And that was a very clear and real and frightening constant thought… I went to the institution, and I said that I needed to go somewhere to get help… And I was told that I couldn’t, that it wouldn’t be good for the institution.”

Thrust into a (frequently hostile) media spotlight, estranged from her father and sister, and living far away from her mother and old friends during her pregnancy, it’s not surprising that Meghan felt distressed. What is surprising is the implication that she was disallowed from accessing psychiatric care, given Prince William’s particular interest in mental health as a campaigning issue, and the fact that Prince Harry has spoken publicly about his own mental health difficulties. Prince Charles, Princess Margaret, and Princess Diana were all known to have seen therapists.

The younger royals — and now Merkle — have been enthusiastic participants in this broader discourse on mental health, which relies on a definition of mental illness that is both expansive and depoliticised. Everyone is encouraged to be more emotionally open in reaction against the ‘stiff upper lip’ adopted by the queen’s generation — but little attention is paid to the issues of wealth, class, and access to scarce public resources.

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Rather than seeing disclosure as the first step towards seeking treatment, this newly popular model understands disclosure to be a form of treatment in and of itself — in fact, the more public the disclosure, the better. Jo Hemmings, a self-described “media psychologist”, spoke on LBC radio on Tuesday to honour Meghan Markle’s own efforts in this regard, saying that: “it was extremely healthy to share it with the entire world” because “she needs the world to listen to her… she’s just taking talking therapy to its extreme”.

She has been described as “brave” by the White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki. And the mental health charity Mind tweeted out a statement acknowledging that although “opening up in this way can be really difficult… when high profile people talk about these experiences, it helps to break down the stigma around mental health issues.”

And yet it’s not at all clear what negative consequences Markle was risking in speaking about her history of depression. One of the very few public figures to have questioned her account, Piers Morgan, received more than 41,000 complaints to Ofcom, was immediately rebuked by his co-host, and has since stepped down from his position at Good Morning Britain. It seems that, on this issue at least, the public are determinedly sympathetic towards Markle.

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Not all disclosures of mental illness would be greeted with such (almost) unanimous support. Historically, celebrities who have confess to having recovered from common and invisible mental health problems like anxiety and depression are far better received than those whose displays of illness are more public and alarming – think of Britney Spears shaving her head, Michael Jackson bleaching his skin, or Tom Cruise jumping up and down on Oprah’s sofa.

In a 2018 Guardian article about her own experiences of mental illness, the journalist Hannah Jane Parkinson writes of a very particular style of “opening up”:

“In recent years the discussion around mental health has hit the mainstream. I call it the Conversation. The Conversation is dominated by positivity and the memeification of a battle won… it tends to focus on depression and anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder. It is less comfortable with the mental illnesses deemed more unpalatable – people who act erratically, hallucinate, have violent episodes or interpersonal instability.”

The Conversation shies away from conditions that are disturbing, destructive, and very clearly not curable through disclosure alone. In some rare instances, there are forms of mental distress from which people never recover, and to which the only solution is heavy medication and institutionalisation. The Conversation doesn’t know what to do about those.

Instead, the focus is on those forms of mental illness that are really just extreme manifestations of universal forms of emotional distress, like sadness and worry. Imagine the response if Markle had confessed to suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, or borderline personality disorder, or if her perinatal mental illness had manifested, not in an urge to hurt herself, but instead an urge to hurt her baby. It is one thing to admit to a depressive illness that is now passed. It is quite another to admit to a permanent condition that is liable to produce frightening and poorly understood symptoms like psychosis.

But only a small minority of psychiatric diagnoses fall into this category. In England, Mind reports that 1 in 4 people will experience a mental health problem of some kind each year, overwhelmingly either depression or anxiety, and although there is little evidence to suggest that antidepressants work better than a placebo, more than one in ten people are now taking them. For Conversation enthusiasts, these figures should be understood as positive — a sign that we are finally “opening up” about private suffering, and thereby waking up to the true prevalence of mental illness.

But few proponents of this approach ever pause to reflect on whether this kind of radical openness actually does lead to improvement. Given that suicide rates in the UK have reduced only slightly in the last 40 years, and have actually increased in the US, while rates of non-fatal self injury have shot up, it’s certainly not obvious that the new model is any more effective than the old one.

And while the expansiveness of the Conversation may potentially serve to destigmatise, it also serves to obscure. This week, the journalist and mental health campaigner Bryony Gordon described mental illness as a “great leveller”, affecting prince and pauper alike. But while it is of course true that the highly privileged do sometimes experience mental illness, this is a category of disease that is closely tied to societal conditions that both create and aggravate distress — and the Conversation, with its preference for talking therapy over material change, cannot accommodate that kind of analysis.

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When we lump together depressed duchesses and schizophrenic homeless people into the same category of “the mentally ill” — a category that, in any given year, will apparently contain fully a quarter of us —  precise analysis becomes impossible. A graphic on a government website reporting that “50% of people seen sleeping rough had mental health needs”, for instance, is now unintelligible. Does this mean that half of rough sleepers are in urgent need of being sectioned? Or would their problems be solved by relocating to California and “speaking their truth”?

A key participant in the Conversation, Heads Together — an organisation spearheaded by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and intermittently supported by Prince Harry — aims to “tackle stigma and change the conversation on mental health”, with the solutions presented all orientated around deliberately uncontroversial forms of education, generally through digital means.

Which is unsurprising, given that Prince William, as a future head of state, is required to maintain political neutrality. So although his campaigning work is no doubt sincerely meant, it is also obliged to be anodyne. It can’t mention issues like class or government policy. It can’t even demand increased funding for NHS services. It is necessarily limited to platitudinous statements which do destigmatise — albeit in a very limited way — but which also flatten and distract. The public response to Markle’s disclosure is entirely in keeping with the Conversation, which — with celebrity and royal assistance — has succeeded in normalising a very narrow band of mental illnesses, but has also stripped away any semblance of political critique.

“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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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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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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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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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.

But when it comes to our complex relationship with the royals, nothing illustrates it better than the American Cinderella story: a kind of modern riff on the original fairytale with, usually, a feminist twist. From The Prince & Me to A Christmas Prince to The Princess Switch, these fictional fantasies centre on an ordinary girl who falls in love with a prince, usually to the horror of his family, but also often to her own distress. She’s a farm girl! She doesn’t know how to curtsy or what fork to use! She hardly even bathes — and she doesn’t want to!

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The American Cinderella is independent, hard-working, and as uninterested in a royal marriage as she is unqualified for one. But love will not be denied, and in these stories, a compromise is inevitably reached: the princess-to-be teaches her stuck-up in-laws that it’s okay to embrace change, but she herself also develops a new appreciation for stodgy royal values like tradition, duty, and service. And they get married and live happily ever after, the end.

But in real life, the wedding is only the beginning.

*

Oprah’s tell-all interview with the stateside Sussexes reminds us just how much the fairytale once seemed real. Meghan Markle was the glamorous true-life realisation of that empowered princess, and her marriage to Prince Harry the stuff that modern fairytales were made of. There was the transcontinental romance, the lavish wedding, an incoming Duchess who was not just American but a mixed-race divorcee with an impressive education and a career of her own — and no, she didn’t know how to curtsy.

Granted, it wasn’t exactly like the movies; there were whispered suggestions in the gossip pages that Markle had strategically placed herself in Harry’s orbit in a way that was more wicked stepsister than Cinderella. But it was close enough. Watching from the US, there was a sense not just that Markle was living the dream, but that she was irritating to all the right people (yes, especially the racist ones) in a way that was profoundly, even historically, American. 1776 was a long time ago, but don’t we still get a little thrill out of that irreverent contempt for authority — especially if it is wearing a crown?

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Fast forward to the big twist a year ago, when Harry and Meghan announced that they would be stepping back from royal life. Even not knowing exactly what it meant, it certainly seemed like a win. A win for Meghan, who was being abused by the British tabloids (not to mention, allegedly, certain less-enlightened members of her new extended family), and also for American values, for freedom itself. From across the pond, Megxit seemed like a second, more intimate iteration of our original Revolution, complete with its own Declaration of Independence (this one announced on Instagram along with the couple’s new brand-to-be, Sussex Royal).

There was even the particularly delicious irony of Harry having appeared at a 2018 benefit performance of Hamilton — a musical about his ancestors getting kicked out of America. Harry even sang a couple lines from the song in which a grossly overconfident King George proclaims his intentions never to relinquish the nation to autonomous rule. The lyrics depict a ruler in the grips of pompous delusion, in the style of a needy lover:

“You’ll be back, soon you’ll see
You’ll remember you belong to me”

It’s funny, of course, because we all know how that little romance ended. But a year after Megxit began, it’s equally clear that the Sussexes won’t be back — and more importantly, they won’t be quiet.

*

To hear Meghan and Harry tell it, their departure from royal life was a question not of freedom, but survival. The biggest bombshell came from Meghan, who said that she was desperately lonely, isolated, and eventually suicidal, and that the Palace refused to offer support. “I didn’t want to be alive anymore,” she said.

This question of safety, physical and otherwise, loomed throughout the conversation — as did the ghost of Diana, who was also beloved by American audiences, and whose death is perceived to be at least partially the fault of the royal family who shunned her after her divorce. Harry said he feared that history would repeat itself, and Meghan described a barrage of intimidation during her pregnancy with Archie — not just death threats and tabloid harassment, but racial insensitivity from inside the palace, including concerns from an unnamed party over how “dark” their firstborn would be. Together, the couple painted a picture of desperation, being treated like outsiders by an institution that bent over backward to help everyone else.

“They were willing to lie to protect other members of the family, but they weren’t willing to tell the truth to protect me and my husband,” Meghan said.

It’s a great line that is also, alas, a little too good to sell the illusion of totally off-the-cuff, unrehearsed honesty that we’re meant to take away from this moment (despite Oprah’s assurances at the start of the interview that her subjects hadn’t been prepped in advance). It reminds you that Meghan is both an actress and an influencer, and exceptional at both — and also that this interview came after weeks of escalating spin from both camps, which reached its peak with a story that Meghan was a difficult Duchess who shamelessly bullied her staff.

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But even if those rumours are true, it’s an insignificant skirmish in a war that has already been won. Just look at the Sussexes, sitting with Oprah under a vine-draped pergola, Spotify and Netflix deals in hand, as radiant as the California sun. Meghan hasn’t just escaped back to the States with her prince in tow: she’s tossing a lit match over her shoulder — with an assist from Oprah, no less, who might just be the closest thing the US has to a Queen. Is it all a bit contrived? Without question, from the strategic displays of emotion to the “casual” followup with Meghan and Harry as they tend to their backyard flock of rescue chickens. (“I just love rescuing,” Meghan says, in the second-most loaded moment of the interview.)

But that’s Hollywood, and that’s America — and this is Meghan Markle’s home turf. She knows that what we really love, even more than a traditional fairy tale, is an underdog story that ends with a cry for freedom, a confessional interview, and a few tears. Even if it’s all just made for TV.

Typified by its remarkable tendency to sound both sincere and insincere simultaneously, this Sussex-ese appeared again in a separate news story this week. “[We are] saddened by this latest attack on her character, particularly as someone who has been the target of bullying herself and is deeply committed to supporting those who have experienced pain and trauma,” the author wrote. “She is determined to continue her work building compassion around the world and will keep striving to set an example for doing what is right and doing what is good.”

No doubt you will have guessed by now how Sussex-ese was given its name. Both of the above statements come from the House of Sussex, specifically from the spokesperson for the Duchess of Sussex and/or the Duchess herself. And I suspect that they won’t be the last — by all accounts, Sussex-ese is here to stay.

As tempting as it may be, it is not enough to dismiss the House of Sussex’s latest statements as bland, sub-Obama pabulum. They almost always have a certain twist of their own; a style which suggests that Harry and, more importantly, Meghan are not only surprised, but almost amazed that anybody might think ill of them. Excerpts from the couple’s upcoming interview with Oprah Winfrey only confirm this.

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History is, of course, rife with examples of princes and their spouses expressing their distaste with the lèse-majesté of their critics. But what’s different about Sussex-ese is that it is a creation born not from the Duke’s blue blood, so much as the couple’s unquestionably golden intentions. And as a result, a very modern form of deference is demanded: do not criticise me, for I am doing much good in the world.

Take the first quote above. It relates to the Duchess’s recent successful privacy case against the Mail on Sunday, which published excerpts of a private letter sent by Meghan to her estranged father. Now you could be forgiven for thinking that, even if she weren’t a former actress, the relationship between the wife of the person sixth in line to the British throne and her father is a matter of public interest. You would, however, be wrong — at least that’s the implication of the judge’s decision to halt the trial before witnesses could be called.

But even if you agree with Lord Justice Warby, it is hard to see how “we all won” because of it.  For example, you may not approve of the type of prurient Royal-watcher who wishes to know every detail of the Duchess’s life, but clearly those people don’t view the verdict as a “win”. More importantly, though, there is something deeply unsavoury about the attempt to extrapolate Meghan’s personal victory into a universal one, particularly since most people will never be in a position remotely analogous to the one in which the Sussexes find themselves.

The same can also be said of their response this week to accusations that Meghan bullied two royal aides out of Kensington Palace. Perhaps anticipating that the Sussex’s Oprah interview will show everyone but Harry and Meghan in a bad light, the bullying story may well have been a pre-emptive defence of sorts from London.

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Either way, the nature of the Sussexes’ response — talking about how “saddened” they are — was entirely in fitting with the sanctimonious language used by so many public figures today. What is uncommon, however, is for a person of such power as Meghan to deflect the harm caused to her alleged victims by stressing her own victim-credentials.

This is exactly what the Duchess does by saying that she has been “the target of bullying herself”. And, of course, this Sussex-ese makes almost no sense. There is no reason why someone who has been bullied cannot themselves be a bully; in fact, we’re constantly told the opposite. Yet it isn’t until the claim at the end of the statement that the Sussex-ese becomes completely overpowering. We must assume that the Sussexes have some idea, at least, of statements put out in their name. So how could they possibly allow a statement that claims Meghan “is determined to continue her work building compassion around the world” to be published? Try it for yourself. If a person asked if they could describe you as a person who is busy building “compassion around the world”, would you not turn around and suggest that it could be toned down a bit?

That isn’t to say that the Duchess has had an inconsequential career. But appearing in Suits, marrying a Prince and starting a podcast are eccentric ways to make the world a better place — let alone “set an example”. Indeed, what kind of person honestly believes that everyone should look to them as a beacon “for doing what is right and doing what is good”? Even the Archbishop of Canterbury wouldn’t claim such moral authority.

Unfortunately, the rise of Sussex-ese suggests that the Sussexes have drifted away not just from the world that created them but, particularly in the case of Harry, from the world that grounded them. The type of service embodied in both the army and the Royal family is such that you should not have to say that you are saving the world.

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And as we can now see, when you do bestow that authority on yourself, your inevitable failure is made all the more bitter. For if the latest bullying allegations are true, they will serve as very public proof that the Duchess of Sussex has failed at her own self-appointed mission. You cannot spread love, compassion and understanding around the world if you are cruel and bullying to the people around you — especially those who are, in hierarchy terms, unquestionably below you.

And that is why the creation of Sussex-ese was never going to be convincing. People do not like being told what to do, think or feel by people they do not admire. As working royals, the Sussexes accumulated a certain amount of respect — but that all vanished when they gave up a life of duty for one that enables them to preach from a number of well-remunerated platforms.

If anything, all Sussex-ese does is allow Harry and Meghan to remain blissfully unaware of their fall from grace. It means that the Sussexes can continue to tell us how to “all win”, how to be good and how to save the world, oblivious to the fact that the further away from royal life they drift, the less moral authority they have. And therein lies the irony of it all: that in trying to escape the Firm, the Sussexes have ended up demanding more deference and behaving with more grandiosity than any British royal for generations.

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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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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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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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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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.

This was on my mind while watching the BBC’s beautifully-acted, directed and produced moral disaster Noughts + Crosses, based on the series of novels by Malorie Blackman.

Presented as a race-reversal work, it is set in Britain at a time when Africa has colonised Europe, where politicians are in hoc to African leaders and where, as a result, black people find themselves at the top of society while whites form a racial underclass.

Many teenagers or parents with teenage children will have encountered the book, and ever since its publication in 2001 Noughts and Crosses and its sequels have haunted not just bestseller lists but also classroom reading lists. Various aspects of the work are meant to make it perfect fodder for teenagers, most significantly the fact that it is seen as a work of anti-racism.

The plot centres around two star-cross’d lovers who break this racial divide, and away from this central plotline the heavy-handed racial role-reversal is presented everywhere. In Blackman’s fictional world white people are known as noughts and black people are known as crosses; the black characters even occasionally use the term ‘blankers’ of the white people, which is obviously an analogy to the N-word.

At the opening of the series a group of young white men are hanging around on the streets when some black police officers decide to come over and break them up, eventually arbitrarily arresting and mistreating them. One of their victims is hospitalised, leading to increased tensions in the country at large and as a result the black politicians who lead the country discuss stop-and-search powers being increased on white youths. The daughter of one of these politicians will, provoked by these events, soon cross the racial divide.

The BBC adaptation presents all this and more in a lush and expensive six-part series, and it is possible that some people will take a lot away from it. Certainly the programme’s makers and actors are hoping as much. In interviews ahead of the series Masali Baduza, who plays the leader character Sephy Hadley, said that she hopes that the series will “kick-start a conversation about racism”.

Meantime Paterson Joseph, who plays Sephy’s ruthless politician father Kamal Hadley, has said of the themes of the drama: “I don’t think it’s a zeitgeist, because I think this issue is always there, but I think we’re particularly living in a time where the volume has been turned up on all that. When you’re shooting, you know it’s significant because you know it’s going to upset some people, maybe a lot of people, on both sides of the ethnic lines.”

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Take a moment to reflect on what is so wrong about that statement and you will get a sense of what is so wrong with this drama. “Both sides of the ethnic lines.” When did any British reader last hear such a phrase used? What are these ‘sides’ and why are there just two of them and where are they so clearly delineated?

For the programme-makers, the answers are clear. They have said that they hope that their series will “open people’s eyes” to prejudice. The author of the original novels has also chimed in, judging her own work to have never been more relevant, because as she puts it “Unfortunately the facts show there is more hate crime in Britain and people being judged on skin colour or religion or sexual orientation”.

Among everyone involved in this programme a common theme stands out above all: this drama is needed because it is relevant to our times. Allow me to make a counter case.

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While watching the first episode it seemed to me that there was only one term to describe what the programme makers had created: Powell-ite. And not just Powell-ite but derivative of the worst part of Powell-ism.

What the BBC have done is to make a drama in which the worst quotation Enoch Powell gave in his “Rivers of Blood” speech is fulfilled, in which black people do indeed have “the whip hand” over white people in Britain. As such, I couldn’t help thinking throughout that the programme would end up being used by ‘identitarian’ types across Britain and further afield. Small though such people may be in number, Noughts + Crosses would be a very fine recruiting tool for their cause. The most dystopian of their warnings can now be shared with the widest possible audience in the most lavish licence fee-funded way imaginable.

Indeed the programme illustrates a paradox in this contentious subject, which is that a certain type of racist and a certain type of anti-racist can end up meeting at certain points of mutual convenience. For both have a desire to exaggerate tensions and exacerbate divides, each in the name of their own allegedly contrary viewpoints.

But the greatest flaw with this dystopian vision is the deeply-dated nature of the society that Blackman and the BBC imagine themselves to be holding up a mirror to. Everything in Noughts + Crosses reeks of a racial debate in Britain which is not just decades old but decades out of date. There is something deeply embarrassing in imagining that British racism and anti-racism are stuck in this Broadwater riots era, when even then the attitudes towards race in Britain were not remotely as simplistic and delineated as Blackman and co present them as being.

If that was the case in the 1970s or ‘80s then how much more is it the case today? The programme makers want people to imagine that Britain today has especial need of this drama, as though we need more “national teaching moments” over racism. A belief which, as the publicity quotes have shown, is intimately tied up with a specific liberal chattering classes view of what has happened in Britain in recent years.

That narrative is our old favourite one, in which the British people voted Brexit and then celebrated their victory with an orgy of hate crime. A narrative that comes along with its own fake news, fake statistics and faked, highly politicised, outrage. It is a deep insult to the British people, who have borne this assault on their right to vote with considerable stoicism. Yet still the insults come.

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Now, once again, the insults come at the hands of the BBC, which imagines that this racist country of ours needs its national broadcaster to go some way to correcting its licence fee-payers’ outrageous racial prejudice. So it is worth remembering where we are in the UK. Not where the BBC and its favourite authors imagine us to be – but where we actually are.

We live in a country in which the Home Secretary is the daughter of immigrants. Where the Chancellor of the Exchequer and numerous other members of the government are what is now known as a “persons of colour”. A country where the Royal Family has black members. Where the highest offices of state and all the major professions have celebrated black leaders. Racism is so absent from British society that all of this has happened with zero negative comment; nobody in any position of any prominence has said that any of this is bad or wrong.

So absent is racism from our society that when the country does want to hound somebody for being racist they have to search and find some elderly broadcaster or disc jockey who has said something on social media which could be interpreted by a dishonest and ungenerous person as potentially being seen as racist.

A truly racist society would have no difficulty locating racism in its public life. An actually racist country would not allow people of different ethnic backgrounds to make their way to the top of society (just look at numerous second and third-world countries and you can see that fact in operation). And of course an actually racist country would not have people of every racial group in the world trying to come into it, legally or otherwise.

Noughts and Crosses may be beautifully made, but it is an ugly piece of work. A social lesson stuck in the past about an imaginary society that is an insult to a real one.

Marriage is a legally recognised agreement after all, one that has been shown to confer many benefits for health and wellbeing. Why should I not be able to rent my place as wife and mother in my particular family to others who wish to enjoy some of those benefits?

Ryan Bourne of the Cato Institute recently argued that the technology exists to enable us to trade citizenship rights. Calling the right of British nationals to work in the UK’s high-wage economy “an effective property right we own but can’t currently trade”, he suggests we could ease immigration pressures by implementing an Airbnb-style secondary market in working rights.

If we frame citizenship, or marriage, as something owned by an individual, it is simply a set of bureaucratic permissions. Like the right to live in a house, surely this could be traded in a marketplace? And if the technology exists to create a citizenship market, surely we could do the same for marriage? I could sublet my wifedom and nip off for a weekend on the tiles with the proceeds. Why not?

The problem is obvious — my husband and daughter would, not unreasonably, object. She would no more want her bedtime story read by a stranger than my husband would want to share a bed with that stranger.

My marriage is not a good I own but a relationship, created by mutual consent. In a marriage, I give up some of my autonomy, privacy and private property rights by declaring my commitment to the relationship. What I gain is of immeasurable value: a sphere of belonging, the foundation of my existence as a social creature.

Likewise, citizenship implies relations of belonging, both of me to a community but also a community to me. It also implies commitments on behalf of the community of which I am a citizen. And in exchange it requires commitments of me, as a citizen: to uphold the law, to behave according to its customs and so on. As the late Roger Scruton put it in a 2017 speech:

“The citizen participates in government and does not just submit to it. Although citizens recognise natural law as a moral limit, they accept that they make laws for themselves. They are not just subjects: they appoint the sovereign power and are in a sense parts of that sovereign power, bound to it by a quasi-contract which is also an existential tie. The arrangement is not necessarily democratic, but is rather founded on a relation of mutual accountability.”

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Just as my husband and daughter have a stake in who is entitled to be called “wife” or “Mummy” in our particular context, so other citizens of a nation have a stake in who is entitled to the rights conferred by citizenship.

In this light we can better understand the revulsion that greeted the actions of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in trademarking “Sussex Royal” for personal commercial gain. Royalty, after all, does not exist in a vacuum. It is not an intrinsic property of a person, like blue eyes or long legs, but something conferred both by the monarchy and also by the subjects of that monarchy.

As Charles I discovered in 1649, ultimately no king can govern save by the consent of his subjects. Royalty is not a private property, but a relationship. The popular disgust and anger engendered by the Sussexes’ move to transfer their stock of royalty from the relational public sphere to that of private property is in truth anger at their privatising something which does not belong to them but to the whole nation.

In The Question Concerning Technology, writes Josh Pauling, Heidegger argues that digital technology uncouples humans from what is real, paving the way for a mindset that treats everything as “standing-reserve”, or in other words “resources to be consumed”. For Heidegger, seeing the world thus is dangerous because it flattens all other perspectives:

Commodifying nature and humanity leads us to discard other understandings of being-in-the-world and the practices, beliefs and ideas that accompany them: all aspects of reality are incorporated into the ordering of standing-reserve.

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The Sussexes’ move to turn their royalty into royalties provokes anger because it flattens something rich in socially created meaning to the simple order of resource: an ore to be mined. It turns something from a relationship to an object, and is — like mining — destructive of what it consumes. For while relationships, being dialogic, can be infinitely renewed, once the goods created in social relationships are claimed as private property by one party in that relationship, they will cease to be renewed.

My husband’s goodwill would rapidly wear thin were I to Airbnb my role in our family. Similarly, Bourne’s citizenship marketplace fails to consider how the general population would react to seeing fellow citizens renting their right to work to non-citizens and swanning about spending the unearned proceeds. And the goodwill enjoyed by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex while discharging their royal duties has already evaporated, now it transpires they wish to enjoy the privileges of their elevated station without embracing its obligations.

Treated as objects to be exploited, relational meanings wither and die. Treated as dynamic relationships, they are infinitely renewable. In this sense, they are more akin to ecologies in the natural world. In Expecting the Earth, Wendy Wheeler argues that in fact ecologies are systems of meaning: whether at the level of DNA or megafauna, she says, living things deal not in information but in meanings that change dynamically depending on context.

Why does any of this matter? “Modernity is a surprisingly simple deal,”  writes Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Deus. “The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.” The impressive achievements of modernity might make the loss of meaning seem, to some, a fair exchange.

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But if Wheeler is right, meaning is more than an optional seasoning on the mechanistic business of living. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl observes of his time in Nazi concentration camps that those who felt they had a goal or purpose were also those most likely to survive.

Indeed, the growing phenomenon of “deaths of despair” is driven, some argue, by deterioration in community bonds, good-quality jobs, dignity and social connection — in a word, the relational goods that confer meaning and purpose on life. As Frankl observed, humans need meaning as much as we need air, food and water: “Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.”

An order of commerce that treats relational ecologies as objects that can be exploited will exhaust those objects. That is, in the course of its commercial activities it actively destroys one of the basic preconditions for human flourishing: meaning.

The Estonian thinker Ivar Puura has called the destruction of meaning “semiocide”. As concern mounts about the effects of pollution and emissions on the earth, campaigners have called for new laws to criminalise the destruction of ecologies, which they call “ecocide”. Perhaps we should take semiocide more seriously as well.

The Royals traditionally function as ciphers: representations in human form of entire world views that are otherwise hard to talk about. As Henry VIII represented the break from Rome, and Victoria represented Empire, they put a face on the big ideas of the age, and people line up behind them. In this clash, things are no different.

Today, we are told, in a drawing room at Sandringham, a showdown is taking place between Meghan, the unhappy American princess dialling in from Canada, and the 93-year-old Queen — mediated by their various princes. It would be hard to find two more suitable representatives than these two women of the clashing philosophies that, in different ways, have dominated British and European politics for the past decade. Tradition versus progress, duty versus self-actualisation, community versus commerce, nation versus globalisation.

There are hints of this in the opinion polling splashed all over the weekend papers. No matter which version you look at (YouGov, JL Partners, Deltapoll have all had a go), each ‘Megxit’ survey reveals the same central tension in public attitudes. A majority of people support the decision of Harry and Meghan to go their own way and overwhelmingly think they should be allowed to do it; but at the same time there is a noticeable harshness in the punitive sanctions which the public think they should receive. The couple should be stripped of their titles, their home, their military honours, barred from receiving financial support even from Prince Charles, and left even without police protection.

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There’s a degree of sympathy for them, but also the audible bolting of the door behind them.

On one level, the British public have become liberals with amazing completeness in just over a generation. From the ‘Red Wall’ in the North to affluent London, from young to old, we have accepted and grown fond of a world of individual rights, self-realisation and freedom from judgment. By the logic of this world-view, there can be no doubt: of course the Sussexes must be free to do as they please and shake off the constraints of their elders. Who would stand in the way of a young family’s search for happiness?

But on another level, there is a growing fear that this same logic, in its relentless ratchet towards ‘progress’, will inadvertently destroy the things we hold most dear. It’s an uneven conflict because where the liberal world view is coherent, defensible and ostensibly virtuous, many of the things it threatens are hard to defend in the same terms. This mismatch makes people defensive and angry, as the Sussexes are now discovering.

In this competition of world views, the monarchy is highly vulnerable. In yesterday’s poll, even millennials are still clearly in favour of keeping the monarchy, and boomers even more resoundingly so. But there can be no logical liberal argument either for raising up an arbitrary family through birth, or for denying their individual rights once they’re there (denying them a political vote is already a breach of their human rights). If the monarchy has to justify itself in this way of thinking, it will eventually fall.

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Meghan was initially welcomed with open arms by the British public, and her Hollywood backstory and mixed-race background brought something new to an institution people like to see gradually evolve. But she has recently come to represent precisely the combination of woke politics and global corporate power that a majority of British voters are trying to find ways to resist — instead of modernising a beloved old elite, she now seems to be dragging her husband into the hated new elite, and it feels dangerous.

Her slick new website, the trademarking of ‘Sussex Royal’, like a golf course, complete with corporate monogram and merchandise rights, is upsetting to people, not only because it is naff, but because it looks horribly convincing as a business proposition. As one commentator wrote (in a piece defending the couple entitled ‘Harry and Meghan will outgrow the Queen’) “no celebrity couple on earth better embodies the zeitgeist of our age… they will be billionaires before the 2030s”.

The Sussexes are already drawing up their battle lines. Via their surrogate Tom Bradby, they are threatening a “full, no holds barred” interview that would “tarnish the royal family’s international standing” by accusing the Palace of being racist and sexist. If there is to be a showdown between big business and hyper-liberal politics on one side and a creaky, beloved but illogical, centuries-old national institution on the other, Meghan and Harry will start with the advantage.

But just as the monarchy becomes the new battleground, there’s an absence of any cogent defence of it. The voices critical of Meghan and Harry, such as Piers Morgan’s, have framed the whole thing in personal terms: Meghan and Harry are selfish freeloaders and have been personally offensive to the Queen. Spoilt brats being rude to grandma, is the critique.

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But accepting that we should choose sides based on their behaviour as individuals already surrenders too much ground. Monarchy can’t be defended in these terms — no matter how impeccably behaved, the merits of individual Royals can never be fairly deserving, and so eventually that argument will lose.

If there is to be any hope for, if we must, Team Queen over Team Meghan, it must start by flat-out rejecting the relevance of liberal individualism in this context. The royals are not interesting as individuals, they are not there on merit, they must not mistake themselves for celebrities. The monarchy is there to symbolise the continuity of the nation within a family. The less we know about them as individuals the better.

The institution, meanwhile, cannot be judged on its internal logic but on the success of the constitution it makes possible. By effectively relegating politicians to second-tier managers and reminding us that the country is much more than its government, it ultimately gives people reassurance that tomorrow will be recognisably like today. It has given Britain an atmosphere of gentle progress and freedom, almost uniquely in Europe, for hundreds of years; it has saved us from the excesses of American-style politics while acting as a necessary drag on the intellectual fashions of the day.

This is as practically valuable to the UK in 2020 as it ever was, even as it flies against liberal logic. If the monarchy is a key component of our national atmosphere of stability, and that stability literally makes people across the world want to live here and businesses want to be based here, what is happening today at Sandringham matters. It’s a battle of philosophies, and Her Maj needs better back up than this.

This week the game got an unwitting boost thanks to news that Meghan Markle, otherwise known as the Duchess of Sussex, has guest-edited the September edition of Vogue. The contents of the issue are perhaps unsurprising. As well as inevitably celebrating prominent women, such as the teenaged school truant Greta Thunberg, the Duchess has also set out to prove that women don’t need men to give them status. Something she has done by including an interview with her husband, Prince Harry.

This in itself has drawn a certain amount of comment, and will not have calmed fears some people had that a highly political figure marrying into the nation’s most necessarily non-politically opinionated family might cause problems down the line. The fact that Meghan Markle’s pre-Harry politics might be best described as ‘woke’ is in some ways unimportant – a prominent Donald Trump-supporting Republican marrying into the Royal Family would raise similar concerns, to say the least.

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The worry was that Prince Harry’s marriage to Ms Markle would end up tipping him towards her political path, fears that will not have been calmed by his appearance in the high-end fashion magazine. In the royally-guest-edited issue, Prince Harry talks about a number of things, the headline-grabber being his claim that he and his wife would not have more than two children because of its impact on the environment and climate change.

It isn’t at all clear how many people in developing countries with a population boom look to the House of Windsor for guidance on child-production, but in a way this is at least familiar, soft, Royal-environmental boilerplate. The sort of thing which is allowed to be voiced by non-monarch members of the Royal Family because it is hard to object too strenuously and it causes no serious harm.

It is the Prince’s follow-up comments, however, that dish up the problem, less for his audience than for the Prince himself. Watching Prince Harry beginning to play the game of identifying ‘unconscious bias’ is like gazing at a hapless amateur juggling with loaded pistols; it is enough to make any well-disposed person want to scream “Stop” and seize the guns from his unsuspecting hands.

The comments appear in a conversation between the Prince and primatologist Dr Jane Goodall, on the subject of what humans can learn from chimpanzees. At one point Dr Goodall says that children do not notice skin colour, to which Harry adds: “But again, just as stigma is handed down from generation to generation, your perspective on the world and on life and on people is something that is taught to you. It’s learned from your family, learned from the older generation, or from advertising, from your environment.” Well perhaps.

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And then Prince Harry goes further: “It’s the same as an unconscious bias. 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.”

Of course, in some ways this is no more than a statement of the obvious. People acquire things from life as they go through it. We pick up ideas from our families, friends and the world around us (although we also shed as we pick up).

Perhaps we all have some ‘unconscious biases’: the interesting thing is which ones become acceptable to recognise (and to politically weaponise) and which do not. It may be, for instance, that Prince Harry suffers from a number of unconscious biases of his own, as may his wife, but then there are some biases that people are happy to highlight and politicise, and others thought best to skip over.

One of the most extreme forms of – generally unconscious – bias that people demonstrate throughout their lives is towards attractive people, and not only in the selection of partners. Study after study shows that good-looking men and women stand a better chance of promotion in their chosen field of work than people who are average-looking or actively unattractive.

For instance, it may be carefully suggested that the editor of September’s issue of Vogue would not be editing September’s edition of Vogue if, rather than the acclaimed beauty she is, she looked rather more like a member of the Addams family. Or indeed an average-looking member of the general public. There may be many reasons why Prince Harry requested Meghan Markle’s hand in marriage, but her looks must have – consciously or otherwise – at least counted in her favour on the way to the altar.

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Another form of bias that people express throughout their lives – again, consciously or otherwise – might be an inclination towards someone who is financially or socially secure. I should never want to accuse a Duchess – or any other member of the Royal Family – of any variety of bias. And yet it seems possible that in her search for a husband Ms Markle may have demonstrated some form of bias (unconscious or otherwise) towards thrones and their heirs. I will put the point no stronger. But in her search for love, Ms Markle must have met many people. Perhaps she met many princes and mingled with many a duke. But it is striking, at the very least, that of all the people who appeared across her path, the one she ended up marrying in a low-key ceremony at Windsor Castle happened to be the second son of the Prince of Wales.

Did either of these (potential) expressions of unconscious bias affect anyone else? Perhaps not as badly as some expressions of bias towards people because of their race. And yet a large number of perfectly charming women never made it to the Duke’s side, at the altar or anywhere else. And a large number of slightly plain women have still not been invited to edit major fashion magazines, even fashion magazines which have become rather boringly preachy.

But this is simply an inconsistency, and we all live with inconsistencies. The problem with the Prince’s comments is more that they are part of a particular political and intellectual conveyor belt, and that belt goes only in one direction. After ‘unconscious bias’, in this pseudo-intellectual game of our time, comes the whole concept of ‘privilege’ and the earning or un-earning thereof. The privilege discussion decides – once the bias has been worked out – who has the right to speak, where, when and how often. It works out who might have benefited from ‘privilege’ and who might not. It then dictates the hierarchical order in which people may or may not speak and listen. It demotes people with privilege while aspiring to elevate those without.

People may play whatever games they think they need to play in order to achieve or retain the position they desire. I simply say – by way of warning – that though the Sussexs may think that they are playing this one with deftness and aplomb, come the next round – the discussion about unearned privilege – it is possible that Harry of Wales, and his Duchess, may find a snake where they had imagined only to find a ladder.

On Sunday, in the ITV documentary Harry & Meghan: An African Journey, the Duke of Sussex told friendly journalist Tom Bradby of his misery at the negative coverage he and Meghan receive.

Harry is suing various tabloid newspapers for breach of privacy and alleged telephone-hacking. Using Africa as a backdrop – gruesome and tin-eared, but what in his life has allowed him to develop empathy? – he spoke of their misery at the intrusion.

Harry has suffered from monarchy, and has spoken about the trauma before. “I thought I was out of the woods,” he said. “But suddenly it all came back. And now I have a family to protect, so everything that she [Diana] went through, and what happened to her is incredibly raw, every single day. And that’s not me being paranoid. That’s just me not wanting a repeat of the past”.

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Then he said: “I think being part of this family, in this role, in this job, every single time I see a camera, every single time I hear a click, every single time I see a flash it takes me straight back so in that respect it’s the worst reminder of her life as opposed to the best”. It was shocking, but so were the sanctimonious responses that Harry should be silent, and grateful for the expensive kitchens – to be a vessel.

The system demands that royals be treated as demigods but what happens when one of those demigods allows itself to be seen as human, with needs which are not served by being royal but are instead maimed by it? Usually, a crisis.

Edward VIII abdicated using the excuse that he was not allowed to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcée. Any perceptive reader would understand that Edward chose Wallis so he could escape; but royalty is not allowed to be that honest – a sacrifice is a sacrifice, and who wants to hear the sobbing at the altar? Princess Diana told of her unhappiness, brought monarchy to another crisis, and we know how it ended. We laid the flowers.

Now Harry will not be silent, and this must be the cause of the apparent rift between him and William. By seeking to shed light on monarchy, and how it maims, he is imperilling his brother’s throne. We know that the Windsors are ruthless. That is why they are still here.

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I wonder if Harry’s course is similar to that of his great-great uncle King Edward; if, unconsciously, he married a woman who did not understand monarchy and so, in not understanding – or tolerating it – would free him? Meghan, like Diana, obviously believed in the fairy tale; she had either forgotten, or never known, that fairy tales are brutal.

Harry has broken the convention that royalty does not say how it feels. He has shattered the bargain that, in return for obsessive attention – I will not call it privilege, because it isn’t – you submit to be feasted on, in every aspect of your life. The only possible way to survive is to say nothing, do nothing, be nothing – to be the vessel – but Harry cannot do this. Catherine Middleton, born into the middle class, can; it is as if, as an outsider who watched monarchy, she knew the market.

The non-royal Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon could do it too. Diana couldn’t, and she did not live in the age of Twitter and Instagram, and a surfeit of news accelerating every trend. Nor can Harry, trying to recover from the death of his mother, after which he has coerced into walking behind her coffin, presumably to protect his father’s reputation.

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The duchess, meanwhile, said she was not living but existing, that she is not “okay”. Her British friends had told her not to marry Harry “because the British tabloids will destroy your life’’. She then said: “I never thought this would be easy, but I thought it would be fair.”

I found this touching, because it was never going to be fair. Are you fair to that which you consume? The media does not hate Meghan, nor does it love her – it is simply indifferent. They are material to be consumed, which is why a tabloid will have pieces both for and against them within pages of each other. This piece, of course, is part of the consumption.

I would liberate Britain from this dirty bargain, which infantilises the public, succours the class system, fills newspapers with junk and ruins the object of its obsession. I think Harry is right to sue, but it will not serve him. You cannot make monarchy rational, or safe for its victims; you cannot amend it, or make it kind.

It was always brutal, but this is an age of infinite cruelty and dehumanisation. It was sad to see them so bewildered, for they do not understand the bargain they have made. Harry is demanding to be allowed to be human, and, for monarchy, that is crisis. I wonder if, when he speaks of continuing his mother’s work, this is what he really means.

This week the game got an unwitting boost thanks to news that Meghan Markle, otherwise known as the Duchess of Sussex, has guest-edited the September edition of Vogue. The contents of the issue are perhaps unsurprising. As well as inevitably celebrating prominent women, such as the teenaged school truant Greta Thunberg, the Duchess has also set out to prove that women don’t need men to give them status. Something she has done by including an interview with her husband, Prince Harry.

This in itself has drawn a certain amount of comment, and will not have calmed fears some people had that a highly political figure marrying into the nation’s most necessarily non-politically opinionated family might cause problems down the line. The fact that Meghan Markle’s pre-Harry politics might be best described as ‘woke’ is in some ways unimportant – a prominent Donald Trump-supporting Republican marrying into the Royal Family would raise similar concerns, to say the least.

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The worry was that Prince Harry’s marriage to Ms Markle would end up tipping him towards her political path, fears that will not have been calmed by his appearance in the high-end fashion magazine. In the royally-guest-edited issue, Prince Harry talks about a number of things, the headline-grabber being his claim that he and his wife would not have more than two children because of its impact on the environment and climate change.

It isn’t at all clear how many people in developing countries with a population boom look to the House of Windsor for guidance on child-production, but in a way this is at least familiar, soft, Royal-environmental boilerplate. The sort of thing which is allowed to be voiced by non-monarch members of the Royal Family because it is hard to object too strenuously and it causes no serious harm.

It is the Prince’s follow-up comments, however, that dish up the problem, less for his audience than for the Prince himself. Watching Prince Harry beginning to play the game of identifying ‘unconscious bias’ is like gazing at a hapless amateur juggling with loaded pistols; it is enough to make any well-disposed person want to scream “Stop” and seize the guns from his unsuspecting hands.

The comments appear in a conversation between the Prince and primatologist Dr Jane Goodall, on the subject of what humans can learn from chimpanzees. At one point Dr Goodall says that children do not notice skin colour, to which Harry adds: “But again, just as stigma is handed down from generation to generation, your perspective on the world and on life and on people is something that is taught to you. It’s learned from your family, learned from the older generation, or from advertising, from your environment.” Well perhaps.

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And then Prince Harry goes further: “It’s the same as an unconscious bias. 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.”

Of course, in some ways this is no more than a statement of the obvious. People acquire things from life as they go through it. We pick up ideas from our families, friends and the world around us (although we also shed as we pick up).

Perhaps we all have some ‘unconscious biases’: the interesting thing is which ones become acceptable to recognise (and to politically weaponise) and which do not. It may be, for instance, that Prince Harry suffers from a number of unconscious biases of his own, as may his wife, but then there are some biases that people are happy to highlight and politicise, and others thought best to skip over.

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One of the most extreme forms of – generally unconscious – bias that people demonstrate throughout their lives is towards attractive people, and not only in the selection of partners. Study after study shows that good-looking men and women stand a better chance of promotion in their chosen field of work than people who are average-looking or actively unattractive.

For instance, it may be carefully suggested that the editor of September’s issue of Vogue would not be editing September’s edition of Vogue if, rather than the acclaimed beauty she is, she looked rather more like a member of the Addams family. Or indeed an average-looking member of the general public. There may be many reasons why Prince Harry requested Meghan Markle’s hand in marriage, but her looks must have – consciously or otherwise – at least counted in her favour on the way to the altar.

Another form of bias that people express throughout their lives – again, consciously or otherwise – might be an inclination towards someone who is financially or socially secure. I should never want to accuse a Duchess – or any other member of the Royal Family – of any variety of bias. And yet it seems possible that in her search for a husband Ms Markle may have demonstrated some form of bias (unconscious or otherwise) towards thrones and their heirs. I will put the point no stronger. But in her search for love, Ms Markle must have met many people. Perhaps she met many princes and mingled with many a duke. But it is striking, at the very least, that of all the people who appeared across her path, the one she ended up marrying in a low-key ceremony at Windsor Castle happened to be the second son of the Prince of Wales.

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Did either of these (potential) expressions of unconscious bias affect anyone else? Perhaps not as badly as some expressions of bias towards people because of their race. And yet a large number of perfectly charming women never made it to the Duke’s side, at the altar or anywhere else. And a large number of slightly plain women have still not been invited to edit major fashion magazines, even fashion magazines which have become rather boringly preachy.

But this is simply an inconsistency, and we all live with inconsistencies. The problem with the Prince’s comments is more that they are part of a particular political and intellectual conveyor belt, and that belt goes only in one direction. After ‘unconscious bias’, in this pseudo-intellectual game of our time, comes the whole concept of ‘privilege’ and the earning or un-earning thereof. The privilege discussion decides – once the bias has been worked out – who has the right to speak, where, when and how often. It works out who might have benefited from ‘privilege’ and who might not. It then dictates the hierarchical order in which people may or may not speak and listen. It demotes people with privilege while aspiring to elevate those without.

People may play whatever games they think they need to play in order to achieve or retain the position they desire. I simply say – by way of warning – that though the Sussexs may think that they are playing this one with deftness and aplomb, come the next round – the discussion about unearned privilege – it is possible that Harry of Wales, and his Duchess, may find a snake where they had imagined only to find a ladder.