We do have a prince whistle-blower, however, telling his fury across six episodes of Netflix’s Harry & Meghan: the first three were released yesterday, and his memoir Spare comes next month. The TV series opens in the VIP Windsor Suite at Heathrow Airport the day the prince left Britain. It tells the story of his meeting Meghan, a coup de foudre, with summaries of his childhood and adolescence, and hers. There are parts on slavery and the British Empire; the stalking and death of his mother; the behaviour of elements of the media (offering her parents money for stories and paying neighbours to mount cameras over-looking her garden); the run-up to the wedding.

The response from the media — many of whom are being sued by the prince — has been negative. The media are accused of intrusion, where they claim there was none: a shot of the couple with their son was taken from an agreed position, and a picture of a paparazzi wall was from a Harry Potter premiere. Media say the cameras he complains of were permitted by the palace, and many were, but that compounds his misery: his family colluded with it. It is sleight of hand, of course, but who can argue they weren’t hounded? Harry shouted at a photographer as a young man: “Why don’t you just leave me alone?” It made the front page: not as an example of our immorality, but of his.

His mother, Diana, was similarly traduced for her Panorama interview. “She was deceived into giving the interview,” Harry says in the documentary, “but she spoke the truth of her experience”: that her husband abandoned her before their wedding day, but he had trauma of his own. And here he reveals the bitterness of monarchy: they are meat or mirrors. They exist to be consumed, or provide a pleasing reflection, and if they resist this, they will be punished. We require absolute compliance for our attention. He asks, remembering his mother’s tears: what am I part of?

It is so obvious that he has PTSD from his mother’s life and death, there is almost nothing left to say. There are videos of him and William in the documentary looking strained but repressing it to be polite. William shows his teeth in a photocall and lies that is happy. Even their father is shown saying that if you don’t learn to negotiate the cameras, you will go mad. Harry says he remembers very little of Diana from his early life, and that makes sense: if you hide your sadness from a child, you hide everything. He remembers the cameras though: they are his most powerful memory. He says that women he wanted were chased away, as his mother was chased away: “the media…. had driven so many other people away from me”.

Like Edward VIII, he chose a woman who he thought would free him because, as a non-British subject, she was not daunted by status. She enabled him, unlike Edward VIII, to relive the trauma of his mother’s experience, and regain some control of it. He says he fell in love with Meghan when he saw a photograph of her with dog’s ears and a dog’s nose, and that is understandable. He is an English nobleman.

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It is true that Meghan is easy to mock. She is ridiculous in the way that all rich people who want to be known for goodness are, and so is he. She seems aggrieved that when performing royal duties, she had to wear neutrals (fawn, camel, cream). Then we saw a photograph of the late and current queens dressed as Cadbury’s Roses for contrast, and I laughed.

There is a shot of Meghan feeding chickens in Montecito. In the next shot, she is sitting beside a bowl of crystal balls, and I wondered briefly if they were the eggs. She seems uncomfortable expressing emotion and hides under a film of quasi-emotional language so hackneyed it is meaningless. I think it indicates insecurity, not self-love: before one date with Harry, she had a shower because “I wanted to look more like myself”. Does Meghan un-showered not look like herself?

The most interesting thing I read about her is that she is a calligrapher, which is a search for beauty and control. Her surroundings are important to her: Hermes blankets are neatly folded as she cries. But Meghan was the trigger, not the cause, of his semi-enlightenment: he chose her. She is not a reincarnation of Princess Diana, even if he compares her “empathy” and “warmth” to his mother’s. But he is. He cannot leave monarchy. But he cannot stay. He is half-conscious, and half-free.

He knows the inherent cruelty in monarchy because he lived it: the adamantine hierarchy, the suppression of emotion, the demand for ownership, the disconnection of family members from one another. After his mother died, when he wasn’t at school, it seems he was often alone at Highgrove with servants and police protection officers. He can attempt to atone for his “unconscious” bias – his description of his apology to the Jewish community for dressing as a Nazi was awkward, and moving, as I imagined a penitent teenage prince at an audience with the Chief Rabbi. He can call himself a feminist, and environmentalist, and it is true that, as Meghan says, his Instagram feed is filled with photographs of elephants.

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This is where he becomes ridiculous, and pitiable though: where he is half-conscious, and half-free. You cannot leave the royal family and seek to keep the status it confers on you: not if you are repentant for its racism and sexism. You cannot talk about racism and sexism and environmentalism without talking about class. The difference between healing, his obsession, and the lack of it is not just self-realisation: it is money. And he doesn’t talk about class, or money: not one word, though he watches as his wife is wound into a fantastical ballgown by four people. His self-knowledge ends at precisely the point of his complicity.  He is still a prince, with all the expectations and pomp of a prince. We can all speak the truth of our misery, but what happens then?

He knows that some things must be exposed: media viciousness and intrusion, the collusion of his family, and the country; how monarchism isn’t love, but hunger. But he can’t acknowledge that our interest in his story is part of the same culture of unseriousness and worship of power.

He thinks he has a different future now: the Sussex brand, which will run on the money Netflix has paid him to tell his story. It is red-carpet philanthropy, which is bogus philanthropy: a luminous unseeing and unhearing of its own. It does not centre the genuinely dispossessed and the desperate: it can’t. In its glib riches, its insatiable desire for attention without merit, and its commitment to the superficial, it is as dishonest as the life he has left behind.

The Cambridges and Sussexes are at war, according to the media: the next three episodes of Harry & Meghan will be aired next week, on the same day that the Duchess of Cambridge is playing the piano at a carol concert. Remember the battle of the bridesmaids’ tights, when each duchess was accused of inciting tears in the other? This is in the same vein of pettiness.

If it is a war — and the media are determined it should be — it is a war not of substance but of style. It is not about how different the brothers are, but how similar. Both remain monied, driven, and convinced of the importance of their work as a newer world sags around them. If he continues on this path, I wonder if he will ever realise not how far he has travelled, but how little.

Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here. 

Elizabeth II, who grumpily planted a tree this week, insisting she could still wield a spade, is the reluctant link to this imperial past. She makes us, unconsciously and inaccurately, feel safe in what is soon to be Boris’s Brexit Blunderland. What we must horribly call her brand is Duty: how can we not feel safe, when she is dedicated to us? But nothing lasts forever. She is 93.

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Fear prevents us thinking about what will happen when she dies; better to live in a dream in which jam, and perhaps butter, will maintain us as the fifth largest economy on earth. We were fine in the world wars, an imbecile told the BBC recently in a vox pop, forgetting that we lost close to 1.5 million souls and took $3 billion from America after 1945.

Meanwhile, we have self-indulgent political chaos and, for distraction, gossip without end. The Duchess of Sussex goes to Wimbledon in jeans. She and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, who apparently likes gardening, are portrayed as avarice and benevolence. Meghan asks not to be photographed in a place that contains multiple television cameras. She spends blah pounds on a kitchen in Berkshire. She will not release the names of her son Archie Harrison’s godparents – is one of them a Teletubbie, or George Clooney?

Amid this babble, what we are not gossiping about is Charles III, probably because we have known him longer and he is not as photogenic as his sons’ wives. Even so, he is creeping up on the throne like one of his plants; he is stealthy, and he should be. Some people still think he had his first wife killed; and he has never clarified whether he will – and I think he will, because he is a nostalgist of the worst kind – crown his second wife Queen Camilla.

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Charles has been Prince of Wales for 61 years. That is a long overture, even for monarchy, which copes in centuries. And he has been Prince of Wales for longer than any other; the runner-up in this competition which no one wants to win – a metaphor for futility – was Edward VII with a mere 60 years.

I have my own theory why Elizabeth II is sane, and has projected reluctance, and, slightly less successfully, thrift, to great acclaim. She did not know she would be queen until she was nine, with the Abdication Crisis in 1936; and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (two queens in one title is very telling about a character) prevented her daughter being spoilt, for she would rather be spoilt herself.

That is why the Queen is practical, and doughty with her spade. The only job she has had besides head of state was as a truck mechanic in the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service, and I hope obituarists remember it. It is important. It is possible that, to her, the United Kingdom is just another truck.

Charles is something else, though: neglected by his mother, spoilt by his grandmother, and the heir since birth, he projects an unease and depression that would be touching in almost anyone else. That is his primary misfortune.

He dresses as exquisitely as his great-uncle Edward VIII – the last, unlucky Prince of Wales – but he seems to take no joy in it. His homes at Highgrove and Clarence House – I have seen both, for republicans are as obsessed with monarchy as monarchists, although I was confined to a gazebo containing his watercolours at Highgrove (they are much better than Hitler’s watercolours) – are likewise tasteful.

But a monarch is not a still life. It is an insane system dependent on a shared – and fragile – national myth, and, to prevent this being stated too often in public, Charles must have a brand. If the Queen’s is duty plus reluctance plus thrift (“that is not really my crown”) what is his?

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Hagiography is no help here, for it grows from what the object is presumed to be, and with Charles the material is thin. He wasn’t even a particularly functional adulterer: because he is a romantic. There was a fantasy about what kind of king he will be in a play – and then a TV film – called Charles III.

Monarchy is insidious, like all dreams – even I believe the Queen is kind, after her portrayal by Penelope Wilton in The BFG, which promised that she would save us from flesh-eating giants and give orphans shelter in her palace, if only she knew of their suffering. (“If only Comrade Stalin knew of our suffering.”) But Charles III was ridiculous as hagiography. It suggested that Charles would imperil his throne for – of all things – freedom of the press.

It is essential that Charles develops a brand of his own, beyond laughing at vegetables while wearing good suits. I saw that with my own eyes, but I live in Cornwall, where it is hard to escape him. You might pass a farmers’ market in Penzance, as I did, and have a Union Jack thrust into your hands which you will then wave limply, having nothing better to do.

It is tempting to define him as what he is not. He is not as stupid as Prince Andrew. He is not as angry as Prince William. I suspect William is principally angry with him, but that is not abnormal. Almost all the Hanoverians hated their fathers; George I locked his wife Sophia Dorothea up in a castle for 30 years and her son, George II, was understandably unhappy about it.

But not being something is not a brand, and I have often thought that Andrew, if happy – if the heir – would be a good king. Stupidity can make you convincing; we have had fat, jolly kings with big teeth before. Anne too; she would be like her mother with slightly worse manners. Charles’ obvious sensitivity – why praise homeopathy if you don’t want to be healed? – is his problem. Easily bullied princes – he was bullied into marrying Diana – are not effective for myth-building; Hamlet, for instance: great lines but would you want him on the throne?

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He won’t have long; and so I think of his style and suggest a last, crabby burst of Hanoverian grandeur to bear Charles III towards his ancestors in the crypt. Let his children talk about mental health to national surprise; few things are worse for mental health than being a member of the royal family and, in their hearts, people know it; hence the widespread “pity” for the Queen, as if she had an embarrassing hereditary condition. Monarchy is supposed to make the monarchist feel happy – what else is it for? – and I doubt the flag-wavers will be made happy by listening to Prince William tell them it’s OK to have the mental health problems they are, in any case, trying to avoid by waving flags at him. But empathy in poverty is no good – it exposes royal hypocrisy. Empathy in glory is better.

Brexit is a response, however cracked, to the loss of British glory; or rather the idea of it, for I doubt the profits were distributed as fairly as we like to pretend. Since monarchy is likewise dishonest – it is not apolitical but predicated on its own survival – I suggest that Charles fuse his myth to that of Brexit, and become, at least outwardly, a glorious king of England.

He has the golden tools and he should use them; it would be better if he didn’t say too much. He could build an ideal palace – a vast Poundbury – and crown his scatty wife under a mountain of diamonds. That is a solution to Charles III, who is temperamentally unsuited to his future: let the crown wear him.