Fractured families What Harry and Meghan’s royal uncoupling reveals about the nation’s psyche

The departure of Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle from royal duties is not a concern, given the other issues besetting the United Kingdom in 2023, that may preoccupy serious academics. It was an omission from academic writing that Edward Shils and Michael Young also noted in 1953. Writing in The Sociological Review, they remarked that: “About this most august institution there is no serious discussion at all.” What follows will avoid arguments about the necessity of royalty in a supposed democracy and whether or not we need a royal family. Nevertheless, we should examine the recent controversies about Harry and Meghan, since what these various views say hold more interest than the individual characters of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

The privileged berating the privileged

First is the question of privilege. It is clear that most of the criticism of Harry and Meghan has come from those of some considerable privilege themselves. Critics such as Piers Morgan and Jeremy Clarkson, untitled as they may be, are men of some wealth and power in the UK media. This is not to say that they have the same access to the material resources of British royalty (which is almost impossible to assess in terms of the royal estate and works of art), but they have a transparent commitment to two forms of contemporary legitimacy: of owning and making wealth, and an assumed inherent privilege of contexts in which to speak.

It is in this context that attacks on Harry for his politics, particularly those related to environmental and ecological concerns, are hardly remarkable from Clarkson, who has glorified car culture and questioned issues related to climate change, to his considerable profit. (His worth, according to online sources, is calculated at around £70 million.) Clarkson, and others like him, are often able to escape censure for their ecologically suspect ideas and behaviour on the grounds of that beloved mantra of fun. Even when Clarkson made derogatory and vicious comments about Meghan, he was not condemned out of hand; a career of employing an apparently jovial laddish demeanour is allowed by some aspects of populism. Behind the criticism by Morgan and Clarkson lies a fear that Harry’s very departure from the expectations of royalty signals a possibility that privilege can be used in a way that interrupts their own.

Setting a flawed example

The pattern of a privileged critique of privilege continues elsewhere, and reams of print have been directed at Spare across all sections of the media, from The Sun to the London Review of Books. Harry and Meghan have been given largely bad press for what is seen as their betrayal and lack of loyalty to the royal family, and the hurt that Harry’s book and the couple’s interview with Oprah Winfrey apparently caused.

Yet Harry’s own parents have some considerable, and hardly victimless, form in terms of a willingness to share with millions the details of their personal lives. Harry’s mother, versed in the language of emotional literacy by her therapist Susie Orbach, was happy to share information about her marriage. Nor did Prince Charles remain silent; he would ask for understanding for his failure to remain faithful to Diana. As a model of parenting, it fulfilled all the expectations of poet Philip Larkin’s assertion that: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” The disclosures by Harry’s parents must have suggested that the only space for intimate disclosure was the world wide web. A lesson to be learned about the contemporary limitations and locations of available friendship and support; we either speak to an analyst or to everyone else on the planet.

Individual or systemic racism?

The second point to be made here concerns the questions, inevitable in the 21st century, of race and gender. Harry and Meghan have pointed accusing fingers at the racism nestled within the royal family, an accusation given some credence following reports of the behaviour of Lady Susan Hussey. (For those less attuned to social media, Lady Hussey reportedly asked the hostile question of “Where are you from?” of Ngozi Fulani, head of the charity Sistah Space).

As ever, this incident was assumed to be a mistake by a person of a British generation less attuned to the racist possibilities of language; it was not allowed to connect with the wider question raised by Spare, that perhaps racism is not just a matter of non-woke individuals, but systemic. Many pointed out that Harry had not done well on the question of racial sensitivities; less was made of his elder brother’s theme for a birthday party, Out of Africa. In so many ways that title has so many implications, so many pointers to a complete avoidance of issues about slavery, continued social and material exploitation, and coercive colonial control.

The record of Harry’s immediate family on questions of race is problematic and it is all too easy to see how the marriage of Harry and Meghan brought to the fore fears and insecurities about Britain’s racial politics and those of its most powerful family. But those fears, and the attempt by Harry and Meghan to place those issues in a public space, also revealed one further issue about royalty and its privilege. Essentially, that it does not tolerate, literally in the case of Harry, the subaltern to speak critically of locations of privilege. In this, it is always the individual who is at fault, never the institution. The late 20th century saw the breaking of the code about speaking by both members of the royal family and those who work for them: royalty became a commodity. In the wake of this shift, and because the financial value of the royal family is often cited as the monetary value in tourism, this has raised questions of how the coincidence of a celebrity culture with a commodified royal family is to behave.

Diana’s death: denial on a regal scale

One way out of this complexity, previously endorsed by parts of the media and the royal family itself, is to use the family for the projection of normative values. Once, in the days of the “little princesses” (Elizabeth and Margaret) this worked; deference was alive and well. But in 2023, the public has become rather more aware that the British royal family (in common with many others) “tramples on its young”. (Historian Miranda Carter, in The Three Emperors: Three Cousins, Three Empires and the Road to World War One, has written a thorough account of this form of parenting by many royal families). The sight of princes Harry and William following their mother’s coffin appalled many. Less noted was the requirement of the princes to attend a church service the day after Diana’s death, at which she was not mentioned; denial on a truly regal scale. These instances of the symbolic use of children to maintain a certain kind of order sit uneasily with emergent expectations about the emotional needs and realities of a child.

Debates about the British royal family inevitably involve both “Political” and political questions. The Political questions are about the place of a hereditary monarchy, carrying a considerable weight of skeletons in its many cupboards, which endorses and supports various forms of hereditary privileges, as well as those conferred by the acceptance, and collusion with, defined ideals of service. The political question, raised at least implicitly by Spare, is that of what we are maintaining when we sustain a monarchy.

The fear of losing the institution is evident in both criticism of Harry’s book and in the reaction of the royal family itself: engaging in an intensely energetic exercise in what is described as “relatability”. It is an exercise that has little foundation in any empirical relationship between the lives of the royal family and its subjects, but a great deal in terms of a concern to assuage fears about change and loss in the nation’s psyche. In 1919, English economist Harold Laski wrote that: “The monarchy, to put it bluntly, has been sold to the democracy as a symbol of itself.”

Whether or not that relationship can be maintained has become more precarious, if not actually uneasy.