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| A Lego version of Harry and Meghan at Windsor |
After the engagement was announced, but before the wedding took place, an American lady asked me what people in Britain thought of Meghan Markle. I said something like, “everyone likes Meghan,” adding, “except for a few racists, but we needn’t worry too much about them”.
It turns out that we might need to be worried about the racists after all. Most people still like Meghan but she has received a fair amount of criticism since (and indeed before) she began divorce proceedings, not with her husband Prince Harry, but from the whole royal family. It has been said – and denied – that racism is behind much of this criticism. The problem is that, while this is probably true as a generalisation, if you automatically accuse everyone who criticises Meghan of racism, you are effectively saying that all criticism of her is inherently racist which is another way of saying that people of colour are above criticism.
You could that argue that this idea is racist in itself. Giving any group special treatment involves admitting that they cannot fend for themselves. That may be justifiable if it helps disadvantaged people by guaranteeing them educational or job opportunities but it hardly applies to Meghan Markle, who seems both able and eager to stand up for herself.
There are two strands here - one of racism and the other of royalty. People often say that the Queen loves the Commonwealth and her lack of racism is a big factor in the success of an organisation which grew out of the British Empire, an openly racist concept which put white people in charge of those with darker skins. The Queen talks to and deals with Commonwealth leaders in an easy, friendly way which, for example, Mrs Thatcher would have struggled to achieve, and they respect her in return. In all the talk about Meghan entering the royal family, there has been no suggestion that she has been sidelined because she is mixed race. In fact, it is her (white) father who is kept well away.
Yet, after a fairly short period of experiencing life as a royal, Meghan has said that she does not want any of this. Before she met Harry, she was an independent and wealthy woman in her own right who had made her way in the world through talent and looks. Her skin colour was not an issue in her success and she was used to signing autographs and smiling at people.
The smiling was to continue after she became the Queen’s granddaughter-in-law but she was told that the autographs had to stop. It was not the done thing for royals to sign them and neither was banging on about political matters, which the royals were supposed to be above. There is a good scene in The Crown in which Prince Charles, fresh from learning Welsh and making a bunch of speeches around Wales, is expecting to be congratulated by his mother. Instead she tells him in no uncertain terms that the hardest thing about being a royal is to have learn to “say nothing”, a lesson imparted by her own grandmother, Queen Mary.
But people in the public eye find it very difficult to say nothing. Prince Charles has views on lots of matters, from climate change to farming via modern architecture, but he knows that he cannot expect to have his own pet ideas given preference over those of the people who, unlike him, were elected to run the country. That does not stop him expressing these views.
I have long thought that the problems of the royal family in a democratic era would be internal not external. The institution would cease to be viable not when we became fed up with them but when they became fed up with us. There were signs of this in the way that Diana, the woman who would have been Meghan’s mother-in-law, tried to detach herself from the royals. Her problem was that she enjoyed the trappings of being a royal but was not that keen on the family itself, particularly the one she married, and that she could not control the attention when she detached herself from the defence mechanisms they had erected around themselves. Her successor Camilla was better at this and had the sense to keep her head down until she was accepted.
Was Meghan entitled to come into the royal family and then reject the whole business? Of course she was. She and her husband have said that they will drop their HRH titles and will make their own way in the future. Obviously, the royal connection will help them as they start their new lives in – what exactly? Being a bit royal and a bit glam is not exactly a career option but they will probably manage to pay their bills once the dust settles.
The problem for Harry and Meghan is that they both want to keep their heads down and yet need to remain conspicuous in order to be ‘influencers’. This contradiction became clear when they began proceedings against a newspaper for printing a private letter Meghan wrote to her estranged father and then issuing a warning that they would also sue those which printed paparazzi shots of them and their son Archie. So they want their privacy respected but need to remain noticed in order to remain influential? It does not work like that. The one thing the story of Diana should have taught them is that you cannot be both in the public eye and at the same time control the interest people have in you. The more you feed the press and the photographers who live off it, the hungrier that beast becomes.
The only way for royals to be both in the public eye and protected is to stay behind the walls erected around them which were built in order to keep prying eyes out. Once you go outside those walls, you lose the protection they afford. I wish Harry and Meghan all the best in their future lives but worry how they will survive outside royal protection. I also worry about the future of the royal family, one of our best-loved and most successful institutions, if an independent and intelligent woman like Meghan finds herself unable to live inside it.
Edwin Lerner
My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com
