PRINCE HARRY - SPARE PART

Prince Harry's book cover

I have not read – and almost certainly will not read – Shame, the memoir by Prince William’s younger brother. The title refers to Prince Harry’s role as the ‘spare’ in case the heir to the throne dies or stands down, probably with a nod to the idea of 'going spare' or losing your cool referencing the prince's well-publicised struggles with mental health.

The spare succeeded to the throne twice in the early twentieth century when the elder brother of King George the Fifth, Eddie the Duke of Clarence, died suddenly and again in 1936 when George’s son King Edward the Eighth gave up the throne in order to marry Wallis Simpson, whom he was told would not be suitable as a queen. Harry has often been compared to Edward, both men having a personal agenda that superseded their loyalty to the concept of royalty.

 

Times have changed since Edward married Wallis Simpson and Harry married divorcee Meghan Markle, at Saint George’s Chapel inside Windsor Castle a few years ago. She seemed like a breath of fresh air coming into the royal family at first but later complained about the racism she claims to have experienced at the hands of the British media and the royal establishment. Their popularity quickly went down and the couple moved to California where they have tried to establish a kind of alternative court five thousand miles away from the main one.

 

I have always said that the royal family will die not when we grow tired of them but when they grow tired of us. When the pressures of being in the public eye all the time become too much, the monarchy might effectively abolish itself. There is little prospect of that happening now with William seeming like an ideal heir to the throne, having an impeccable family life with his wife Kate and their three children. They have all superseded Harry in the line of succession, making him fifth in line to the throne, very much a spare part who is unlikely ever to become king now.

 

That leaves him in a difficult position. Being the dutiful younger brother, standing behind his elder sibling and being content with a subsidiary hardly seen role does not fit in with the demands the media makes of people in a modern monarchy. Harry’s wife Meghan has an American sense of marketability about their role and has helped to monetise it by breaking away to establish a separate identity. Harry's book has now become the best-selling non-fiction title ever printed and is ubiquitous on the shelves of shops and he appears eager to promote his viewpoint. 

 

In order to sell so many copies, he had to exaggerate – or at least tell the truth about – the extent of the falling out with his brother and father. Juicy details about their rows were pushed out in advance of publication, just as details of his fairly unheroic killing exploits as a soldier in Afghanistan appeared. It presumably makes for interesting reading and helps to move piles of books to satisfy the insatiable curiosity of the public about the royal family.

 

The trouble is that Harry is not really that important in the scheme of things. He and his offspring would soon be relegated to relative obscurity as he is the younger brother (the spare as opposed to the heir) and he faces a lifetime of stolid but boring duty, with the knowledge that, if he puts a foot wrong, he faces life in the wilderness like his uncle Prince Andrew does, having given into the temptation of easy sex on offer. 

 

The alternative is to have people feel sorry for him as a victim. This necessitates a good deal of sharing, which may sell books but is not part of the royal tradition, where keeping a stiff upper lip and not washing your dirty linen in public are part of the requirement for being a good dutiful royal. Faced with the choice of being a loyal but quiet supporter of the institution or being a privileged victim, Harry signed the contract, took the money and went to California. 

 

However, he would not be an important player if it was not for the institution they are now effectively undermining. Just as no-one would care much about his mother Lady Diana Spencer if she had not married Prince Charles, so no-one would care about Harry if he was not a royal. He and Meghan obviously felt like there was enough life left in the royal family for it to survive a bit of buffeting from a salacious memoir by a minor royal out for revenge.

 

The question is how much longer can this go on before the royal family is permanently disabled by the revelations in his book? His mother Diana enjoyed enormous popularity and had an undoubted charisma but her independence could not survive for long under the pressure of fame and she was hounded to death by paparazzi, whom she sought to exploit but could not control. There may be something to be said for remaining behind those castle walls.  

 

This brings up the wider question of victimhood generally. Most of us like to feel sorry for the underdog, who has been given a bad break by circumstances and contemporaries. Harry has chosen to play the martyr rather than the dutiful son and brother, standing four square with his family – which he did before his marriage. He – with a little prodding no doubt from his wife – now comes over as a victim, having lost his mother and, more recently, the rest of his family, the first to a sudden accident in Paris and the second to a lucrative book deal.   

 

People generally do not buy books by those who dutifully wait in line and do their duty. They want to hear about suffering and conflict from the victims. This has led to the growth of ‘misery memoir’ in which people make a fortune from their misfortune. The trouble is that it is difficult to feel much sympathy for a man who has millions in the bank, a flashy website and an Instagram account. He might make a good deal of money from being the ‘spare’ but it is hardly good for the royals. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.    

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Edwin Lerner 

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

  

WHEN HARRY MET MEGHAN

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

DIANA AND DEMOCRACY

Diana - one name is enough
(Picture from Wikipedia)

The point of democracy is that you have a choice, while the point of monarchy is that you do not.  You might think the two systems are incompatible but you would be wrong - in the case of the United Kingdom at least.  The Queen and Prince Philip went to Bath Abbey in 1973 to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of the coronation of King Edgar who will have to do as the first king of all England, although pedants can dispute the accuracy of the commemoration.  Whenever it started, the monarchy continues to work and the Queen enjoys levels of popularity and acceptance which politicians would kill for.  As long as the royals continue to do their duty there is no reason why the monarchy should not continue for the foreseeable future.  It is a harmless pleasure for millions, a boost to the tourist business and a symbol of continuity and stability in an unstable world.

One anniversary which is undisputable is that of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, killed in a car accident in Paris twenty years ago.  I was one of those who thought that the inquest into her death was a waste of public money – until the jury gave its verdict that she had died, as had seemed obvious to me, in a chaotic accident while being pursued by photographers who were themselves satisfying a demand for pictures of her fed by you and me.  We were guilty of her killing, not some obscure conspiracy anxious to get rid of a troublesome and unpredictable princess.  Once the jury looked coolly at the facts and came to this conclusion conspiracy theories faded from view and those who persisted in them were not taken seriously any more.

While the British system has proved that democracy can survive the presence of monarchy, the case of Diana shows that the monarchy might not survive the introduction of democracy.  There is no doubt that she was more popular than the other royals, probably than all of them combined.  Yet, if Prince Charles had not married her, she would have probably married some wealthy banker or aristocrat and been ignored by the public who came to adore her.  It was not just good looks which made her popular and loved.  Clive James wrote of how she could immediately identify the most isolated and lonely person in the room and offer him (or her) comfort.  One flash of that killer smile and your day was made.  If she and Charles had hit it off, she could have been such an asset to the royal family.  As it was this charming apparently naïve young girl, who did not have a single academic qualification, did more to destabilise and threaten the monarchy than anyone since Oliver Cromwell 350 years ago.

The Windsors did what they normally do; they kept calm and carried on, gradually regrouping and working away to rebuild their position without worrying too much about their popularity.  In Britain, if you stick around for long enough and are not guilty of something unforgivable – child abuse, feathering your own nest, abandoning your children – then sooner or later you are accepted back into the fold.  The royal family did not survive for so long by refusing to adapt to the times.  Their very name comes from the fact that their original German title, Saxe-Coburg Gotha, was considered unacceptable during the First World War, when London was being attacked by Gotha bombers, and had to be changed.  Instead of their main home being named after the family, the family was renamed after their main home, as good an example of pragmatism as you could hope to find.  The hundredth anniversary of the name change earlier this year was virtually ignored while the memory of Diana will be dredged up again by people who met her once or twice and sell their stories on the twentieth anniversary of her death.

We will lap up these stories.  Diana died at the age of thirty-six, her youthful prettiness giving way to a mature beauty none of the horsey Windsors could hope to emulate.  Her death will keep her, in the words of the Bob Dylan song 'forever young'.  As the old saying goes, those whom the gods love die young.  Prince Charles, as he grows old, will have to watch as his painstaking attempts to improve his position are undermined by the memory people have of his being unable to make her happy.  The Queen will stagger on for a while longer until Charles succeeds her as an old man, while the country waits impatiently for Diana’s son William, a stolid Windsor but with the looks of his mother, takes over.  

In the play King Charles the Third this process is accelerated by Charles’s determination to override democracy by refusing to sign a bill sent to him by parliament.  It is a fine play with a flimsy foundation, that Charles would be foolish enough to sacrifice his long-waited for succession by committing political suicide leaving the path open for his son to succeed him.  In practice, future kings of England will be middle-aged to elderly men for the foreseeable future, the opening up of the crown to the first-born child, rather than eldest son, coming at the time when the Windsors have managed to produce males for the succession.  As long as they choose – and keep – suitable wives, they should be around for a while yet.  That is, if they do not try to override the political process.  If it were to come to a choice between monarchy and democracy, there can only be one winner.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner