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This weekend’s christening of Archie Harrison will hopefully be a joyful occasion. It also shows Harry and Meghan refusing to play ball with an aggressive British media, who have been barred from attending the christening of their son.
When Archie is christened on Saturday (in the Private Chapel at Windsor Castle), it will be a quiet, family affair.
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Latest reports suggest there will likely be no more than 25 guests in attendance. Whether or not celebrities who attended the royal wedding, such as Serena Williams, George Clooney or Oprah Winfrey, will be there in the role of godparents has been a source of much speculation over the past few months, but the latest intel suggests it is unlikely.
Harry and Meghan will also not be revealing the names of said godparents to the media. The message is clear: this is personal, private, and any access to our family is going to be entirely on our terms.
In a statement, Buckingham Palace said on Wednesday: “Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor will be christened in a small private ceremony by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Private Chapel at Windsor Castle on Saturday 6th July.
“The Duke and Duchess of Sussex look forward to sharing some images taken on the day by photographer Chris Allerton.
“The godparents, in keeping with their wishes, will remain private.”
Allerton’s pictures will be distributed to news outlets the following day, the palace has advised, but few will be surprised if this happens at around about the same time as they hit the Sussex Royal Instagram page.
If experience is anything to go by, those pictures will be landing around 11 a.m. Eastern time, perfectly timed for a lazy American breakfast. They will make a pleasant punctuation mark in the Fourth of July holiday weekend.
The approach to this weekend’s festivities is very different to what happened when the Cambridge kids were christened: Prince William and Kate Middleton allowed the media to photograph guests arriving, they were allowed to take some photographs inside the chapel, they were even provided with the names of godparents in advance so they could work up a little feature on them. (The names of Archie’s godparents are not being disclosed but according to The Daily Mail are thought to include Meghan’s childhood friend Benita Litt and Harry’s mentor Mark Dyer.)
Harry and Meghan have done none of the above. Indeed, when it comes to godparents, The Daily Mail quotes a source a saying the godparents are “friends of theirs, close and old friends, who are private citizens and the couple want to honor that.”
In revenge, the media has declared all-out war on Meghan and Harry, claiming that the decision not to allow them access all areas to this important and symbolic day in their kids’ life is an outrage.
“They can’t have it both ways,” is one popular headline that has been circulated in various forms in recent days, with the sense of confected outrage stoked by the release of the royal accounts last week which handed a very large stick to the media with which to beat Harry and Meghan: the revelation that the renovations on their new home cost £2.4million (a little over $3 million).
Good Morning Britain presenter, and noted Meghan-hater Piers Morgan said: “This baptism should be public or the public should get their £2.4million ($3m) back.”
Never mind that $3 million is a small price to pay to securely house the most high-profile young family in the country.
Never mind that it is not anywhere close to the sums of money that were lavished on Prince Andrew by his mother when she gave him his home, which was subsequently bought in an extremely dodgy deal by a Kazakh plutocrat and demolished.
Never mind that the child in question does not have an HRH title, is not ever going to become king, and will likely receive no public funding when he is grown up.
Never mind that the private life of a child who is less than two months old is not up for grabs.
The argument that Meghan and Harry somehow have a duty to parade their child for the cameras because they live in a house paid for with public funds is particularly nonsensical as Prince Charles has made it clear that only the direct descendants of the king or queen can expect to be full-time working royals in the future.
Just as Prince Archie will not be a full-time working royal, it’s inevitable that Charlotte and Louis both will.
The really interesting thing about this latest row, however, is that the nonsensical arguments that Harry and Meghan are hiding the child, unpatriotically depriving the people of a glimpse of it, seem to have absolutely zero resonance with the wider global public.
The Mail, for example, to bolster its case that this is a betrayal of British values, highlighted a tweet by a member of the public which said, “private christening publicly funded.”
The author of this tweet has, a quick click reveals, 216 followers.
Context is everything and the vast majority of people, in the context of today’s hyperaggressive coverage of Meghan and Harry by the media, clearly feel they should be able to do what they like with their child’s pictures.
It echoes a similar row in the run-up to the birth, when the media proclaimed it an outrage that Harry and Meghan refused to create a media event around the birth in the same way that William and Kate did.
These attempts to pressure Meghan and Harry into giving over more details of the birth failed, with a whopping 75 percent of the public telling pollsters that they believed Meghan and Harry had “the right to keep the details about the baby’s birth private” while just 12 percent told polling firm YouGov that they agreed with the contrary proposition that “they are wrong and the public has the right to know more details about the baby.”
One can’t imagine the figures would be so different this time around. Most people agree with the not particularly radical proposition that a new mother should be allowed to have her baby the way she wants to and that she should be allowed to choose which photographs get sent out like the rest of us.
The resentment of the press is understandable, especially after they were deliberately misled by the palace in the hours after Archie’s birth into thinking Meghan was still in labor.
The angry attacks are mainly born out of fear because royal reporters know that Harry and Meghan are successfully managing to bypass them.
They are cleaving the loyal royal audience and its eyeballs away from newspaper websites and onto their Instagram page.
Ultimately, the press are on the wrong side of this battle, and they know it.
And that’s why all these complaints about what a terrible person Meghan is, and how appallingly she has abused the British public’s generosity in building her magnificent house in Windsor will vanish into dust on Sunday when British papers will run, all over their websites, photographs taken from Meghan and Harry’s Instagram feed.
