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One of the most remarkable qualities of the British royal family is its resilience.
Think how many times in the past 30 years it has been said that an event, an outrage or a tragedy means things will never be the same again, only for us to belatedly realize, as the gang trudges their way yet again from Sandringham House to church on Christmas Day, trussed up like cashmere-loving turkeys, that, au contraire, bar a few carefully curated cast member changes, things have endured exactly as they ever were.
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Although the drama surrounding Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s extraordinary series of recent outbursts (made first in letters, then in legal documents, then in televised interviews and then in off-the-record briefings) feels right now like a moment from which there is no return, the odds are that the monarchy will ultimately chug on regardless.
There could hardly have been a more visible sign of the Keep Calm and Carry On culture in action than Kate Middleton, casually lining up at the self-service check in at her local supermarket, buying her kids Hallowe’en outfits.
Of course, some might have said it was merely the latest salvo in what has been a brutal week of internecine warfare in the house of Windsor.
But how much does this whole debacle with Harry and Meghan really matter in the long run? Does it truly mark a fork in the road or will the giant institutional steamroller that is the British monarchy squash Harry and Meghan into insignificance?
My hunch is that looking back on this in 20 years’ time, you probably won’t even be able to see the bump.
When it comes to rocking the boat, one of the most destabilizing and aggressive actions Harry and Meghan could take would be to move overseas.
Such a move has been endlessly speculated on, but Valentine Low, royal correspondent for The Times of London, told The Daily Beast he sees it as unlikely that Harry and Meghan would live overseas for anything other than a short period of a few months (although he adds wryly: “As this couple have shown, they are more than capable of surprising us.”)
What about them walking away from the Royal family altogether? “It’s unlikely but not impossible,” says Low. “Harry has talked about that possibility before, but Meghan has made it very clear that she has extremely ambitious aims and goals.”
Philanthropy on this global scale, Low points out, “requires a platform and if they were to give up their HRH status and retreat to a farm in the countryside, that platform would be much less prominent. Look what happened to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor after he abdicated: They became no-longer-important people.”
Low ultimately expects the royal family to muddle through the current drama and points out that what Harry does or doesn’t do is going to steadily become of less and less constitutional importance.
“Harry’s fate is to become ever more marginal. That is the fate of people not in the direct line of succession. They start off glamorous and fascinating and they end up bit players. Look at Princess Margaret or Prince Andrew. It’s a well-trodden path.”
It’s a good point. Are we really going to care what Harry, Meghan and Archie are posting on their Instagram when George, Louis and Charlotte are partying it up?
However Catherine Ostler, a contributing editor at the Daily Mail who was formerly editor of British society magazine Tatler, suggests that predictions the whole thing might soon blow over are somewhat optimistic.
“Part of the problem is that because of the legal actions, this isn’t over. It’s going to drag on and it may even end up with Thomas Markle giving evidence in court,” she said. “It’s uncharted territory and whether or not it all goes away depends entirely on Harry and his decisions. It would be very easy to make all this go away by dropping the legal cases, keeping a low profile and focusing on some unglamorous, local domestic causes. Princess Anne would be the model. But do they have any interest in doing that?
“And what is all Harry’s upset really about? Is it about press intrusion, or is it actually about his deeper issues? He himself seemed to suggest the latter when he said that every camera flash brought him back to his mother’s death.”
Veteran British publicist Mark Borkowski, who has an abiding interest in the royal family said, “The reality is that doing the job of being a royal still is one of the most difficult jobs in the world. It is unforgiving and some days will be good and some bad.
“The royal family has a self-healing factor about it, but what its future actually depends on what happens when the queen passes. That’s going to be seismic event on the psyche of the nation.”
Before that happens, however, Harry and Meghan have to make a choice between a high-profile life (in which case it’s not unreasonable to assume they will be relentlessly hounded by a media, which, for example, might be interested to gain some insight on why Meghan doesn’t talk to her dad) and stepping out of the limelight, allowing interest in her to die down of its own accord.
A good parallel here is Pippa Middleton. Pippa didn’t ask to be famous, it was just dumb luck that her svelte figure caught public attention at Kate and William’s wedding.
But after that, Pippa very much sought to cash in on her fame by writing a book and magazine articles which were, to be brutally honest, published because she was famous. Her complaints that she was being hounded by photographers therefore didn’t generate a huge amount of sympathy.
But once she dialed down her media presence, stopped trying to be a star and got on with the business of being quietly married to a billionaire fund manager, the public and the media pretty quickly lost interest in her.
It’s tempting to say that Meghan and Harry don’t have the option of retreating from public view in that way, and while that’s true to an extent, it’s also true that they don’t have to continue promoting themselves quite so relentlessly on a global stage.
The trade-off of a lower profile might be that they are not able to change the world. What kind of royals should Harry and Meghan be? That is for them, and the royal family, to decide.
