This was my third interview about Harry and Meghan in as many hours, but it was the radio host who sounded jaded. Shouldn’t we be discussing something important, she asked. Never mind that she and her UK media colleagues had spent the preceding week speculating about the Sussexes’ new Netflix documentary. Earlier that morning, the first three episodes had finally dropped and already those same journalists and outlets were talking the series down.
I demurred: the documentary was compelling, perhaps in some respects even important. The radio host waved away my comment. She had better things to do with her time, she declared, with the performative distaste Very Serious People typically reserve for Strictly Come Dancing.
Of course, she had a point. The news cycle that day, as most days, was grim. Iran had just executed a man convicted for participating in anti-government protests sparked by the state’s murder and repression of women. Surely this fresh atrocity should have led every bulletin.
Yet the idea that the documentary deserved to hit the headlines only because people were chattering about it, as another interviewer insisted, was wide of the mark too. For one thing, disdaining the royals as a branch of light entertainment overlooks their power and influence. In more than a few of the 14 overseas realms, the debate about whether to retain King Charles as head of state is urgent and sophisticated, weighing the monarchy’s problematic history against any value that it adds, and the costs and risks (more acute than ever in a world of surging far-right populism) of change.
In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, such discussions also bubble up. In Westminster politics, they are relegated to the fringes. The Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, for example, has affirmed his party’s commitment to deep constitutional reforms, including the abolition of the “indefensible” House of Lords. It might seem perverse to object to one unelected and partially hereditary institution of state without at least considering the future of a purely hereditary one, but that is the course Starmer has signalled by accepting his knighthood in 2014 and in his more recent statements of support for the monarchy.
In England, republican zeal is conspicuous by its absence. So is Prince Harry. The Sussexes’ exit confirmed a widespread misapprehension that the couple are a sideshow to the monarchy, rather than central to its fate and future. The real question, though, isn’t whether Harry or his children are likely one day to reign – he is fifth in line to the throne, with son Archie and daughter Lilibet respectively sixth and seventh. It’s whether and how many future generations of Windsors will follow Charles, and what the failure of the institution to retain its first mixed-race members says about attitudes within its ranks, as well as in the media and wider society.
The first tranche of the series contains useful context: David Olusoga and Afua Hirsch knitting together the legacy of empire and Brexit that saw the two sides of a painful family split become opposing proxies in the culture wars; Harry and Meghan describing how it feels to be prey for the press; Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, for the first time speaking, with eloquence, for herself. The final three episodes, due to stream from Thursday, will presumably rehearse the couple’s allegation of racism by a member of the royal family, first made during their 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey. There had, said Meghan, been “concerns and conversations about how dark [Archie’s] skin might be”.
Polls show that the couple’s departure, and the subsequent explanations for it, have turned some younger and more diverse demographics, briefly won over to the royal family by Harry and Meghan’s union, against the monarchy. The few prominent commentators who have attempted to articulate this effect – or merely voice discomfort with the nasty, polarised debate around the Sussexes – regularly find themselves invited on daytime TV to be shouted down, gaslit or accused of race-baiting in return.
It doesn’t help that Meghan is an imperfect victim, not always consistent in her accounts and prone to flourishes. Her re-enactment for Netflix of curtseying to the Queen instantly drew ire, real and confected, for supposed disrespect to the memory of her grandmother-in-law. Nobody curtsies like that, critics harrumphed. They’re wrong. When I was researching my biography of King Charles, I discovered his female staff were running a competition to see who could perform the deepest curtsey without falling over. A former girlfriend of his also confided that protocol demanded she curtsey to him, leading one evening to a clash of heads when he mistimed an attempt to kiss her.
A far more serious charge against Meghan is that she bullied palace staff, a story deliberately placed with journalists just before the Sussexes’ Winfrey interview. When I heard some of these allegations in the summer of 2018, I hadn’t written about the royals for a couple of years and this wasn’t a strategic leak. Even taking account of mitigating factors – cultural misunderstandings, a barrage of sexist and racist media attacks at exactly the moment that royal convention denied Meghan a voice, the bias that sees women of colour as angrier than their white counterparts – it’s clear there were clashes.
It’s equally clear that the institution itself has a dismal record of protecting the people who live and work within its walls. The court can be brutal: bristling with plots, “Wolf Hall” in the words of one source, staff bound by NDAs, their complaints hushed up, while royals and their favourites strut and bellow.
Whatever Meghan did or didn’t do, her experience of racism should be believed, not least because it’s always been there in plain sight. The Netflix documentary serves up one example: the decision by Princess Michael of Kent to wear a “blackamoor” brooch to lunch with Harry’s then fiancee and other royals.
When I began probing the question of which family member might have made the comment about Archie’s skin, an insider described Charles as “the least racist royal” and meant this as a compliment. The King’s charities and initiatives have brought him into contact with a wider range of people than many of his relatives, but these perspectives have never been embedded in his household, which, like the whole organisation, tends to homogeneity.
Mandu Reid, the leader of the Women’s Equality party, an organisation which, as it happens, I co-founded, witnessed this phenomenon in action at a Buckingham Palace reception last month intended to highlight violence against women and girls. The event instead drew attention to Lady Susan Hussey, woman of the bedchamber to the late Queen, and by then part of the queen consort’s retinue. Reid watched Hussey interrogate another guest – Ngozi Fulani, the head of the charity Sistah Space – about where Fulani came from, seeming to refuse, in time-dishonoured tradition, to accept that Fulani was British. After the story blew up each woman suffered consequences. Hussey resigned, enabling officials to spin her as an outlier of palace culture. Mandu and, in particular, Fulani suffered a campaign of abuse stirred up by some of the same outlets that harried Meghan. Sistah Space suspended some operations amid safety fears.
Watching this ugly, predictable backlash unfold, I thought how unsurprising it was that the Sussexes should feel the need to tell, and retell, their story, their truth. The wonder isn’t that they’re doing it, but that they held it in for so long.
Catherine Mayer is the author of Charles: The Heart of a King, newly updated and published by WH Allen
