Omid Scobie is the reporter favoured by Harry and Meghan. In ordinary circumstances, this would be a footnote, but the couple’s relationship with the rest of the press is so frosty that Scobie’s access looks as unfettered as if he were their medieval scribe or they were all in a thruple. It’s for this reason, I suspect, that there are no details in Scobie’s new book, Endgame, that would trouble the Sussexes. Given the openness of Harry in Spare, earlier this year, there was arguably not much new news to share.
Yet scandal arrived on its own, via the Dutch publishers, whose translation appeared to name the member of the royal household who allegedly asked what colour Meghan and Harry’s son would be when he was born. The book has been pulled from the shelves in the Netherlands, though not before some readers clocked it, so the intelligence is now in the waiting room of the public domain; enough people know it that we’ll all know it soon enough.
This allegation, along with more atmospheric charges of racism, has always been the smoking gun of the self-exiled pair. Harry and Meghan have said many other things that they must have thought would put public opinion on their side: in the Oprah interview, they described the Firm as completely insensible to Meghan’s mental distress, unsympathetic, adamantine, concerned only about appearances. In Spare, there was a huge amount of fraternal unpleasantness that permanently lowered my own opinion of Prince William, and it wasn’t that high to begin with. Yet the media response overall was a shrugging, “ah well, sure there are two sides to every story”, which reflected not so much a disapproval of dirty laundry in public as an unspoken agreement between the royals, preserving their reputation, and the press (mainly the tabloids), permanently ranged against Harry and Meghan for their audacity in challenging various newspapers in court.
The charge of racism, however, will not evaporate: it is not just the extraordinary crassness/white supremacist bouquet you can smell in that Archie remark; the couple also suggest, in their Netflix documentary, that the royal family turned a deliberate blind eye to the press as it criticised Meghan in racialised terms that ran the gamut from coded to bleedin’ obvious. This then triggered an onslaught of open racism and white supremacy on social media, contributing to Meghan’s distress, which the royals disdained to notice.
Scobie details tabloid coverage quite carefully in his book, recalling “loaded terms like narcissistic, social climber, exotic DNA, and straight out of Compton … both to describe [Meghan] and to establish a narrative”. Scobie also got a ringside seat on the casual racism bandied around the palace. He was there when “a senior courtier hollered ‘what a legend’ when they heard that a photographer had commented that Meghan should ‘be more Black and wear some African garb … let her Afro out’ at an engagement linked to Nelson Mandela”.
The problem for the royals is that blanket denials don’t work. Prince William can say, “We are very much not a racist family” (as he did, after the Oprah interview), but this asks us to conceive of them all as one homogeneous unit, exactly as unracist as one another, exactly as intolerant of micro and macro aggressions from their entourage, exactly as evolved. This assertion does the Windsors more harm than good, when there are palace officials telling Scobie off the record that “there’s still more work to be done”: more work from every leg of this giant centipede? Or are some of them, in fact, further along than others?
Besides which, so many members of this family are simply not in the intellectual shape they would need to be to do the delicate work of representing the royals abroad – it’s not their one job, but it’s up there. Inevitably, touring the Commonwealth, they’ll be met with challenge, both historical, for their ancestral part in colonialism and slavery, and current, for their stance on reparations: it’s going to take tact, humility, curiosity, open-mindedness and courage, before you even get to the crunchier business of money. Prince Edward would have to be fighting fit to display even half those things at once. Instead, when the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston Browne, mentioned “reparatory justice”, Edward guffawed (this is Scobie’s testimony – “guffawed”, granted, is quite a loaded word, but even “laughed” would have been woeful, if true).
Endgame is quite granular on the tensions and impossible contradictions this is causing within the family (even the ones who still talk to each other); the palace was reportedly very upset when William moved immediately to distance himself from the former lady-in-waiting Susan Hussey, after she asked Ngozi Fulani where she was “really” from. (The prince’s previous assertion had come back to bite him: either Lady Hussey didn’t speak for the family and its courtiers, or they were all engaged round-the-clock wondering where people of colour were really from.) Scobie speculates “schadenfreude” from Charles, when pictures of William and Kate’s tour of the Caribbean – the couple dressed in white, in an open-top Land Rover, looking like Mr and Mrs Coloniser about to address the mine shaft – landed badly. But these hints of a brewing crisis, whether speculative or evidenced, are supplementary: the crisis is obvious, and has been since Megxit (if we’re really calling it that). It’s much larger than a family estrangement, and remaining estranged – or making up, for that matter – won’t fix it.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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