One of the few things that make me feel cut off from my fellow countrymen is their obsession with minor royals. In most ways, I have ordinary British tastes. I drink tea by the gallon, I can recall curious cricket statistics, and I am fluent in that half-jokey, half-cynical idiom that sets us apart even from other English-speaking peoples. But I have never understood why we are all expected (not least by our friends in the United States) to have strong opinions about the antics of petty princelings.
In a typical group of five Brits, four will be enthusiastic royalists and one will be a high-minded republican. Both are venerable British traditions, stretching back to the civil wars of the mid-17th century. But I don’t belong to either tribe. I am, for want of a better phrase, a default monarchist. I wouldn’t start from here, but the institution is functioning well enough, people seem happy with it, and if we start monkeying about with it now, we’ll probably get something worse. To see what I mean, imagine completely rewriting the U.S. Constitution to make it modern. Can you doubt that you would end up with an inferior version?
Until last week, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex had barely encroached on my consciousness. My wife, being both a royalist and a woman, made me watch their wedding, which involved a gospel choir and an African American bishop whose preaching style wowed the nation. I later became vaguely aware that the couple had decided to chuck the whole thing in and move to California. Fine, I thought, good luck to them.
Yet it turns out that, far from stepping back, they were about to make themselves inescapable. Last week, Meghan carefully leveled the two charges that, in the current media climate, are the most incendiary and the most likely to be accepted at face value: victimization and racism. In doing so, she placed herself at the heart of a culture war that even the lockdowns could not still.
It is a peculiar feature of modern identity politics that the burden of proof is reversed. If you claim to be a victim of racism or misogyny, people are reluctant to challenge you. Certainly Oprah Winfrey made no attempt to press her interviewee. Her responses tended to be along the lines of “Oh, wow, really?” The one prominent journalist who questioned Meghan’s version of events, Piers Morgan, was told by his TV company to apologize, and he left after refusing. So much for the notion that journalists are meant to be skeptical.
Still, many of Meghan’s statements were demonstrably false. That includes her bizarre claim that she and Prince Harry had been privately married before the wedding, as well as her most incendiary allegation: that her son Archie had been denied a royal title because, we were invited to assume, he was of mixed race.
Let’s leave aside the fact that, when Archie was born, his parents made great play of the fact that they wanted him to be a private citizen, “Master Mountbatten-Windsor.” There was never any question of his having the title “His Royal Highness,” which, since King George V codified the rules in 1917, has been reserved for children of the monarch or of his or her immediate heirs. Neither Princess Margaret’s children nor Prince Edward’s are given these titles.
Though Winfrey might not be expected to know this, Meghan surely does. Yet she wants everyone to believe — she may, indeed, actually have convinced herself — she is being singled out and that, by implication, the royal family is being snobbish and racist.
It is utter nonsense: The queen is deeply aware that most Commonwealth citizens are not white. The monarchy set out to have a multiethnic workforce decades before the idea became fashionable. Far from being cold-shouldered, Meghan was embraced by pretty much the entire country as a symbol of relaxed, post-racial modernity. The bad press began only when she started complaining about things, hectoring people, and throwing herself into woke causes.
What we are really seeing is a generational divide between those Britons, including most members of the royal family, who still believe in duty and discretion and those for whom those words suggest repression, and for whom the highest virtue is victimhood.
This second, younger group now generally gets to set the terms of the public discourse. Label yourself oppressed and you can get away with a great deal. You can, for example, stalk away and then complain about being cut off. You can repeatedly appear on TV to demand privacy. You can moan about money from a $10 million mansion. You can drip with entitlement while accusing others of snobbery. And everyone will still applaud you.
