[Prince Harry’s tell-all media blitz was meant to lift the lid
on royal failings. Even more clearly, it shows the price Britain pays
for monarchy.]
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ARE YOU SIDING WITH HARRY OR THE PALACE? EITHER WAY, YOU FALL INTO
THE ROYALIST TRAP  
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Polly Toynbee
January 9, 2023
Guardian
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_ Prince Harry’s tell-all media blitz was meant to lift the lid on
royal failings. Even more clearly, it shows the price Britain pays for
monarchy. _

,

 

Must we, really? I’m afraid there is no avoiding the great crown
soap opera as this finely crafted Prince Harry publicity spectacular
engulfs the news. However nugatory the revelations about scenes of
brotherly rivalry, beards, bridesmaids and broken dog bowls
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it’s no use pretending it’s not happening or that the country and
its households aren’t dividing into Harryites and Williamists.

Pollsters see a leave v remain rift
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with leavers on the side of the monarchy and remainers inclined
towards Meghan and Harry. While older people back the palace and the
young lean more to Montecito, I doubt that last night’s angry and
contrary ITV interview
[[link removed]] will
restore Harry’s sliding ratings.

The interview landed as the next neatly choreographed step in the ace
publicity machine of Prince Harry’s publishers. After the Oprah
interview
[[link removed]] in
2021, six episodes of the Netflix series, teasers for his four TV
interviews this week and the early leaking of his book, was there
really anything new for him to say or for us to think? Nothing, beyond
the painfully raw spectacle of his inchoate rage.The palace, with its
hordes of PR specialists, spent weeks war-gaming its response – it
was prepared for devastating revelations, ready to break its silence
if absolutely necessary. So far, its worst fears have “not come to
light
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which tantalisingly suggests it thought Harry had more lethal missiles
to unleash.

Of course, Harry’s words evoke some sympathy for an angry, damaged
man. In what family is it psychologically acceptable to consign the
younger son to service the elder for life? Few parental divorces are
as horrible as the one these boys suffered, their schoolfriends
snickering over the tampon tape and the James Gilbey recordings,
everyone ogling Diana and Charles’s self-justifying TV interviews
and books, capped by their mother’s horrific death. The monarchy
teetered as the Queen misjudged the Diana moment, but then she held it
together. If it could survive all that, the blow of a minor twig
breaking from “the Firm” to seek his Californian revenge is hardly
fatal – as he voices full support for the monarchy itself,
condemning only its toxic relationship with certain portions of the
press.

His one act of heroism is this dangerous duel with the tabloids that
he blames for his mother’s death, as he pursues cases against the
publisher of the Daily Mail, Associated Newspapers
[[link removed]] and
the owners of the Daily Mirror and the Sun
[[link removed]],
the Reach plc subsidiary MGN Ltd and Rupert Murdoch’s News Group
Newspapers, accusing them of phone-hacking
[[link removed]] or other
breaches of privacy
[[link removed]].
His father warned that it was a suicide mission, but Harry says the
royals have, in feeding the beast, made a pact with the devil. He
rages at their failure to stand up to them: there was not a word from
the palace in rebuke for Jeremy Clarkson’s disgusting hate attack
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Meghan.

Everyone knows Harry is entirely right about the filthy, hypocritical,
moralising amoral press and its corrosive effect on national life. Yet
in his mist of confusion and contradictions, he doesn’t see that
publicity is the monarchy’s lifeblood. When Queen Victoria withdrew
from the public eye for years, her popularity plummeted. That oxygen
is how the royals make their pointless living as fantasy creatures:
they need the press to justify their very existence, like any
celebrities. Their only role is to entertain us, and Harry plays his
part perfectly. Walter Bagehot
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wrong: the royals were never the “dignified” part of the
constitution, but undignified performers who reduce us to infantilism
in following their small dramas. Bagehot wrote that the purpose of the
monarchy is “to excite and preserve the reverence of the
population”. Indeed, citizens are reduced to subjects in revering
this family of nothingness. Nor was Bagehot right to claim the
monarchy’s “mystery is its life” and “we must not let in
daylight upon magic”. The public needs feeding constantly with each
new royal episode.

Of course the press is retaliating with a sewage outflow of bile, the
full firing squad of rightwing commentators hating the Sussexes’
“wokery”
[[link removed]].
It stays unspoken that “wokeness” means #MeToo and Black Lives
Matter, race swirling around in their loathing of “victim
culture”. Harry sounds ill-equipped intellectually to take them on,
unfocused in his fury against them, unpolitical, tin-eared and
clueless about how his Afghanistan kill-count
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other soldiers, giving fresh ammunition to the enemy press. Don’t
expect him to examine the slavery sources of some royal riches: the
future William IV made a pro-slavery speech
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accusing William Wilberforce’s abolition campaign of misrepresenting
the treatment of enslaved people in the British sugar colonies, whose
good living conditions he could attest to himself.

With the battle to re-examine the legacy of empire and slavery barely
begun, the royal family’s failure to prevent Meghan’s flight is a
disaster for them. Whatever restraint it took, it needed to embrace
her. The Queen is gone. Charles’s pitiful King Lear plea
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“Please, boys, don’t make my final years a misery”, reminds us
that he lacks her reinforced steel. The monarchy’s popularity has
declined for years: more 18- to 24-year-olds
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now prefer to have an elected head of state, while only 53%
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25- to 49-year-olds are in its favour. As Graham Smith of Republic
says, three white men in a row as kings stretching ahead for maybe the
next 100 years looks singularly out of step with modern Britain.

Look at the Clarksonesque roll-call of Harry and Meghan haters and you
might instinctively take Harry’s side, but no, let’s not be
dragged into the psychodrama of this spin-off from The Crown. This
country is braced for the deepest recession
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the G7, so badly misgoverned that people can’t call an ambulance to
a heart attack or police to a burglary, catch a train or stretch their
shrinking wages to pay for food and heat, while public services are
drained dry by austerity. Yet how easily we succumb to the great
distraction of another instalment of the royal charivari, briefly
diverting public anxiety and conveniently relieving pressure on the
government.

Monarchy is a cast of mind that blocks reform, an unholy religion made
of these remarkably unremarkable people. Despite the best education
for generations, their most useful genetic function is to demonstrate
that talent and intelligence is randomly assigned. Monarchy breeds in
Britain a feudalism of the imagination that gives a stamp of approval
to inheritance and to the inequality, risen rampantly in recent
decades, that is at the root of our social and political malaise.
Harry exhibits the epic unreality the royals inhabit when he imagines
this
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“I genuinely believe, and I hope, that reconciliation between my
family and us will have a ripple effect across the entire world.”
The rest of the world, I fear, enjoys the show, but laughs at our
absurdity.

_Polly Toynbee [[link removed]] is a
Guardian columnist. Her books include Dismembered: How the attack on
the state harms us all
[[link removed]], co-authored
with David Walker. _

_Guardian Media Group is a global news organisation that
delivers fearless, investigative journalism - giving a voice to the
powerless and holding power to account._

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exists to secure the financial and editorial independence of the
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_Today more than half of our revenue comes directly from our readers,
helping to support Guardian journalism and keep it open for everyone.
Contribute. [[link removed]]_

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