As we’ll see throughout the week, the British media clearly sees the Princess of Wales’s cancer confession as a greenlight to attack the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. The British media is coming at the Sussexes from every angle – H&M should volunteer to come back and help out, except Kate and William should throw them out of the country, except Kate and Harry should go back to being friends, except Kate doesn’t need Harry’s support at all. Story after story, article after article, all with the same messages: the Sussexes better come back so we can throw them out and punish them again; how dare the Sussexes show their faces around here anymore, where are they, why aren’t they back? One of the most chaotic and vile pieces was published in the Daily Mail, unsurprisingly. Columnist A.N. Wilson openly discusses how fun it will be if Donald Trump is reelected and he deports Harry, because I guess that’s the only scenario in which Harry would be “forced” to come back to them.
The Sussexes’ message of support to Kate: This communication, which followed a public statement from Montecito wishing Kate ‘health and healing’, is said to have been the first in months between the warring Wales brothers. Let’s all hope that the truce, if there is one, lasts and that Meghan and Harry are eventually welcomed back into the Royal Family, and – one day, perhaps – into the hearts of the British nation. Lord knows the royals could do with it. With the King and Kate both temporarily out of action through illness, there’s a real need for others to pitch in, especially in the low-profile, less glamorous work of charities and patronages.
Trump’s threat: Let’s also not forget Donald Trump’s veiled threat, if he is re-elected to the White House this November, that he might expel Harry from the United States for allegedly giving misleading accounts of his previous drug use in his visa application. ‘If he lied, they’ll have to take appropriate action,’ the ex-president said. Were this frankly hilarious development to take place, Meghan would presumably be asked to give up her Californian lifestyle – to say nothing of her hotly anticipated new luxury jam enterprise – and bring Archie and Lilibet to live in Windsor Great Park, and perhaps go to school with George, Charlotte and Louis. If you were writing the script of the royal soap opera, you could not hope for a more delicious twist in the plot.
How Harry must have felt: Yet still I ask myself: How must Harry have felt last Friday when he heard Kate’s sad news, so bravely expressed? It is he, after all, who averred in his tawdry Netflix show: ‘I think, for so many people in the family – especially obviously the men – there can be a temptation or an urge to marry someone who would fit the mould as opposed to somebody who you perhaps are destined to be with.’ His meaning was clear. He, Harry, had married for love: whereas William, and perhaps their father, had coldly married someone who merely looked the part, out of a misguided sense of duty.
How Harry treated Kate: Before Harry met Meghan, he and Kate had been true friends: by his own admission, she was ‘the sister I’ve never had and always wanted’. So if her brave video last week achieved anything, I hope it made Harry reflect on how he has had treated her. After all, it seems to me that a great many of the problems facing the Royal Family at the moment can be laid at his and Meghan’s door. It is they who lifted the lid on the rift between the two brothers. It is they who raised the inflammatory claim that some royals are secret racists. It is they who insulted Kate, knowing she could not respond. Their foolish decision to go public with their seething resentments against the House of Windsor has done far more damage to the royal image than any supposed intrusions into their privacy by the Press, let alone the delusional fantasies of social media trolls.
The Sussexes were the lazy ones, you see: The truth is, he and Meghan were too self-absorbed and ultimately too lazy to carry out the day-to-day slog of royal duty which Kate, Princess Anne and the King and Queen have so faithfully done for years. Their little strops, and their decision to flounce out in early 2020, were a sort of mini-abdication. And the malice with which they have derided and vilified the Royal Family is another way in which they seem to want to echo the bad behaviour of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, aka the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. (The eerie thing is that as time goes by, Meghan has increasingly come to look like Wallis, her fellow American divorcee.)
I doubt the Sussexes had any kind of conciliatory urges last Friday, but for arguments sake, let’s say they did. Wouldn’t those urges die swiftly the moment they read this vile bullsh-t peddled with implicit or explicit palace approval? The same British media which is now shaming everyone for merely wondering why Kensington Palace was lying about Kate for months is the same media pouring scorn, hatred, and deeply unsettling bullsh-t about the two people they’ve terrorized for years. The point of it is not that Harry should or should not come back – the hatred seems to be the point. Just churning evil, pain, damage and trauma throughout every media outlet.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.