the times | Tuesday July 28 2020 1GM 25
Comment
The Sussexes are nothing without gossip
A new book about Harry and Meghan exposes the emptiness of royalty once pomp and circumstance are stripped away
Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826
tabloids any less than before. Last
week they began another lawsuit,
after paparazzi drones hovered
over their home in Los Angeles. It is
quite hard to tell what the Sussexes
are up to over there — beyond
looking upwards sometimes, irritably
— or why, or where they reckon this
is all going.
They are not the Obamas, and
they probably know it. Nor, though,
are they Hollywood royalty, despite
being royalty, and almost in
Hollywood. For to be royal, almost
by definition, is to be famous for
nothing. You can do wonderful work
and many royals do — hooray the
good ones — but you will never beyour work. You will always be the
thing that was there before. And
they still are.
What could be more royal, in
fact, than bickering with the rest of
your family via things your
semi- imaginary friends have told
the newspapers? This story, I think,
is already a tragedy. In America,
the idea was, they could be royals
without all that silly old
embarrassing nonsense. No pomp,
no ceremony, no dogs, no horses,
no palaces, no silly hats, and most of
all, no gossip in the newspapers.
That last one, though, is hard to
get rid of. Particularly if you ditch
everything else. Without it, you
might find, there’s nothing left.gossip, they were saying. It is not
what we want to be.
And yet here comes Finding
Freedom, which is exactly like
everything they hate, except this
time it is nice about them and only
nasty about other people. On every
page, nameless “friends” turn up and
share everything, right down to
which of them first said “I love you”
and what the other one felt about it.
I’d remind you at this point thatHarry is 35 and Meghan is 38. Their
many “friends”, it seems, are about
nine years old. Officially, the couple
did not co-operate but they
definitely aren’t complaining, either.
Which shows you, I think, a flaw in
their plan to escape the media beast.
Because they want to escape it by
riding it. While, simultaneously,
milking it. And you just can’t do
that. Not even if you have very
long arms.
It is early days, I know, and there
has been a lot on. But the new
Sussex world does not, from a
distance, seem to be working out
that well. Despite their lawsuits,
they do not appear to be in theThe new Sussex world
does not, from afar,
seem to be working
spiritual enlightenment or bought
your own bottom. Not long after the
Sussexes announced their big move
several newspapers reported that
they had chosen, as their public life
template, Barack and Michelle
Obama. It wasn’t even a joke. Ah, the
audacity of hope.
That story may not have been
true, of course. Lots of royal stories
aren’t. Maybe most aren’t. In my first
job in what I suppose we could
tenuously call “journalism”, on a
gossip news website, I was blessed
with a senior colleague who
specialised in predicting royal
pregnancies that never happened.
“It’s not not true,” he’d protest, “it’sjust not true yet.” His other great
maxim, which he’d brought over
from the tabloids, was “royals never
sue”. Harry and Meghan have
heaved that one right out of the
gilded carriage window, most
notably with their legal fight against
The Mail On Sunday after it
published a letter from her father.
In April they announced a
boycott of most British tabloids.
“What they won’t do,” the couple
said, in an odd third-person letter
about themselves, “is offer
themselves up as currency for an
economy of clickbait and distortion.”
In other words, they were choosing
to simply leave the conversation.
Enough of the tittle tattle and theT
here’s just not enough
there. This is royalty’s big
problem. There is a swirling
maelstrom of duty, and
familial rifts, and hats, and
writs, and gossip, and more hats, and
medals for you’re not sure what, and
awful friends, and dogs, and horses,and palace disasters, and
occasionally a meaningful brooch
but more often than not just another
hat. And really not very much else.
Think of it this way. Think of
September 2018, when the new
Duchess of Sussex, who by this point
had been married to the new Duke
of Sussex for four months, got out of
a car at the Royal Academy of Arts
in London and closed the door.
“Meghan closes a car door”,
reported the BBC, almost
immediately, and the world’s news
media sat up and paid attention. “Is
there anything Meghan Markle can’t
do?” pondered a correspondent in
The Washington Post, not entirely
ironically. Funny, yes, but probablyalso a bit wearying, if it’s you. “What
a strain,” you might think. “What a
terrible distraction!” Only, from
what?
The fuss is the job and the job is
the fuss. That’s it. That’s the whole
royal deal. This is the context in
which to read the past few days of
extracts from Finding Freedom, the
new book about the Sussexes’ brave
decision to move to America
because the Duchess of Cambridge
made the wrong sort of eye contact
with Meghan at a memorial service
and also once didn’t offer her a lift to
the shops in a Range Rover. And it is
also why, despite their ceaseless
desire to be known, and understood,but correctly, their efforts will only
ever be a Möbius strip, turning
inwards, forever, upon themselves.
Royalty is completely
preposterous. Everybody knows this.
It’s awful, too. It is fame as a chronic,
genetic condition from which
nobody recovers. In a global context,
to be a top-tier British royal is to be
halfway between being the Dalai
Lama and Kim Kardashian, only
without having achieved your ownRoyalty is fame as a
chronic condition from
which no one recovers
@hugorifkind
Hugo
Rifkind