This Side of the Pond

It’s been all over the news for the last week, so I’m sure you know by now that everyone’s favorite prince has flipped the bird to Queen and country and fled for the safety of Canada. Or, to set aside the histrionics, that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will be stepping back from their royal duties and splitting their time between Britain and North America.

You might be wondering why the reaction has been so extreme. Even my mild-mannered mother was livid and, if you haven’t managed to forget Piers Morgan as though his time in America was just a bad dream (I’m so sorry we let him escape), you may have heard him noisily stamping his feet.

It’s difficult to explain why Britain has been a maelstrom of emotions over this news because there isn’t anything I can safely compare it to. You guys decided against having a monarchy and you’re used to your figureheads being temporary, because that’s how the Founders designed things.

It’s different for us. The royals have been a part of my life since I was old enough to understand who they were. The Queen represents permanence and continuity, she is a fact of life I simply accept. She is, when you drill right down, another part of my own family (albeit one with a much nicer jewelry box).

Because the royal family belongs to us in ways I couldn’t put into words, we all took Harry and Meghan’s announcement personally. We were hurt to think they didn’t want to be a part of our family any more.

Many of us justified this feeling of rejection by reasoning that it was a terrible, ungrateful thing for them to do. They belong to us and should not have the right to discard us at will – after all, we pay for them to live those lavish lifestyles, we’re basically their employers.

I, too, was hurt, and I am not ashamed to admit that it felt like I’d been dumped for the country next door. But once I’d finished reacting like it was my own brother telling me he didn’t want to see me at family functions, I was able to think about things from their perspective.

Harry and Meghan are not happy, that has been clear for a while. I’ve always suspected that Harry regrets the status of his own birth – I don’t think he’d have enjoyed being a royal even if the death of Princess Diana hadn’t soured his feelings. Before Meghan, he was at his happiest on trips to Africa, away from the cameras, and while serving as a helicopter pilot in Afghanistan.

Do I blame Meghan, as the press has seemed to do? Yes, but I see it as a positive thing. I believe a good marriage is one where you can see your own potential in your partner’s eyes, and that seems to be what Meghan has done for Harry. This was the decision he always wanted to make.

The flipside of the money argument is that, as a nation, we don’t pay as much as we think we do on royal fripperies. The average cost for a taxpayer per year is less than £2 (or about $2.60), and I’ve given more than that to a bloke at the train station who couldn’t get enough change together to buy a ticket.

When you think about it that way, does the Sovereign Allowance really give us leeway to dictate how this new family lives their lives? Can we honestly say that, for less than the price of my favorite chai latte in our local coffee shop, we have the right to demand they be miserable?

But then again, we did also pay millions for the Sussex’s lavish wedding and then more millions to renovate Frogmore Cottage as their official residence. Does that make a difference?

Even factoring in the announcement that they will be paying back the cost of renovations: not really, if you think of the Sovereign Allowance more as an investment than a cost. According to news reports, the royal family brought in £430 million more than they cost the taxpayer in 2018 through tourism, merchandise and the arts. The Crown Estate meanwhile paid £329 million into the Treasury.

I think the way in which Harry and Meghan went about their announcement was what ruffled feathers, and it could certainly have been handled more delicately. They didn’t even tell the Queen, which is an unforgivable sin – an insult to her is an insult to us.

They are also openly hostile towards the press, which is understandable. We all have a suspicion that the defining moment in Harry’s life was the funeral of his mother. In hindsight, I can barely believe we expected a 12-year-old boy to walk behind her coffin as millions of people watched around the world.

Harry hates the press, and even as a member of that press, I don’t disagree with him. It’s not news reporters and feature writers he despises, it’s the paparazzi who stalk the famous, refuse to respect boundaries and hounded his mother into an early grave.

Unfortunately, his hostility towards the press inevitably seeps through into what the press then puts out for the public. He doesn’t hate the British people or hold a grudge against us, but you can sure get that impression when he’s publishing documents the length of your arm on how and when he’s prepared to interact with the media. After all, they’re the conduit through which he tells us what he’s up to.

Harry wants more control, and who could blame him? This has been a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more the public suspects he’s rebelling against his lot in life, the more we blame Meghan for changing him. And the more horrible we are to the wife he loves so deeply, the more he’s thought about leaving us.

As with so many things in life, we’ve brought this on ourselves. Meghan has been criticized for everything from the dresses she chooses to wear to “touching her baby bump too much” – she even caused a scene by closing her own car door. Could you stand by and watch your spouse go through that? Could you cope with the thought that it would one day soon happen to your child?

Harry and Meghan will still be part of the family firm – they will still be ambassadors of all things British, it’s just that their smiles will be real. When you’ve grown up with the royals as a fact of life, it’s easy to forget they are human beings and deserve happiness and autonomy as much as anyone else. It’s easy to forget that a life of duty without freedom is not as charmed as it seems from the outside.

So with all this in mind, am I angry Harry and Meghan have decided to leave us? No, not really, not any more. I’m just sad they feel the need to go.