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Last week, a grandfather received a visit from his grandchildren who live overseas. Such things happen all over the world, every single day, with no fanfare whatsoever. If those people are members of Britain’s royal family, however, the fanfare cannot be dispensed with. We the public must, apparently, know about the event, pore over its every smallest detail and decide, at the end of it, who came out looking best. And so it was when Harry and Meghan made their first visit in four years as a family, their children Archie and Lilibet in tow, to see King Charles.
Such is the life that Harry and Meghan have been trying to avoid since they moved out of the U.K. and renounced royal duties in 2020. Have they stayed out of the spotlight altogether? Far from it. If you’ve had the misfortune of watching With Love, Meghan, you may have come away with more knowledge about the potential uses of edible flowers than anybody needs, and a bad taste in your mouth to boot. It would be difficult to argue that producing endless Netflix documentaries and sitting for tell-all interviews are the actions of people who want to be left alone.
But I feel conflicted about Harry and Meghan because, on the one hand, yes, their TV shows are not very good, and they seem personally sort of blah, and I would happily not hear so much about them and what they’re up to in California. But on the other, they are 100 percent correct in their view that the British media are a bunch of parasitic monsters when it comes to their coverage of the royals. Anyone in their right mind would cross an ocean to get away from it. I am, however, adding my voice to the choir here—and I appreciate the irony, so bear with me—in order to paint a picture of precisely how doggedly invasive the British press is when it comes to the royal family.
This visit by Harry and Meghan was a private event. It happened at Highgrove House, a sort of royal family satellite property outside London, and there were no photos released or any details given about what the family did together or spoke about during the visit. Who knows, and frankly, who cares.
And yet, even so, the tabloids are, I think, probably budgetarily mandated to churn out analysis of who “won” this visit. Take this article from the Express, one of the U.K.’s bigger red-top papers, headlined “Meghan and Harry Just Got Shown Who’s Boss—King Charles Has Played a Blinder.” Apparently, by not releasing public images of this meeting, the king has bested his son in a PR battle, and the columnist writes that she wouldn’t be surprised “if they have brought a sneaky Netflix camera crew to film the children at Diana’s grave.” It ends with this spit-take-worthy line: “The message from London is quiet but clear, and perfectly managed: You are always welcome as family, but the days of turning the British monarchy into a media circus are officially over.” The Daily Mail is running a poll for readers on whether it was “right” for the king to meet his grandchildren in this manner, and one of its columnists has declared the Sussexes “agents of chaos” for not confirming to press definitively enough whether the private family visit was going ahead.
What can be gleaned about the state of the relationship between the British king and his second son from this visit? Practically nothing new, and yet so heightened is the obsession with the royals that gleaning must be done. It never ends. Prince William’s son Prince George went to Wimbledon to watch the tennis this weekend and wore a suit—cue column inches about the fact that some people thought it was too hot for him to be wearing a suit. Kate’s use of a fan in hot weather at the tennis match was, according to whatever species of brain worms is de rigueur among royal reporters at the moment, a dig at Meghan somehow. And, of course, none of the writers of these articles believe a word of this; they just have to turn out some slop to feed the machine, because people have been trained since birth in this country to click on information relating to the royal family like Pavlov’s dog. The media circus will never close its doors so long as selling tickets to see the performing monkeys is profitable.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source slate.com ’
