Meghan may be a resident of Montecito, California, but she is still the Duchess of Sussex, and she won’t let us commoners forget it. Despite their highly publicised separation from the royal family, Harry and Meghan remain extraordinarily loyal to their fancy titles. They have been asked before why they cling to their aristocratic honorifics and shrugged off the question. “What difference would that make?” Harry told Anderson Cooper in 2023, when asked why the couple didn’t renounce the titles.
The difference, Mr Duke, is that people might stop wondering why you and Megs are so keen on reminding everyone that you’re royals, while living in a country that famously has no monarchy. And this question isn’t going away. It keeps popping up and it’s back in the news now thanks to a Harper’s Bazaar cover story on Meghan.
“After years of being subsumed by other people’s narratives, the Duchess of Sussex is ready to author her own next chapter,” the profile proclaims. And then a little detail that has taken the internet by storm. The magazine writer enters the luxury New York home of one of Meghan’s friends and notes: “The house manager announces, ‘Meghan, Duchess of Sussex,’ even though we appear to be the only other two people in the house.” The woman so keen on authoring her own next chapter apparently continues to insist on being called by a title she received via marriage from an institution she seems to disdain.
Before all the Meghan fans come rushing in ready to fight: yes, the duchess was given a terrible time by the royals and the British press. But two things can be true at once: one can acknowledge that Meghan was treated poorly while also noting that she and Harry seem awfully keen to enjoy all the privileges of royalty, without many of the responsibilities.
This seems to be a theme with the Sussexes. The Harper’s Bazaar profile explains the reason Meghan was at her friend’s New York pad for that interview was that she and Harry were in the city to receive the Humanitarians of the Year award from a mental health not-for-profit organisation. Have the pair done good work raising awareness about important issues? Sure. Do they deserve to be known as “humanitarians of the year” when there are large numbers of underpaid and underappreciated humanitarian workers risking their lives in war zones? No, they don’t. And this is why so many people have a problem with the Sussexes. Because they seem obsessed with titles and accolades without putting in the grunt work that normally goes along with them. I can think of a few words for people like that – and it’s not “duchess” or “duke”.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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