A shower of bastards in search of an audience

The response to Netflix's 'Harry & Meghan' is telling, predictable, and pathetic.

The Father: No sir, no. We act that role for which we have been cast, that role which we are given in life. And in my own case, passion itself, as usually happens, becomes a trifle theatrical when it is exalted.

— Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), Luigi Pirandello

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The Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan is an autobiography of a couple. Though it features others — both sympathetic experts and friends — it is Harry and Meghan’s story told from their perspectives and shaped by them. No one is an entirely reliable narrator but the series is being attacked by some of the world’s most unrepentant liars.

It should be neither surprising nor shocking that a man whose very birth was a plot point in a centuries-long national soap opera and a woman who was an actress in a previous life should be so invested in narrative. But part of the anger from the various royal ‘experts’, royal correspondents, and columnists is about the refusal of these characters to acquiesce to having their plotlines written for them.

I’m a republican, so by definition I don’t think monarchy should exist; in my ideal reality, Henry Charles Albert David Windsor would have been considered no more or less special at birth than any other child. But he was born into the glare of flashbulbs, trapped in a dysfunctional setup from the moment he took his first breath. The idea that he could now buy obscurity through silence is ludicrous.

What he could get, through acquiescence and abasement to the tabloid gods, is kinder coverage. If he had not and did not continue to break the ‘invisible contract’, they might write ‘nicer’ things about him, but the same underlying sentiment would be there: “Great coverage you’ve got, be a shame if anything were to happen to it.”

The relationship between the royals and the press is a sick combination of protection racket and suicide pact. The line now is to pretend Harry only talked about that deal after he and Meghan got together, that she ‘poisoned’ him against his family and the press alike. But a much-circulated compilation of interview clips from his late teens and early twenties shows that’s not true; in it he says:

I don’t want to sit around at Windsor because I generally don’t like England that much and it’s nice to be away from the press and the papers and the general shite that they write…

My father always says don’t read it, everyone says don’t read it because it’s always rubbish. I’m surprised how many people in the UK actually read it. Everyone’s guilty for buying the newspapers I guess but hopefully, no one believes what they read…

Of course, I read it, if there’s a story and something’s been written about me I want to know about what’s being said. All it does is upset and anger me that people can get away with writing the stuff that they do, not just about me, about everything and everybody. [Reporter: How far back does that mistrust of the press go?] I think it’s fairly obvious how far back it goes. To when I was very small…

But those were only potshots in early skirmishes; Harry’s real battle with the media began a few weeks after his relationship with Meghan became public — splashed in the Daily Express by Camilla Tominey — when he issued a statement highlighting the “smears” and “racial undertones” in the coverage and telling editors:

This is not a game — it is her life.

Much later, when the Duke and Duchess of Sussex stepped down as ‘working’ royals, they also stepped away from cooperation with the Mail, Sun, Mirror and Express titles, saying they refused to “offer themselves up as currency for an economy of click-bait and distortion". That’s very different to Camilla — now the Queen — giving exclusive interviews to the Mail or William and Kate allowing pictures of their children to appear in calendars given away by the Mail on Sunday.

The general line in the press is that Harry & Meghan sets a new precedent as if Diana didn’t cooperate with/effectively co-write Andrew Morton’s biography of her or give the famous Panorama interview, in part, as retaliation for Charles’ soft-soap PR-move interview with Jonathan Dimbleby in 1994. The difference now is that the Sussexes have more control over their story and have chosen to tell it outside the British media, just as they did before with Oprah.

If you view the British press’ reviews of Harry & Meghan through the prism of anger that ‘characters’ have got away from them and are now authoring their own stories, they make a lot more sense. Especially when you couple that with the realisation that the series — even in just its first three instalments — repeatedly highlights the banal emptiness of “royal correspondent” as a job.

Being made “royal correspondent” is not a promotion but a demotion; it is being condemned to act as an unholy melding of gossip columnist and stenographer, stuck in a dusty corner where real acts of journalism do not occur. Just look at the BBC, where Johnny Dymond was a foreign correspondent known for his reporting on 9/11 before he was made a royal correspondent and Nicholas Witchell was a respected reporter and news anchor before covering the monarchy hollowed him out to a laughable, obsequious shell.

In episode 3 of the series, Harry says that royal correspondents are “essentially an extended PR arm of the royal family. An agreement that has been there for over 30 years” and that the press believes “this family is ours to exploit. Their trauma is our story.” Numerous reviews and columns in response to the documentary claim those points are contradictory but I don’t think they are.

The British media both colludes in the royal family’s PR aims and expects its members to offer up every part of their lives for scrutiny. What secrets royals do have — and the Queen and Prince Philip had many — are protected by a mixture of law, precedent, levels of presumed public affection and willingness to play the game. What William and Kate do is subjected to far less scrutiny because they are very much onside.

Harry and Meghan’s wealth, privilege, fame and the hypocrisies that come with that mix are analysed in minute detail because they have stopped “playing along”. Camilla Tominey’s review of the documentary for The Daily Telegraph shows that:

… “Vol 1” of the Duke and Duchess of Sussexes’ much-hyped Netflix series is probably best described as Harry, Meghan and the Half-Truth Prince - an act of glossy wizardry designed to depict the couple as the Gryffindor to the royals’ Slytherin.

Yet by the end of the first three episodes, it soon becomes apparent that the only Mug(gle) to have fallen under any spell is Harry himself - a husband so besotted by his wife that he has been completely blinded to the magic of his once majestic life.

The former military man and his American actress wife had gone on Oprah armed with a Uzi, sub-machine-gunning their royal relatives with claims of racism and institutionalised indifference that nearly drove them both to suicide.

This was a more subtle form of televisual warfare. Like a love story featuring an arrow filled with explosives, it used slick propaganda, thinly-veiled jibes and a Sussex squad of loyal troops to do battle against bigoted Britain and its racist press.

Putting aside the garbage opinions for a moment, this is abysmal writing; from the highly-suspect Half-Blood Prince allusion — someone please buy these people some more books — to the hyperbolic and half-cocked metaphors. It’s truly embarrassing that Tominey’s tortured copy is considered worthy of a national newspaper, even one as run down as The Daily Telegraph, an unwieldy fanzine for tweedy racists.

Tominey believes in monarchy as a “majestic life” — or, at least, must pretend to for the benefit of her readers — and seems to argue that it’s awful that a man loves his wife. Even as she rejects the notion of a racist press, she’s once again pushing the idea of the good prince led astray by his “American actress wife”. To read a Daily Telegraph columnist railing against propaganda and “thinly-veiled jibes” feels a little Goebbels objecting to someone else’s strongly-worded pamphlet.

There’s also more than a fair dusting of irony on a sentence that decries “thinly-veiled jibes” and then goes for the Sussex Squad in the very next clause.

Someone must have mistakenly told Tominey that she’s funny (“As has ever been the case with Meg-a-whinge and Prince Harassed…”) and she retails the same tired old claim that Harry has only recently criticised the relationship between press and palace:

On Oprah, Harry spoke of being the victim of a media conspiracy. Two years in California appears to have broadened his horizons. Now it seems the conspiracy not only involves the media, but also the palace to which he once belonged. Or “exploitation and bribery between our family and the media”, as he puts it.

The review is sprinkled with quotes from the episodes stripped of their tone and given harsher readings; jokes become pointed and light-hearted observations become cruel. Tominey is, of course, far from the only hack engaged in that game.

Take the reliably unpleasant Dan Wootton, writing for MailOnline, who says:

The snide digs at the Prince and Princess of Wales come thick and fast, too.

Like the implicit criticism that William may have chosen to marry Kate because she was the safe option, with Harry saying: 'For so many people in the family, especially the men, there can be a temptation or an urge to marry someone who would fit the mould as opposed to somebody who you are perhaps destined to be with.'

That’s an implication that he chooses to take from that comment. It could equally apply to Harry’s father and both of his uncles. Wootton also makes sure to defend Samantha Markle and Thomas Markle because they are sources for him. If they weren’t he wouldn’t spare a second for them.

On Twitter, the Mail’s Sarah Vine transforms Meghan’s self-deprecating story about meeting the Queen for the first time into an example of ‘racist’ disrespect:

Why is it ok for Meghan to mock our culture in this way? Or does racism only work one way?

Sarah Vine’s culture may be defined by bowing and scraping to someone because they emerged from a magic vagina but it sure as fuck isn’t mine.

In The Sun, professional stalker Piers Morgan files what must be his 500th column about a woman who went for a drink with him once and regretted it instantly. On a page that features not one, two, three, or four, but five pictures of Morgan, he writes:

In the documentary, Meghan looks like the smirking cynical cat who got the commercial lottery-life-win cream, while hapless Harry looks like a spaced-out zombie who now speaks weird Montecito therapist couch psychobabble as he tries to justify his appalling treachery towards his family and his country.

This is the kind of stuff you might expect to read in a note made up of letters cut from magazines. It is personal hatred from a man who would quickly love the pair if they talked to him and gave him all the attention he craves. Just look at how Ronaldo, a footballer he called a “treacherous little toad” and “egocentric prima donna” in a 2008 article for the Mail, is now his bestest pal after he did an interview for Piers Morgan: Unwatched, dragging the show’s ratings out of the toilet.

Morgan, a man whose ego is visible from orbit, believes he knows more about Princess Diana’s character than her son:

… the most sickening part of this Netflix series is the constant use of Harry’s late mother Princess Diana, and absurd comparisons to his wife. ‘So much of what Meghan is, is so similar to my mum,’ he says. ‘She has the same compassion, same empathy, and the same confidence. She has this warmth about her.’

Really?

Having known both women, I can say with certainty that they had absolutely nothing in common.

Morgan ‘knew’ Diana in his role as a tabloid newspaper editor. In his first volume of published diaries The Insider, he writes of getting hold of a potentially embarrassing story about her:

… the Sunday Express [had it], but it was pulled at the last minute because their owner Lord Stevens is a mate of Princess Diana’s and didn’t want to embarrass her. I have no such allegiance.

Inevitably, Allison Pearson of The Daily Telegraph also believes she knows Harry’s dead mother better than him. In a column filed the day before the documentary was released, she wrote:

Harry forgets that his mother had two sons who both adored her. A devout monarchist, Diana would be appalled at the damage her younger boy is doing to his big brother, her darling “Wills”, via the institution he will one day lead. If, that is, there is a monarchy left when Harry has finished his tantrum.  

How does she know? Perhaps, she’s borrowed the Daily Express’ ouija board or talked to the Telegraph’s go-to Diana channeller, Rose Tremain, author of history’s most unhinged monarchy fan fiction.

The Allison Pearson of 2022 castigating Harry for perceived sleights against King Charles is the same Allison Pearson who wrote for The Daily Mail in 2008 that Prince Charles should step aside in favour of William. She is also the same Allison Pearson who defended Harry’s use of racist slurs in a video filmed in 2006 by saying he would also suffer from ‘banter’ “as a gingernut posh git”. Harry has learned, changed and apologised, Pearson’s professional position means she must never do either.

In the same Mail column that she blithely dismissed racism, Pearson argued that “Diana’s boy [had] inherited her gift and [had] the makings of a compassionate man.” When Harry and Meghan’s engagement was announced, Pearson wrote that “Diana would be delighted”. But now he’s not the character she sketched out, she argues in a national newspaper that his mother would be “appalled”. It’s grotesque.

Two words from The Sun’s front page yesterday sum up why Harry and Meghan feel the need to define their own story: Woko Ono¹. Like Yoko Ono, a person with a career of her own before she met John Lennon, Meghan is constantly framed as the ‘exotic’ woman who led Harry astray. For all the jibes against him, it’s her who is always the villain of the (newspaper) piece.

For The Guardian, Zoe Williams writes a piece in defence of the couple but what’s striking about it is the attempt to pretend that it is only the tabloids who are the problem. She concludes:

… is it OK to have this very dominant industry, dedicated to the maintenance of blatant but deniable bigotry? Is there a response the progressive media could have had, better than dignified neutrality? Could the BBC or the broadsheets have been more robust? How many black women have to be sacrificed on this altar, while we decide whether or not their behaviour was part of the problem?

The Guardian’s review of the first three parts of the documentary by Lucy Managan was headlined Harry & Meghan review – so sickening I almost brought up my breakfast. In it, Mangan says:

There is plenty here to start another round of tabloid frenzy, particularly in Harry’s mention of members of the royal family who consider the pressure placed on anyone “marrying in” a rite of passage and resist allowing anyone else to avoid what their own spouses went through, and who bow to internal pressure to choose a wife who “fits the mould”. Which is to say – it is hard to see who, beyond the media, the villains of the piece, will really gain from this? A period of silence should be welcomed.

This is classic Guardian, pretending to be terribly above it all — a cut above the sleazy tabloids — while revelling in every single moment of it.

A similar kind of abject lack of self-awareness is at play in Sarah Vine’s Daily Mail column; she howls about Harry and Meghan:

What gives him – the both of them – the right to judge other people’s relationships in this way?

It’s a question that can be thrown back in her face and indeed the faces of every royal correspondent and ‘expert’ who has analysed the lives, relationships, and psychology of people they don’t know.

In Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, the titular figures arrive demanding that someone finish their story. In the British media, the correspondents and columnists who make their livings from the characters of the royal family are furious because Harry and Meghan presume to write their own story and to profit from it. The only ‘truth’ the British press can countenance is one delivered beneath their bylines and that’s why Harry & Meghan will be so stringently fact-checked while other cosier fictions continue to go unquestioned.

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Thanks to John Hill, the Research Arena, Red Pola and the Burnzoid for reading and offering feedback on the draft today.

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1. A jibe previously used by Camilla Tominey in The Daily Telegraph, who, I suspect, cribbed it from the gossip forum Tattle.