The Royal Family is a deeply toxic institution

Whoo boy…

The Royal manure has very much hit the Family fan.

Weirdly, it’s not because one of the Queen’s sons is almost certainly a paedophile with links to a child-sex-trafficker. No. It’s because a Prince and his mixed-race wife decided that the harassment from the press and frosty treatment from the rest of the Royal Family had become so bad that it was no longer worth being part of it.

“The Royal Family is a deeply toxic institution, so obsessed with tradition, and decorum, and protocol that they’re never not their own worst enemy.”

Speculating on the royal baby’s skin colour. Ugh, Jesus, gross.

The new Oprah interview, already aired in the US and (at time of writing) due to air in the UK tonight, has thrown more light on Harry and Meghan’s decision to step-back from the Royal Family. Revelations include an undisclosed senior royal repeatedly voicing concerns about the skin colour of the couple’s baby, a struggling Meghan being dissuaded from seeking mental health support because it would “look bad”, and baby Archie being denied a title or security from the palace (not a matter of choice on the Harry and Meghan’s part as the public where previously led to believe). Reactions have, as ever, been polarised but if this contributor has to take any side in this, then frankly it’s Harry and Meghan’s by a country mile.

Even public figures are entitled to a private life. They make public appearances, and give interviews, and promote their brand and whatnot because themselves is what they have to sell. There’s nothing wrong with that. People who are ‘famous for being famous’ can be annoying but they still have the right to not have every inch of their lives constantly picked and prodded at. And it seems they would have been quite content to do this relatively amicably before the Palace opted to make ‘Megxit’ far more acrimonious and mean-spirited than it needed to be.

“These days my attitude has evolved to ‘lol, where the guillotines at?’”

Duty and racism

The Royal Family’s preoccupation with the notion of ‘duty’ is a ludicrous artefact. Birth should not determine what anyone does with their life, and anyone born into a royal family (also a ridiculous and outdated concept) should be able to walk away if that life doesn’t suit them.

Other monarchies seem slightly less fussy about this, with the monarchs of Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Qatar, Cambodia, Bhutan and Japan all abdicating in recent years to make way for their younger heirs in what’s basically a retirement. In the UK, the abdication crisis of Edward VIII in 1936 has left a scar on the idea and fostered the growth of a hostile and brutally reactionary attitude to any deviation from the royal norm. (This is also why American divorcees and the royals are still not regarded as a good mix). As a result, the Royal Family is a deeply toxic institution, so obsessed with tradition, and decorum, and protocol that they’re never not their own worst enemy.

As for the racism issue, not even a dust mite should be shocked by the notion that the monarchy as an institution is racist. The modern monarchy was built on colonialism and the subsummation of other peoples and cultures under their rule. I heard a supporter of the Royal Family on the radio earlier cite always seeing them ‘surrounded by peoples of all cultures, colours, and creeds’, or something to that effect. That might be true, but the royals go amongst diverse people as Royals. They go amongst them as Colonisers and Masters. The Royal Family has only ever championed diversity in a paternalistic, patronising manner that’s conditional on people of colour remembering their place as subjects in a defunct empire whose legacy continues to plague every corner of the globe.

Just a couple years ago I’d probably still have considered myself a begrudging ‘Monarchist’. These days my attitude has evolved to “lol, where the guillotines at?”. I’d like to see it abolished after the Queen dies but, given the recent trend of jingoist ethnonationalism this country is embracing, I doubt that’ll happen.

Monarchy bad

Meghan is a celebrity, whom I only know through news reports and interviews, so I can’t accurately say what she is like as a person. But I can say she does not deserve the campaign of racially charged vindictive reporting she has been subjected to by the British media (also by and large a racist institution). No one deserves it. Who can blame Harry and Meghan for not wanting to put their family through the same treatment which essentially killed his mother? Sometimes the only way to stop a cycle is to break it, and that’s not always going to be palatable for all concerned.

What I can confidently say is that, were Meghan a white upper-middle-class English girl like Kate, and not a divorced American woman of colour, her treatment by the press and the royals would have played out a whole lot differently.

Tl;dr Monarchy bad, Monarchy racist, Harry & Meghan been done dirty.