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It was a day of deep thinking and heroic typing, my brain so fried I could hardly call out for pizza. Then the news and social media feeds exploded with reports that Harry and Meghan plan to leave California and move back to England. What was that to me? I don’t care that the royals moved away or believe in royal anything except perhaps Royal Crown Cola.
Most media, not me, insist on referring to Harry and his sitcom actress wife, Meghan Markle, as “Duke and Duchess of Sussex.” Their two children carry the official royal titles of prince and princess. And to think their parents aren’t even “working royals.”
About the working royals: “Prince William,” heir to that pointless throne, seems nice enough, and his wife Catherine is lovely. But the same can be said about my high school principal or my last Uber driver. His father, “King Charles,” is now doing a yeoman’s job, I guess, though his prior behavior was not sterling. (Let’s not even mention “Prince Andrew.”)
Point is, Americans staged a revolution so that they wouldn’t have to bow before average or sub-average people in crowns. As the incendiary pamphleteer Thomas Paine wrote in “Common Sense” (1776), “Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”
Upon landing in California, Harry and Meghan embarked on a campaign to monetize their dramatic break with royal headquarters. Harry penned that cruel but highly profitable tell-all of family conflict. Meghan did a lifestyle series on Netflix, “With Love, Meghan,” and launched an unsuccessful home goods company peddling dried flowers, candles and jam.
Martha Stewart, one of six middle-class kids from Nutley, New Jersey, made quick work of Meghan’s attempted trespass on her lifestyle empire. “If you’re an actress,” she said dismissively, “it’s hard to then transition to a princess and then from a princess into a homemaking guru on a television show. It doesn’t sort of follow.”
Meghan ran into another headwind when she featured her 7-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter on her social media feed. That did not quite jibe with her campaign to shield children from the harms of social media.
As a fashion influencer, Meghan does wonderful things for hats, but Catherine does also. And though Catherine, like Meghan, was plucked from the “commoner” ranks, she towers over the whole bunch on manners and class. She is formally “Her Royal Highness Catherine, Princess of Wales” but is widely called, with affection, plain Kate Middleton. The glowing coverage of Catherine makes the reports that Meghan didn’t get along with her quite believable.
But it didn’t take Harry and Meghan to set me on the road to revolution. The spectacular split-up of Diana and Charles blew away whatever fairy dust still obscured the royal family’s ordinariness.
Harry and Meghan’s return to England, many say, is intended as a brand reset. What do they have to sell? So far, the only product that’s brought in the big bucks is dishing dirt on the royal family. A recent Ipsos poll has Harry’s favorability among the British people at a sad 30%, while Meghan trailed the lot at 23%.
That same Ipsos poll found that only 55% of Britons wanted their country to remain a monarchy -- still a majority but the lowest support since those surveys were taken. And among the younger 18- to 34-year-olds, that support fell to only 33%.
See? Harry and Meghan have me thinking about them. That said, my mental checkout time is about an hour from now when I’ll be done disparaging the whole monarchical racket.
Who are these people? Why must we care?
Follow Froma Harrop on X @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.
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