I have not read Harry’s memoir, so let me say that at the outset. This will not be a book review. But as a media observer of many, many years that has seen the Netflix special, I am kind of astonished at the vitriol thrown in the direction of him and his family, who have moved from the UK to start a new life in the entertainment industry in sun-kissed California. Also, the media’s lack of proper context of Princess Diana, the mother of Prince Harry, and the circumstances under which she died and how that affects his present day decision-making.
Granted, a member of a thousand year old royal dynasty breaking away from his ceremonial duties — whatever, quite frankly, those are — of being a royal in the modern era is certainly precedent-busting, to be sure. It is a subject that is bound to be fascinating to the UK public and the tabloid culture alike. It is the proverbial story that launches a million copies. But Harry is, like, fifth in the line of succession, after all of William’s children. He is not going to be King of England, frankly. So, shouldn’t he be allowed to live his life outside of the ultra-sleazy British tabloid universe?
Consider Prince Harry’s historical relationship with the British tabloids and how they have acquitted themselves of late with regards to his current wife. “The tabloids may not like Prince Harry’s reincarnation as a super-rich Californian wellness bore,” writes the brave Marina Hyde of The Guardian, “but it does have the moral edge over pulling people’s medical records and hacking the phones of murdered 13-year-old girls.” Yes, you read that right, dear reader — the now defunct Murdoch-owned British tabloid News of the World hacked the phone of a missing girl who was later found to have been killed, because of “scoops.” Fleet Street is very competitive, you see.
This is the type of ooze we are dealing with (above). Rupert Murdoch actually had to apologize for putting out too much media garbage in his instance. News of the World no longer exists because it became a liability; it was, in essence, just too sleazy, even for Fleet Street. But in its time, it was a force — in phone hacking — to be feared by celebrities. Rupert Murdoch ultimately made a pretty penny before he had to ditch the rag altogether.
From all accounts Princess Diana had a complex relationship with the media. “(Prince William) knew the tabloids made her life hell, but he also knew she colluded with them,” writes royal chronicler Tina Brown in 2022. “By his early teens, he was his mother’s most trusted confidant. She used to describe him as ‘my little wise old man.’” Harry was a little younger, so his understanding of the media is probably quite different. William and Harry have wildly divergent ideas about the tabloids.
Diana, however, was not above lunching with editors like Tina Brown, who has now, not surprisingly, thrown her lot in with the British royals and, by proxy, the tabloid press. Lady Evans clearly knows what side her bread is buttered on. And Princess Diana, in her own war against the royals in the last years of her life, used the tabloids — and allowed herself to be used by the tabloids — to promote her public image to the public. As Mark Honigsbaum of The Spectator (via PBS) put it:
Unlike the people, she read the tabloids out of necessity, not love. But she was wise enough to realise that they were the bane of her life, when it came to the publication of paparazzi photographs, they tended to be far more supportive of her public causes than the broadsheets. As another tabloid editor, again speaking on the basis of anonymity, put it, the Princess recognised her relationship with the tabloids was a two-way street and exploited it to the best possible advantage: 'The quid pro quo was that in return for access to her private office you would be broadly sympathetic to her charity work, and by and large we were. What Earl Spencer doesn't seem to appreciate is that the ones who caused her the greatest distress were the editorialisers and sneerers and the broadsheets. We treated her trips to Angola as great tabloid events. It was the think pieces afterwards that really got to her.'
This symbiotic relationship ended, abruptly, in August 1997, when the Princess was killed in a traffic tunnel while her car was being chased by … paparazzi. The Spencers, understandably, never forgave the tabloids. By September 1997, Earl Spencer asked the editors of the tabloids not to attend the funeral of his late sister. He asked through a spokesman for the tabloid editors not to attend “because he and his sisters, particularly Diana, would not have wished them to be there.” Kate Samuelson of Time wrote of Charles Spencer’s eulogy and its focus on the tabloids:
The unspoken villain in his eulogy was the paparazzi and their sponsors on Fleet Street — the notoriously hard-nosed, intrusive tabloid newspapers that remain a staple of British life. From the Murdoch-owned Sun and its competitors the Daily Mirror and the Daily Star to their middle-market cousins the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, these newspapers offer readers a daily helping of news and sport steeped in moralism and prurience, reflecting the obsessions of a broad stripe of the country’s middle class. Celebrity news remains the stock in trade, and twenty years after her death Diana’s “beloved boys” remain rich targets.
How did the tabs respond? Well, how do you expect? In the oiliest way imaginable. With maximum pushback, even though it is against a grieving family. This is, after all, the culture that hacks the phones of missing little girls in order to get the leg up on the competition. It is a nihilistic, morally rudderless cosmos. So — Earl Spencer got the blade. From the NYTimes, in 1997:
Earl Spencer is now in the midst of an unusually messy court hearing in South Africa, meant to decide whether his imminent divorce case should be heard in Britain or in Cape Town, where he and his estranged wife, a former model and the mother of the couple's four children, now live. One unflattering detail after another has been emerging about the Earl. And he is discovering that no one takes on Britain's boisterous, partisan tabloids and wins -- not even an Earl with a 500-year-old family, an enormous stately home, and a nephew second in line for the throne.
Charmed, I’m sure. I mention these events to draw more light on Prince Harry’s justified anger at the British press. And how, in their frenzied, high-pitched rage fever against Harry and Meghan — which can only be properly construed under the category of “racial” — the tabloid press can be a very frightening thing for Harry and his family. Further, there are vile, rogue British tabloidal creations, like Piers Morgan, making their living off their weird obsession with Meghan Markle. As if the enmity of the royal family were not scary enough. Imagine trying to start a young family, navigating between the Scylla of the British royal monarchy on one side, and the Charybdis of Fleet Street on the other. Does the California sun seem so far fetched under those conditions?
That having been said, there is something to the angry, anti-aristocratic protest against the Sussexes. The early attempts to navigate the American media led to glossy, not very egalitarian stories like “Meghan of Montecito,” which, in retrospect, is not a good look. We don’t need to know how rich they are, or how many bedrooms they have. But they have gotten better, and they have gotten a better reception from the media — particularly, of all places, Black Twitter. Prince Harry's ongoing project to deconstruct hereditary monarchy is quite interesting and so have the quarters that he has received support. Attacks against him and Meghan for being “annoying” for being so privileged are simplistic and seem to ignore the fact that both are actually in the process of exploding that very privilege. It will be interesting to watch how far they will go against such powerful and ancient cultural institutions as hereditary monarchy and gossip.
Ultimately, most of the anti-Sussex social media opining appears to have no desire to understand why that family decided to buck the British royal tradition in the first place. Never underestimate the amount of romantic idealization that former colonies bestow upon their old masters. And, finally, in this era of right-wing authoritarianism with a twist of anti-democratic nationalism, it is easy to see why an interracial couple that believes in (relative) egalitarianism can seem so deeply offensive.