Of course, if Meghan was never genuinely interested in being a working royal, and only wanted the platform to catapult herself to greater worldly success, she has been achieving her objective brilliantly. But what if she did genuinely think that she might be able to adjust to her royal role? If that is the case, hers is indeed a sad story. It might have been different if she and Harry had figured out that you can’t do as they have done. You can’t treat an enterprise as something worth undertaking only when you’re getting the rewards you require. Success as a royal has eluded her and success as a politician will do likewise unless she learns the lesson he knew before linking up with her. To succeed in those worlds, your goal cannot be to thrive. It has to be to survive, and to survive well.
While Meghan and Harry have shown themselves to be brilliant at commanding the stage, whether royal or otherwise is beside the point, her conduct to date suggests that Meghan is congenitally unsuited to a life of service, though she might well be perfectly suited to a commercial life that has a side-line in humanitarianism.
The reality is that the way of life of a constitutional royal was never going to have any appeal for someone who is as financially driven as Meghan has admitted she is. To be a successful royal, money can’t be a high priority. You also have to be a true believer in something that is both intangible and greater than yourself. Whether you are born into the position, like the Queen, or marry into it, like Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and the Duchess of Cambridge, you need a vocational approach if you are to stay the course. If you lack that, as Meghan patently does and Diana, Princess of Wales and Sarah, Duchess of York did, you begin to question the merit of the sacrifices you are compelled to make while pursuing the life of service royals are called upon to lead. Ultimately, if you are not a true believer, you find yourself putting your personal feelings above the cause you are meant to be serving. Once that happens, you are bound to fail, for success as a royal comes by putting your sensations to one side and rising to the occasion, whatever it is and however you feel. Self-abnegation is an intrinsic part of the whole process, and if you cannot deny yourself, you cannot succeed as a royal.
That does not mean that there are not huge personal benefits and payoffs to being royal. There are, but they exist only if you respect the constraints of the system. My regret is that Meghan did not give herself enough time to discover what they were. This is a regret many of the courtiers share, though others take the view that she is better out of the picture. To them, her disrespect for the boundaries, which prevent politicisation and commercialisation, were inexcusable. To them, all individuals, whether they be political, commercial, professional, social, or royal, are expected to function within the system. As far as those courtiers are concerned, the British monarchy has spearheaded the concept of constitutional monarchy since the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the restoration of the monarchy under his son Charles II in 1660. In the 360 years since then, the Crown has learnt by trial and error what works, and what does not. The British monarchy is now a vast and highly sophisticated institution in which the Royal Family and the courtiers play equally vital roles. The royals are expected to take advice only from their official advisors and tailor their conduct accordingly. These advisors are dedicated professionals whose sole goal is to maintain the efficacy of the British political system, of which the Crown is the head. They are, in their own way, vocationalists, as dedicated to the monarchy as a priest, rabbi or imam will be to his religion.
In the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that there was consternation amongst the courtiers when Meghan, an utter novice as well as a foreigner, not only resisted all advice from her official advisors from the very beginning, but went behind their backs and appointed a whole range of alternative advisors separate from her and Harry’s Buckingham Palace advisors within eighteen months of her marriage. None of these appointments was approved by the palace. All were regarded as antithetical to the interests of the monarchy.
The most contentious was Meghan’s appointment of the American media management firm Sunshine Sachs early in September 2019. This followed a summer of controversy in which Meghan’s micro-management of her and Harry’s public profile had backfired spectacularly. There were several incidents, all of which triggered an outcry predictable to everyone but Meghan and Harry, whose earlier nous seemed to have deserted him under his wife’s determination to control the press as she micromanaged her image.
All of these incidents were avoidable, the negative reactions predictable. The first of these resulted in the furore surrounding baby Archie’s christening by the Archbishop of Canterbury on the 7th July at Windsor Castle. Meghan and Harry had decided to throw precedent to the wind and make totally private what had hitherto been a family event shared with the public through the presence of photographers, cameramen, and godparents. In furtherance of opacity, Harry and Meghan decreed that they would not be revealing the names of the godparents, nor would they be granting access to the photographers and cameramen who customarily covered the ceremony. They would issue a photograph of their own choice to the press, as and when they were ready to do so, and not before.
Not surprisingly, this caused a hue and cry. Adam Helliker, who features earlier in this work discussing the leaking of the news of Harry’s relationship with Meghan, wrote an opinion piece in the Sun quoting the
