Monday, March 8th, was Commonwealth Day in the United Kingdom, an annual celebration of the association of fifty-four former colonial territories of Britain, headed, as it has been for the past sixty-nine years, by Her Majesty the Queen. Up and down the country, Britons from all walks of life were, naturally, preoccupied by the commemoration, taking the opportunity to reflect thoughtfully upon the legacy of colonialism, upon the service of the ninety-four-year-old monarch, and upon the still wide-reaching influence of the Crown.
Just kidding: the “family of nations,” as Patricia Scotland, the Commonwealth Secretary-General, referred to the association she heads, barely got a look-in on Monday, which was, instead, dominated by discussion of the nation’s principal family, the Windsors. The latest royal crisis was precipitated by Oprah Winfrey’s incendiary televised interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, whose final appearance as working members of the Royal Family took place at last year’s Commonwealth celebrations, when they attended a service at Westminster Abbey before making their exit to Canada, then California. The Oprah interview was shown on CBS in the United States on Sunday evening—prime time for an American audience, but inconveniently falling between one and three in the morning in Britain. As a result, to see the broadcast in real time in the U.K., one had to be both a dedicated royal watcher and sufficiently technologically adept to have a V.P.N. installed—a Venn-diagram intersection that includes journalists and members of the Buckingham Palace comms team, but perhaps few others.
Waking up on Monday morning in the U.K. and checking the headlines—“Meghan claims she was suicidal when she was five months pregnant, Kate made HER cry and Royals refused to make Archie a prince because they were worried about how ‘dark’ he would be,” the online summary in the Daily Mail read—was similar to the experience of logging on to Twitter after a day’s healthy avoidance only to descend into a boundless morass of takes and subtweets. Commentators who had watched the broadcast—or at least who appeared to have done so, radiating the wide-eyed, ravaged hysteria of having pulled an all-nighter in middle age—did the rounds of the morning shows on radio and television, mediating the public’s absorption of the couple’s revelations while still absorbing the details themselves.
It made for disorienting viewing: while American audiences were served the full Oprah banquet—her skillful deployment of the confidence-building inquiry, and her devastating forensic follow-up—British audiences were sputtering over the show’s most indigestible revelations along with their toast and coffee. On “Good Morning Britain,” the breakfast show on ITV, the network that had acquired the rights to broadcast Oprah’s interview on Monday evening, the co-host Piers Morgan declared the event “a two-hour trash-a-thon of our Royal Family” and accused Harry and Meghan of “spray-gunning his family on global television.” Morgan, who began his career at the tabloids of Fleet Street in the late eighties, ascending before he reached the age of thirty to become the editor of the News of the World, a Murdoch-owned Sunday paper, is one of Britain’s best-known and most contentious broadcasters. Over the course of the pandemic, Morgan has repeatedly played the unlikely role of the moral conscience of the nation, blasting Dominic Cummings, formerly an influential Downing Street aide, for flouting lockdown rules in the spring, and denouncing Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, for not firing him; challenging the Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, to resign over his bungling of school closures; and humiliating the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, for voting against free school meals for low-income children.
Morgan, who has a long-standing and well-known antipathy to the Duchess of Sussex, turned Monday morning’s show into what he might, under other circumstances, have described as a three-hour shout-a-thon. At a little before seven-thirty in the morning, one remote guest, the author and activist Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, who described the Royal Family as “rooted in the legacy of colonialism, white supremacy, and racism,” challenged the Queen’s apparent lack of intervention: “What kind of grandmother would be so close to her grandson Harry, but then not use her power and influence as Queen to protect them from the racist media coverage?” she asked, one rhetorical inquiry among several that Morgan decried as “disgraceful.” In a surreal moment an hour later, Chaka Khan was beamed in from Los Angeles to comment upon Meghan’s claims. “I am not a Britisher, but I am only hoping and praying that they will look into what she is alleging, and make it to rights,” the onetime queen of disco offered, as helpful an intervention as any Britisher might have been able to muster under the circumstances.
Elsewhere in the British media, confidants of the Sussexes were roped in, as were defenders of the institution. On the early-morning “Today” program on Radio Four—the British equivalent of NPR—Dean Stotts, a former Special Forces soldier and a friend of Harry and Meghan’s, described the Royal Family as “very warm and open . . . there is no arrogance at all,” laying blame instead with palace aides, who, he told Martha Kearney, the show’s host, “almost feel like they have the title of the family.” Kearney’s next interview subject was a former palace aide, Charles Anson, who was press secretary to the Queen from 1990 until 1997, a span that includes the annus horribilis of 1992, during which the collapse of the marriage of Harry’s parents, Prince Charles and Princess Diana, was made public. Anson told Kearney that he didn’t believe there had been “a strand of racism” within the royal household’s reception of the Duchess of Sussex; when Kearney pointed out that Harry and Meghan said otherwise, Anson conceded silkily that this point was “a question that needs to be considered.” By lunchtime, a further video clip was released, in which Harry claimed that the Queen herself was at the mercy of controlling palace aides, who had forced her to disinvite him from a prearranged visit to Sandringham, in Norfolk, shortly before he and Meghan made public their wish to step down as senior royals, in January, 2020. It emerged that there were two hours more of footage on Oprah’s cutting-room floor: enough to keep the royal household up for several more uncomfortable nights.
The full-length interview revealed, perhaps surprisingly, a well of affection and admiration on the part of the Sussexes for the nonagenarian at the center of it all: “Her Majesty the Queen,” as Meghan deferentially and correctly referred to her on first mention, offering the lexical equivalent of a curtsy. Meghan recalled a moment when, having joined the Queen on an official engagement for which they were transported by car, the monarch urged her grandson’s wife to share the car blanket that had been draped over the Queen’s knees against the cold. The anecdote was intended as an indication of the monarch’s kindness; but it was also a suggestive metaphor for the Queen’s predicament, as an individual trapped by duty in a chilly environment, able to offer only a modicum of comfort.
By late afternoon Tuesday, the Palace issued a statement, aimed at reassigning the public rift to the sphere of the private. “The whole family is saddened to learn the full extent of how challenging the last few years have been for Harry and Meghan,” it read. “The issues raised, particularly that of race, are concerning. Whilst some recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately. Harry, Meghan and Archie will always be much loved family members.” The fallout from the interview continued: Piers Morgan, who on Tuesday morning had walked off the set of his own show after being challenged by Alex Beresford, a co-presenter, on his Meghan-skeptical stance, had by the evening “decided now is the time to leave Good Morning Britain,” according to a short statement issued by ITV.
The couple, it was revealed in the interview with Oprah, had been in touch with the Queen throughout the pandemic. “I’ve spoken more to my grandmother in the past year than I have done in many, many years,” Harry remarked, with palpable fondness. On Sunday, ahead of Commonwealth Day, the palace had issued a video containing a statement by the Queen on the occasion, the service at Westminster Abbey having been cancelled for the first time in her long reign, owing to the coronavirus. In it, the Queen herself noted the way in which communication has been altered by the pandemic. “In our everyday lives, we have had to become more accustomed to connecting and communicating via innovative technology,” she said, acknowledging that the dynamics of the Royal Family, no less than of more ordinary families, have been thrown off kilter by prolonged, enforced, unnatural separation. As she recorded her remarks in advance of Oprah’s broadcast, the Queen cannot have known what Harry and Meghan would say; revisited in the light of their revelations, her words to the Commonwealth take on an unexpected poignancy, illuminating the gap between hopeful wish and painful reality. “Increasingly, we have found ourselves able to enjoy such communication,” the Queen went on, “as it offers an immediacy that transcends boundaries or division, helping any sense of distance to disappear.”
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