Why Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are the reality show royals we deserve

OPINION:

Sometimes I think we shouldn’t complain about Harry and Meghan when we have created them. Every person is to some extent the reflection of their age, and its prisoner, to boot.

To that extent, we always get a royal we deserve, from the Roman Emperor Caligula and Henry VIII to the Duke and Duchess of Montecito, who have become such artificial constructs that the Duke and Duchess of Monte Cristo would be a more apposite title for them. But it’s society, innit?

Look back at Rome. Degenerate tyranny created monsters like Caligula and Nero. They acted as they did because they were allowed to, though eventually even the weak and whining Romans of the time got fed up and had them assassinated, equally cruelly.

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex are seen on May 16. Photo / Getty Images

The head of Caligula’s 2-year-old daughter, Julia, was shattered against a wall by her father’s murderers. But then it is only in the 20th century that we have become sentimental about children.

In England, the 15th and 16th centuries were particularly bloody ages, with short life expectancy and a religious acceptance of death. Not everyone cut the heads off their wives, though they probably would have liked to.

However, it was only when Henry VIII turned his attention to the blameless 67-year-old Countess of Salisbury, a Plantagenet cousin, and decided to execute her, too, that people demurred.

Things improved in the 18th century, and most aristocrats in British public life began to act with a sense of public duty. The bloody king and philanthropic duke has now departed but has been replaced by the reality star, the social media influencer and the plutocrat.

There is only one real form of human striving that is understood by our world and that is the striving for money and celebrity.

You can call the Sussexes “grifters”, as one Spotify executive did a few days ago, but how else did we expect them to end up?

Meghan's Archetypes podcast has been cancelled. Photo / Spotify

This week, there were reports that they were signing a contract with Dior, which would have seen Meghan become its “face”. A source for Dior has denied this, but the Sussexes’ devotion to the fashion house is unquestioned. Meghan has draped herself in Dior couture and tottered out in its shoes, while the lesser Harry has been spotted in its shirts and suits.

This is beneficial for all concerned. Social media and our preoccupation with fame without achievement have made Meghan a sort of institution to the young of America and elsewhere, like the Statue of Liberty.

Like that monument, she is a bit overdone and is suspected to have undergone minor renovation. Doubtless, her admirers would say that age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety. But she is approaching early middle age.

Of course, custom has bashed her about a bit. Yet the true puzzle is why this professional uplifter wears Dior at all.

The brand has been pilloried for being one of the last fashion houses to use real fur. As a conservationist and animal lover, surely Meghan would recoil in horror from associating her delicate sensibilities with such iniquity?

It’s easy to get lost in the great Sussex labyrinth, but it’s really quite simple. We inhabit a plutocracy and in a democratic state, the plutocracy inevitably takes the place of the missing aristocracy. It is even mistaken for it when it is something quite different.

Harry and Meghan appear at the Queen's Jubilee in June 2022 in London. Photo / Getty Images

It lacks the essential characteristics of a true aristocracy; taste, culture, tradition, self-sacrifice, courage and honesty.

Meghan and Harry are a mirror to our collective faces and our entertainment. You see them on reality television, in The Tudors’ sex and sword fest, and in soap operas about how royals are now imagined to be; foolish, overdressed and physical approximations of Hollywood stars. Above all, gripped by self-obsession.

Like most people in 21st-century democracies, Harry and Meghan stand under no obligation to country or to state. They are transient and lack a goal. And yet they are relatable to so many young people because their aspirations are essentially the same.

Our youngsters no longer dream of glory, or even service, in the way their grandparents did, but of a heaven paved with gold and precious stones and the latest Lady Dior mini bag in mauve leather and beige rattan.

What this age really needs is a sense of liberty. We produce occasional libertarians, just as tyrannies produced regicides, but we assassinate them publicly and then cancel their thoughts.

Our libido for the ugly stares back at us in the form of our politicians, our heroes, our gods, and in Harry and Meghan, who are I’m a Celebrity’s answer to The Tudors.