Even so, to universal tabloid rejoicing, the Sussexes are moving back to Britain. Though maybe only for a bit. And Chuck wasn’t told till the last minute. And Harry is still on non-speakers with Wills. And maybe it’s just for Meghan’s work. Except why are they even doing this when they said they’d never? What about the millions Harry owes the Mail? And so on.

The dichotomy that stands out, amid all the rubbernecking and rumor-mongering, is “public” and “private”. Megxit was all about Harry and Megs being private individuals, so well-known for appearing in public to tell us how desperately they needed their privacy they even got a South Park segment about their Privacy World Tour. 

But despite being so private, Harry is still angling for the British public to pay for his security. But this doesn’t really make sense. Why would he be entitled to a state-funded heavy with an earpiece, if he’s just a private individual? Aren’t famous rich people expected to pay for their own bodyguards? 

Harry’s difficulty is trying to reconcile two mutually exclusive kinds of fame: the kind that comes with high-profile public service, and the kind that comes with individual celebrity. In this sense, the nearest parallel — both in terms of divisiveness, and in terms of ambiguity — isn’t Britain’s panoply of still-living ex-PMs, but a man currently angling to join their number. The only Brit, in fact, clickbait-friendly enough to out-clickbait Prince Harry, and who functions even more powerfully as a human Rorschach test: Nigel Farage. 

Farage, too, has been in the news lately in connection with arguments over his security and the nature of his public profile. To Farage’s admirers, he’s a hero and public servant: Britain’s last chance of escaping the Uniparty and restoring something more like the status quo ante Blair. To his many haters, meanwhile, he’s the odious imp responsible for the calamity of Brexit, whose comeback was oiled by almost winning I’m A Celebrity – Get Me Out Of Here! and whose conduct in public life has always indecorously blurred the lines between lucrative media and celebrity appearances, and purportedly selfless public service. 

Amid this ambiguous maelstrom, Farage argues that the divisiveness of his public role has placed him at such grave risk of public attack that the Home Office should offer him greater state-funded protection than has hitherto been available. He has further asserted that the £5m donation at the center of the current parliamentary standards investigation was intended to help him with security costs the government refuses to cover. The whole debate became still grimmer following the murder of Reform migration spokeswoman Ann Widdecombe at her home. 

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So is Farage a celebrity or a political figure? Greedy grifter or vulnerable public servant whose safety is in the national interest? Harry, meanwhile, hasn’t (to my knowledge at least) received any undeclared donations from crypto bros of any kind. But — albeit perhaps for different reasons — he too acts as a kind of human Rorschach test, variously perceived (including perhaps by himself) as “public” as in high-profile public service, and “public” as in lucratively famous. 

In Harry’s case this isn’t down to a role in parliamentary politics. It is instead the result of the unique nature of the “working royals” as public figures methodically insulated from the faintest whiff of commercial grabbiness. 

Being “royal”, as far as royalty has operated in Britain since the last absolute monarch was deposed in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, is largely symbolic. The human individuals born royal are employed as symbolic placeholders for absolutism within a parliamentary democracy. It’s a weird job, one that comes with certain privileges, but also makes demands as well, especially when it comes to monetizing your public profile. 

In a way that has some parallels with the restrictions on politicians, there is a profound taboo on monetizing living royals. Royalty works, inasmuch as it does work, by making the royals generic and representative. Celebrity is the exact opposite; it assembles an individual personal brand and privatizes any profits. Kate and Wills understand this dynamic and play along with a mix of dutiful reserve and understated wokeness that is (if you’ve spent any time around Britain’s upper castes) impeccably small-c conservative. 

Harry, though, was always the wild one. It was Harry who went to a fancy-dress party dressed as a Nazi; who saw combat and then blabbed about slotting jihadis; who Went Too Far by getting therapy and reinventing himself as the Royal Lolcow with that awful memoir. He might not be the sharpest tool in the box, but he clearly never had a sufficiently bland personality to be wholly comfortable with a role as silent figurehead. 

And it was also Harry who inherited his mother’s morbid fascination with the other kind of public life: the individual celebrity personal brand. Despite (so he recounts in That Memoir) an abiding fear of loved ones being hounded to death by the press, he somehow still married an actress and couldn’t stop reappearing in the public eye to demand privacy. And Meghan, meanwhile, clearly never understood the difference between royalty and celebrity. 

This is perhaps understandable: America is a republican, entrepreneurial culture, and from that perspective it’s easy to see how royalty might be conflated with personal brand. Or perhaps it was just her. In any case, the result was wall-to-wall cringe, made even worse whenever Harry joined in. 

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Among the deeply bonkers, predominantly American “Sussex Squad” royal fandom, which seized on Megxit as a re-run of 1776, the settled narrative is that Markle was expelled from the Firm for being “too Black”. But the reality is the opposite: it was clear when they married that the British establishment and much of the public were over the moon at the prospect of a Diverse Royal. It was the deeply un-royal grabbiness and oversharing, not Meghan’s epidermis, that turned the British public against them. For lovers of royalty-as-represention, the idea of monetizing that aura prompts the kind of revulsion reserved for people who fundraise “for good causes” then (cough — Captain Tom — cough) trouser the proceeds.

Meghan had no such qualms. When the Sussexes announced their decision to step back as working royals, they simultaneously applied to trademark “Sussex Royal” and turn their HRH status into a lifestyle brand. Correctly sensing the imminent disaster of “HRH”-branded scatter cushions in Target, the Palace briskly put a stop to these maneuvers, spiking the brand application and drawing sharp lines to delineate the Sussexes’ activities from anything that might resemble “working royal” duties. The couple were only allowed to retain their “HRH” titles provided these were never employed in any public or commercial capacity. 

Various tell-all cringefests have followed, to media fascination and cold Palace fury. And after all that, who can blame the Firm for wanting to ensure that their exit was unambiguous and their status simply that of private individuals, as they said they wanted? Accordingly Ravec, the committee that manages security for British public figures, has also treated them thus, ruling not only that Harry’s security should not be publicly funded, but that he would not be allowed to access government protection even if he reimbursed the taxpayer. Wealthy private individuals, even those closely related to the King, don’t get to rent armed protection from the British government. 

But Harry seems not to want what he says he wants — nor perhaps to understand that you can’t be both a working royal and a regular celeb. Or, less charitably, perhaps he’s just realized he is rubbish at being a celebrity but can’t quite bring himself to go full Prodigal Son. All the Sussexes’ American ventures bombed, and there are still no HRH scatter cushions. Meanwhile Harry’s Invictus Games project is in Britain, and now Guy Ritchie has reportedly offered Megs a job. It turns out the only things they were ever good at were the two jobs they tried to leave behind, and then, disastrously, to merge: being a regular TV actress, and a working royal. 

Now they seem to want it both ways again. He’s clearly angling for a kind of Premium Economy sort-of-royal status. Between this and his charitable gyrations it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that he longs to be a public representative again, like his nan. But his wife is just as clearly yearning to return to that other, mutually exclusive kind of fame. And if there’s one thing Harry could glean from the ongoing Farage farrago, it’s that the way to make yourself maximally vulnerable to press harassment is by trying to combine celebrity with public service. 

So, assuming Harry was telling the truth about not enjoying such harassment, the Sussexes face a straight choice between symbolic representation and the celebrity kind. In other words, between Harry’s vocation and Meghan’s. Assuming he wants to stay married, in Harry’s shoes I’d be beginning to wonder what secret third thing would allow me to be famous, and politically powerful, and symbolically representative. 

Under what circumstances could he enjoy both kinds of public aura? The answer is: it could, in theory, be done. But to achieve this, Harry would need to reach much further back than his grandma’s reign, to the monarchy as it was before his branch of the family got anywhere near it. That is, to royalty as it was understood in the British Isles before 1688. And with the exception of the other, even more bonkers, fringe of royal fandom, no one is quite ready for that — least of all Harry, or Meghan, or indeed Nigel Farage.  

November 2008 marked the theatrical release of Twilight, the first film adaptation of the romance novels that centred on a love triangle between a vampire, a werewolf, and a teenage girl. By this point, they had already become a transformative force in the book world — but this was only the beginning.

Within a year, you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting something Twilight-themed. There was a Twilight-themed makeup palette, and Immortal Twilight perfume to dab on your pulse points. You could drink your coffee from a Team Edward mug in the morning, roll up to the Burger King drive-thru in Edward Cullen’s Volvo C30, order a Twilight-themed kids’ meal for lunch, then go home and curl up in the arms of your Edward body pillow beneath your precise replica of Bella’s purple duvet. The franchise’s rabid fanbase was a market force unto itself: brand something as a Twilight tie-in, and they’d snap it up.

These fans weren’t just a reliable income stream, though: they were a powerful, even political, faction that was not to be trifled with. I was a reporter on the Young Hollywood beat for MTV News at the height of the Twilight craze, and so great was their cultural power that an editorial edict instructed we refrain from calling them “Twihards”, because they didn’t like it.

At first, Twilight‘s cultural influence was chalked up to its popularity among adolescent girls. Edward and Bella’s romance was a love story, but also an obvious abstinence parable, making it a perfect vehicle for teens to explore the burgeoning passions for which they otherwise had no words. This, at least, was not surprising: every generation has something that both captures the imagination and inspires the lust of a young female audience. I was too old to be swept up in the Edward Cullen craze, but just the right age to spend long hours earnestly debating with my friends which of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would make the best boyfriend. (Raphael, obviously.)

But the way Twilight captured the broader discourse was more unusual, which had as much to do with timing as with the story itself. Twilight dropped directly into the midst of a digital revolution that catapulted fandom from niche communities to a global, quasi-political force. The iPhone, Goodreads and Tumblr all debuted in 2007; when Twilight the movie was released a year later, it was the spark in an armoury already filled with 10 different types of ammunition.

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The resulting explosion wasn’t just in consumption: fans were curating mood boards, making memes, writing their own fanfics, and engaging in direct conversations with creators courtesy of social media. Stephenie Meyer might have written Twilight, the book, but the ever-expanding universe in which it existed? That belonged to the fans — who increasingly felt a sense of entitlement, control, even ownership over the stories, the characters, and the culture they loved.

For this, we may credit Twilight‘s ageing fanbase, who rather than discarding fandom in favour of more grownup concerns ended up simply carrying it with them into the adult world. For teenage girls, the Edward vs Jacob debate offered a way to explore romantic relationships — who you liked and what you wanted — within the safe framework of fiction. But for adult women, Twilight was more than an excuse to be horny on main; it was a framework for discussing literally anything, from race to religion, to romantic mores, to decolonisation. Was Bella a victim of Stockholm Syndrome, or a feminist icon who persisted in chasing what she wanted at all costs? Was Jacob cruelly and undeservedly friend-zoned, or was he a total incel? Was Twilight racist because the vampires were pale — or should it be celebrated for representing Native American characters? Then there was the question of the age gap between Edward and Bella: you say immortal teenage dreamboat; I say creepy 108-year-old man.

All this was happening against the backdrop of a collapse in the distinction between teen and adult content in publishing and entertainment: 2008 was the era of Peak YA. As many not-so-young adults suddenly discovered a passion for content aimed at teenagers, bookstores were overwhelmed by “chosen one” stories, in which a heroine who doesn’t know how beautiful she is has to fight the forces of evil — while caught in a love triangle between two equally strapping suitors. For decades, this type of content had been written off as frivolous, a passing fancy; now, its power could not be denied. Twilight was perhaps the first property to make clear that, in the digital age, young women’s passions are not to be taken lightly.

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Twilight itself has now faded from view, but its influence lives on; it taught us to see absolutely everything as a question of teams. It wasn’t just the Edward-or-Jacob debate, which would always be a sort of friendly rivalry owing to its predetermined resolution (you could make a good enough case for Jacob, but Bella was never going to end up with him). It was the Twilight fandom itself, and what it became for its adherents. Loving Twilight was a cause, a chance to be part of something bigger than yourself — as was hating Twilight, if that was your thing, for whatever evils you felt it represented.

And by the time the final film in the series was released — one week after Barack Obama’s successful re-election to the presidency — American culture at large was beginning to look a lot like American politics: a highly polarised world of in-groups and out-groups, where the rivalries weren’t so friendly anymore. At the same time, a new mode of cultural critique had arrived in the form of Your Fave Is Problematic, a witch-hunting Tumblr that indicted celebrities and content creators (and by extension, their fans) for various sins against social justice. The whole thing was a guilt-by-association machine. If an admired creator was called out for some -ism or -phobia, you had two choices: denounce the sin and renounce your fandom, or be tarred as complicit.

In this moment, the cult of fandom and the culture of consumption fully collided to create something monstrous — but also, something deeply compelling. If art and politics were inextricable — as both Tumblr users and mainstream culture critics now reliably assured us they were — then so was fandom and activism. Fandom mattered. Fans mattered. And whatever you were into, it was more than mere interest; it was your identity. In this world, what you like is who you are.

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And in a world where fandom had become political, it was only a matter of time before politics became fandom: tribal, facile, and tailor made for our current moment. As a mode of engagement, fandom neither rewards nor leaves room for nuance; the whole point is that it’s obvious which team you should be on, which makes it the ideal medium for a political culture that thrives on simple sloganeering, Instagram-sized infographics, and 60-second TikTok explainer videos. Fandom is what fuels the blonde college student in a keffiyeh, rolling her eyes as she explains that once Israel has ceased to exist, the Jews who lived there can simply return to wherever they came from — like Yemen, or Ethiopia. It fuels, too, the pro-Israel activist who thrusts a camera in her face, knowing she’ll beclown herself.

It’s not just the tribalism but the blazing certainty — that there’s a right side, and that identifying it is both uncomplicated and fun. For people coming of age on social media, Twilight offered the first inkling of how good being part of a mob could feel. How wonderful to just pick a side and root for it: fiercely, loyally, unconditionally and absolutely. And once you had done this with sparkly vampires, it was surprisingly easy to do it with everything else.

Opening, reading and sorting the fan mail postbag for Coronation Street at Granada Television was part of my fairly lowly first job in television back in 1997. A novice, I was taken aback at the consistently boiling tone and curious preoccupations of our correspondents. “Have we got a problem?” I asked my boss, wafting a particularly choice collection of scrawled rage under her nose, after the show had recently taken a tumble in the ratings. But she, an old hand, just laughed.

“If a viewer has gone to all the trouble of sitting down to write a letter, buying a stamp and an envelope, and popping it in the pillar box, all for the pleasure of telling you they’re going to stop watching your show — well, then they’re so highly motivated they will never stop watching your show,” she chuckled. “They are fandom. They are the last people we should be paying attention to!”

Back then the internet was in its nascency, only beginning to transition from a hobby into an integrated part of everyday life. It is now a medium so ubiquitous we hardly even think about it, and those born under its shadow probably almost never do. And so my boss’s valuable insight has been lost.

Everything, thanks to the internet, now has a fandom; not just TV shows and pop stars but public institutions, political parties, nations. The fan clubs of old where you sent off for a sticker and a poster are no more. Fandoms are mini-communities, groups of people who don’t just like or enjoy something but who love it, and love it hard.

And in some cases, love in a way so obsessive it’s barely distinguishable from hate. So while almost everybody loves the Beatles, Beatles fandom can tell you exactly where the Beatles went wrong, why, and how they should actually have gone about things.

Fandoms are often very, very mad and sometimes very, very bad. Taking them seriously is ill-advised. Pandering to them is almost always disastrous. And as common culture has fragmented — thanks to audience shrinkage and ever more niche content — the noisy obsessives of fandom have become louder, with some serious consequences, and not just for pop culture. Look at the Labour Party — a mass working-class unionised movement that has been turned upside down by catering to a loud rump of headbangers. It’s not a political party, it’s fandom.

How has this happened? Back to Granada, and those falling ratings. I’ll always remember the long faces and numb horror in the office when Coronation Street dipped below 13 million viewers one night. A significant rung had been slipped, and ITV executives and advertisers were not happy.

Today Coronation Street is still ITV’s big strong ratings grabber. Last Monday it got 5.1 million viewers.

What has happened is that the media landscape has expanded, and then — in the late 2010s — exploded. Far fewer people are watching the same things, and fewer still are watching them at the same time. And yet paradoxically this dwindling has seen a massive increase in the attention paid to the unrepresentative complainers.

The immediacy of the medium of complaint can blind us to these tiny numbers. Your heart will often sink, and you may feel a “what is the world coming to?” twinge in the soul, when you see, for example, a particularly stupid tweet with 30,000 likes. It’s easy to forget that this is a hugely unrepresentative global platform, and that those 30,000 — the size of the population of Chichester — might well be the only people in the world who agree with it.

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But in today’s public sphere even smaller numbers have a disproportionate effect. Almost every day in the tabloids you’ll see how “eagle eyed fans took to Twitter” about a TV show. Often all it takes is a couple salty tweets to confect a news story. Ofcom can be “deluged” by “fury” after about 40 complaints.

Over the 20th century we lost a community-based folk culture; the folk songs and myths blasted away by mass technology, religious observance in sharp decline — but at least we had a kind of substitute. We were more often on the same page. Now, we consume in silos — and silos have therefore become fashionable.

Even the megastars of the recent past, Bowie or Elton John, are retooled to appear boutique. The movie Bohemian Rhapsody eulogises the band Queen — who have sold 300 million albums worldwide — as “misfits and outcasts” who “don’t belong”, playing to an audience of the same. At Wembley Stadium.

Queen were like an institution, attracting — like Coronation Street — a huge cross-section of the population. Few things can claim that today, and the smaller that audiences become, the more that those audiences become a febrile mob that can go from obsessive love to hate and back again in seconds.

These are communities that are formed ad hoc around shared, often eccentric, interests; without the scrutiny and self-doubt that leaven most shared endeavours they quickly, inevitably, become little fiefdoms of the ultra-committed. So the loudest, most intemperate, most present voices are amplified and now, crucially, are catered to, as if they were important. Huge corporations quake in fear from tiny numbers of tweets, again sometimes just one — witness Innocent smoothies and Kiva recently jumping like scalded cats after solitary tweets from activists complaining about them for merely following a pensioner labelled as “transphobic”.

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Back to the 90s again. The first internet communities — the social media of their day — were the “rec.arts” news groups that formed around shared hobbies and fixations. Looking back, they served as an early warning system, with spats, threats, temper tantrums, sendings to Coventry and castings out into the wilderness. But then at least there was a real world to judge this against, to escape back to.

Today the world is one big newsgroup — rec.arts-reality.com. The real-world social tics that stop polarised factions forming just aren’t present in these mediums. Most people, in the flesh, will want to agree around some kind of careful thought and politeness simply to make any dialogue possible. Remove niceties and things get nasty.

Only the loudest screams are heard and so now the strangest and most extreme views held by tiny numbers of people — that biological sex is not real, that the police should be abolished, that a person’s skin colour makes them irredeemably wicked — are rewarded, reinforced, even protected from being questioned or mocked.

This politics-as-fandom has inevitably started to spill out into the real world. Antifa and the storming of the Capitol are cosplay gone wild in the streets. The Twitter-popular fandoming of the Labour Party around Jeremy Corbyn had predictably ruinous results as it slammed into the real world of the British electorate. The zealotry of the EU’s Twitter “FBPE” fandom led the Remainer faction in Parliament to overestimate their hand and blow their chance of a softer Brexit.

In a strange reversal, as politics becomes more like fandom, the fandoms of old have started to behave like political actors. Star Wars fans lobby Disney as if they were a campaign group, as we saw with the recent dismissal of the actor Gina Carano. Fans of K-pop outfit BTS buy out a Trump rally to protest in support of Black Lives Matter. The poor folk band Hanson are forced into making a statement on the issue of which everyone must have an opinion (and the correct opinion) by their demented fans. Ditto with actor Chris Pratt.

And, of course, there is J.K. Rowling.

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Arthur Miller famously described the ideal of a good newspaper as “a nation talking to itself”. A common culture, a still centre, should be the cardinal purpose of the BBC. Instead the BBC, like many of its commercial rivals, has run scared, adopting and amplifying the craziest voices because those people are most likely to generate the small number of clicks that seem big in a microcosm.

We desperately need to reaffirm a shared order of meaning. The nerds and noisy complainers have to be put back in their box — I can confirm, as a member of the nerd community, that we were happier there. The special discipline of producing mass popular culture that freely and genuinely reflects its whole audience is being lost, and without it we are obsessing about the oddest things. It’s like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

Let’s think in big numbers, in commonality, and forget fandom. Thirteen million cheers for the lowest common denominator.