It was advertised as “a place where boys could be boys”, with its acres of park, valley and woodland, into which boys could disappear and beat each other with sticks and fenceposts and marinated conkers. Our sacred texts were the Dangerous Book for Boys, Cherub, Our Island Story and anything by Kipling. Girls, alien creatures of ill-repute, were absent, as were high academic standards. Instead, we were free to play sport and musical instruments, and to work on our “Character” — to become stable, self-assured Englishmen of the last century, who could stand firm in the flux of the present one.

I was not the first of my family to board there. In fact, I was “Adair minimus”, the fourth of my brothers (minor, major, and maximus) to attend the school. Each had returned, quieter, for their first exeat, insisting that it was such fun. And it sort-of was. It could not be avoided, so we had to make do. This was, after all, England’s annual trick of renewal, the ritual by which the country had sustained itself for nearly 200 years. To maintain an empire, the Carthaginians had sacrificed their children; the English merely spent vast sums of money on packing theirs off to board. This had once been considered “progress”.

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And yet progress has now left the prep school behind. By the time I arrived, in 2010, these institutions had been confused into taking one of two paths: rapid modernization or entrenchment. Mine chose the latter, and that made little sense: the world for which they hoped to raise us was long-since dead, and the ritual had become a hollow repetition. Eight-year-old children were being weaned not, as once, to rule the waves and administer an empire, but to lament their ill-fortune in therapy rooms and broadsheet supplements, or else to exert their wits in the lower rungs of the insurance market. Once upon a time, these old boys would have been public-minded; now they were just “posh” and their only certainty was that the rest of the country really cared how this made them feel.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the character of Earl Spencer, who has spent the past fortnight busily “ragging” the King. His life maps effortlessly onto the decline of the prep school, and the upper and upper-middle classes more generally: a transition from steely coldness to self-centered loquaciousness. Over his last two books, Spencer has done more to dismantle the vestigial myths of hidebound English “society” than the Labour Party could ever dream of. In his memoirs A Very Private School (2024) and last week’s Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, he has moved beyond the stoic and illusive stability of prep-school England into everything that is its antithesis, a confessional, tabloid desperation that Philip Roth might have deemed a very English berserk. Neither the prep school nor the Royal Family will ever quite return to their former innocence: these books, which he insists are not attacks but memoirs, have undermined the very structures that enabled 19 generations of his family to reside at Althorp.

Prep-school England is now dead. There are only 163 eight-year-old boarders in Britain, down from 468 in the year I started. This means a bygone elite will not reproduce itself. And yet, should these schools and their attendant way-of-life die, something will undoubtedly be lost because, however obsolete and exclusive they seemed, they did their best to promote an ethos we lack today: “Character” over results, the individual over the statistic, and the sort of self-restraint that could prevent these tabloid squabbles between the houses of Spencer and Windsor.

Mine was the county school, which meant that everyone in the county sent their children there, and that all the county’s fine class distinctions — between middle, upper-middle, and upper class — were quietly endorsed. There was a rifle range and a clay-pigeon shoot, and boys were permitted to skip lessons and ride to hounds at the hunt’s annual meet in the school parking lot. Then, the boys who rode would be served honey-mustard sausages and cups of Bovril by those who didn’t.

Our lives, our characters, felt old there — enchanted. The wars felt nearer than the local town, and the school register was haunted by the same surnames that appeared on our war memorial. It was a world without irony, much like the Boys’ Own universe described by George Orwell, in which “Everything is safe, solid, and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever and ever,” even if, really, it was already doomed. Each year, we re-enacted the Second World War and played a game called German Spotlight. The boys had to get from one end of the school site to another without being spotted by the SS officers, whose roles had been assumed by the teachers. I could never evade the Nazis for long, and would trudge back to the school building, where a film was showing for the re-imprisoned boys. “1940, Somewhere in England,” the credits read, and I would think of those boys still out there, sticking it to the boche in the frost-bitten grounds.

The school was founded in the late 19th century by a “monocled and fanatical Jacobite”. He designed it as a modern school, complete with concrete playground, Eton Fives courts, and a gaudy arts-and-crafts chapel. He chose the site for its “healthy aspect”, in the hope that this might prevent his charges from snuffing it too readily — a common problem in the earliest prep schools. This happened half-a-century after Thomas Arnold purportedly invented the prep school, back in 1837, when he decreed that he would not accept under-12s at his school — believing them to be unsafe among the older boys, many of whom were bullies, or pederasts, or both. And yet more than Arnold, it was the age that necessitated them: the rapid expansion of an empire that required officers and administrators — and somewhere to deposit their children — as well as a newly enriched caste of industrialists whose rougher edges needed a shine. In practice, that meant imparting “Character”: an Arnoldian idea that incorporated moral imperviousness, muscular Christianity, and an odd streak of anti-intellectualism. As Jan Morris wrote, Arnold had “implanted concepts of privileged service [in his students] that led logically to the idea of a new Rome”. His boys would become “Christian Gentlemen” — moral, not empathic, but with enough sense of duty and cold detachment to rule the natives in Gujarat or the Gambia.

This doctrine outlasted the century. Orwell, author of the best prep-school memoir, Such, Such Were the Joys, attended St Cyprian’s in the 1910s where he was thrashed for wetting his bed by the headmaster. In hindsight, Orwell thought, to enlist a child at prep school delivered them from the family to the nation, and so created foot soldiers — like Orwell himself — who, at only 19, could assume responsibility for some 200,000 Burmese subjects.

In Orwell’s day, there was a cruel logic to this. By John le Carré’s time, some 30 years later, there wasn’t. In his fallen Britain, there was a clear original sin: “the maiming of the privileged young.” They were thrashed, bullied, and buggered into eligibility for that Philoctetean caste of mandarins who presided impotently over national decline — their survivors’ coldness inflicted, now, upon British subjects instead of colonial ones. Thus, le Carré held the schools accountable for “the traumas, deformations, and truncations of character that explain the British Establishment from the appalling Doctor Arnold to the Thatcher Matronocracy”. Le Carré’s words blurbed Nick Duffell’s The Making of Them, a polemic that popularized the concept of “boarding-school survivors”. The BBC documentary followed several children in their first weeks at Maidwell Hall in the early Nineties, the very school where Charles Spencer was abused. It presents a collage of interviews with new-boys, middle-aged “survivors”, and parents — one of whom dismisses the idea of speaking to his eight-year-old on the telephone since “[children] can’t express themselves very well”. Often, what was most difficult for “survivors” to come to terms with was how parents who had suffered in their own time could inflict the same suffering on their own children. Not Charles Spencer — who desperately tries to excuse his parents. In A Very Private School, Spencer documents the scholastic North Korea that was Maidwell, where he was bullied, beaten, and sexually abused. His book weakened the prep-school ritual’s spell, to the extent that Maidwell itself closed down in the summer of 2025.

Britain stopped thrashing its privileged children soon after it lost Hong Kong. Corporal punishment was abolished in private schools in 1998, some 12 years after the ECHR had triumphed over le vice Anglais in the state system. Unsurprisingly, an hour-long detention proved no match for the slipper and cane. And as their disciplinarian Victoriana morphed into twee gentility, so too did the boys the schools produced. If, once, it had been necessary to drill them into inhuman stoicism, all they really needed now was a psychiatrist’s phone number and a recommendation for the MCC, and then it was off to an interminable lunch in Leadenhall Market or to oversee the decline of their familial estate. For all that these schools continued to market a timeless, Boys’ Own fantasy, these days they could only sell connections and access — a means for an impotent elite to reproduce itself. If they couldn’t build “Character”, they could, at least, make you posh.

This was clear enough in the boys at my school, much as my headmaster tried to drill us with old-fashioned, Anglican ideals. Bald and bespectacled, his was a doctrine of self-assurance and deference, which encouraged us to be polite, civic-minded, and Christian, as well as to take responsibility for the consequences of our actions. And yet in daily chapel, his sermons confused the word of God with news of how the First XV had performed in their away match at Terrington. It couldn’t have been further from the “hellfire and masturbation” that Cyril Connolly remembered from his time at school. Perhaps that’s because it was markedly less sexual in my time, save for the wanking epidemic that briefly spread among the third form. Sex had fled the chapel, and now belonged in the PSHE classroom. It fell upon a science teacher to inform us how sex and its attendant organs worked. Modern parents, after all, weren’t paying to have their children terrified of sex.

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And that’s what mattered. “It’s difficult to realize that a school is primarily a commercial venture,” Orwell wrote — and so all schools will do as the market dictates. Our headmaster had believed in the school and its vision, but the market increasingly didn’t. Modern psychology and the new British values made sure of this. Power moved from the headmaster to the parent, and boarding became flexible. Those who still boarded often went home on the weekends. The Fives courts were converted into classrooms and after the headmaster retired, the school became co-educational.

Their death could be blamed on Labour’s VAT policy, but, really, it was inevitable. Most old boys have, now, enacted their own little berserk — therapized out of their former class allegiances. And, besides, the only people interested in an old-fashioned education these days seem to be the Chinese and the Rees-Moggs. Most of Britain now regards these schools as they do the Catholic Church: as safe houses for perverts. Those that remain will be (mostly) southern, and will focus on “excellence”, not Character, and so will foster a new kind of snobbishness — the untethered, Spencerian sort, whose cruelty is its destructive self-concern. The much derided Arnoldian doctrine will, perhaps one day, be missed. It could have blossomed in a modern institution, cut loose from cosseted datedness and cruelty.

And what became of us, trapped between the old world and the new? The world in which we were raised bore no resemblance to the one we entered. The traditions were dead and the rituals meaningless. Civic-mindedness is of little benefit in a City career, where stoicism proves an inconvenient stopper on the second bottle of claret. Some could still lead vanished, institutional lives, but would find themselves to be hollow men clutching onto romantic visions of lost grandeur, or else expensive and out-of-date ideals. Character could take us so far, but that alone didn’t seem of much use in a world of chaos and smartphones and Snapchat and hardcore porn. “How I did loathe that preparatory school,” wrote the 19th-century author Herman Merivale, “preparatory, thank heaven, for a life that was not to be.”

The most sensational allegations are already well-rehearsed. Charles seemed “giddily elated” after Diana’s death; that Diana said the now-King was “in love with his valet”, and that His Maj said after her death that “we’ll forget her soon enough”. Wasn’t it a bit dodgy to make all these un-falsifiable claims so long after the fact? Laura Kuenssberg asked ever so mildly, in a BBC interview on Sunday. Shouldn’t the good earl consider Harry and Wills before raking it all over?

Spencer’s retort cuts to the heart of Britain’s posho pathology. No, he insisted, it’s all a true account of what he remembers. Charles was always on about duty, he said, but Diana also had a strong sense of duty. And as “a witness to history”, the Earl intoned, he has a “duty” to tell his sister’s story.

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But what exactly do we mean here, by duty? Duty to whom, or to what? Over Britain’s high imperial era, this idea of “duty” always pulled in two directions. One half of the ruling-class culture that emerged in that age was a Spartan toughness and (at times) cold-blooded single-mindedness, that built institutions and infrastructure, and also extracted wealth or massacred recalcitrant natives. Institutionalized and reproduced in Britain’s chilly, disciplinarian public schools, this sense of “duty” supplied the former Empire’s stoical, institutional-building team spirit and capacity to set personal feelings aside in pursuit of larger goals.

The other half was a genuinely idealistic moral universalism. Born in industrial-age Britain’s Protestant predilection for social reform, and always more female-coded, this supplied a core of righteous zeal that animated the Empire’s missionaries and “civilizers”. Perhaps the most historically notable fusion of these two senses of “duty” is the point where (admittedly after a lot of campaigning) abolishing chattel slavery became imperial policy, realized through an immense expenditure of blood and treasure.

The British Empire’s legacy is immense and ambivalent, meriting both the acclaim of its nostalgists and also the critique of its post-colonial revisionists. And since its end, no subset of Britons has been left more lost, and less capable of reckoning with that legacy, than the upper class — especially the constitutional monarchy — whose purpose evaporated with its collapse.

It was not always thus. In the high imperial 19th century, our monarchs did their duty, just as they expected citizens to do the same. Prince Albert turned his abilities to diplomacy and or institution-building in areas such as museums, scientific societies, and military schools. Queen Victoria, for her part, espoused moral causes such as animal welfare, social reform, and injured veterans. Some monarchs and a whole empire later, even Charles’s mother was able to squeeze a lifetime’s “duty” from presiding over the Empire’s dismemberment while pretending everything was fine. But there was nothing left on that carcass by the time Her Maj died. So with little useful to occupy them, our upper crust has turned the twin moral turbine of their imperial upbringing loose on themselves, and all of us, to disastrous effect.

Nowhere did this appear in more vivid tableau vivant, than throughout the miserable marriage of Charles and Diana. Victoria’s and Albert’s instincts are discernible in, for example, Charles’s interest in youth education and Diana’s in landmine victims. Charles tried to personify “duty” in the sense of willingness to inhabit given roles, rules, and obligations, irrespective of personal feelings. And Diana personified “duty” in the sense of obligation to pursue a deeply felt moral mission wherever it led.

But unlike Victoria and Albert, Charles and Diana had only a Potemkin empire in which to play out their inherited roles: the “Commonwealth”. This entity, confected to save face as the real Empire imploded, was always an awkward hybrid of friendly-ish settler states such as Australia, plus former colonies whose disposition toward the Crown runs from ambivalent to openly and extractively hostile.

With only an at best ambivalent reception to enjoy, while doing the rounds in the “Commonwealth”, Charles’s and Diana’s institution-building and moral-reform instincts went in search of a canvas at sufficient scale. Alas: they found themselves reborn as warring emotional camps, in an America-led, globalized 24-hour TV entertainment cycle. In this frenzied setting, a sensibility that once ruled the world degraded into an ugly divorce battle, between “duty” in Charles’s sense of subsuming your feelings for the greater good, and Diana’s of pursuing personal truth, no matter what the cost.

This resonated more widely than just the Windsors, because the battle was also raging throughout our erstwhile imperial class. Long before Diana died, her combination of idealism and selfishness was a sufficiently common cultural hangover of the Sixties to have been vividly satirized in the Nineties sitcom Absolutely Fabulous.

The show’s two central characters, Patsy and Eddie, capture the hedonism and sentimental, self-righteous attitude this produced — while casting a sharp eye at Britain’s fraying upper class. Only Patsy is genuinely “posh”, but she also has no money: she lives a parasitic life in nouveau riche Eddie’s house, where she guzzles Eddie’s champagne, makes use of her chauffeur, and bullies her staid daughter, while weeping crocodile tears whenever challenged.

The year after Ab Fab stopped broadcasting, Diana’s sudden death declared her self-involved version of “duty” the winner in the media battle, as it were by martyrdom and canonization. As Tony Blair solemnly declared at the time, she was the “People’s Princess”. From there on in, the Patsy and Eddie version of “authenticity” was to be the new normal for Modern Britain. Small wonder, perhaps, that therapeutic navel-gazing plus globalized wokeness has since become the dominant moral registers for what’s left of Britain’s poshos, as typified by figures such as Kirstie Alsopp and indeed Diana’s son, Harry.

Watching Earl Spencer justify his latest salvos against King Charles to Laura Kuenssberg, I don’t doubt his assertion that if he really wanted to spill the tea, there are spicier truth-bombs he could drop. But clearly he doesn’t just want to screw King Charles. He wants us to understand how discreet he’s being and how utterly lovely his life is, and to be sympathetic about his (self-diagnosed) “ADHD” and “rejection-sensitive dysphoria”. Like Patsy and Eddie, he wants to destroy his enemies and not be made to feel guilty and still have everyone agree that he’s a really nice person.

What of the other side, meanwhile? If Britain’s posho moral-reform instincts have long since resiled into wokeness, philandering, and crybully emotional terrorism, the proponents of emotionally detached team spirit are just as gravely adrift. Shorn of an empire in which to act globally, and obviously reluctant to contract their field of vision to “little Britain”, this group has instead directed its energies either to renting out social cachet à la Patsy, selling off the family silver, or alternatively chasing a dream of universal institution-building, often at the expense of those whose interests they ought to protect.

Here, for example, we find hereditary products of Britain’s erstwhile imperial class such as Boris Johnson, opening Britain’s borders to the “Boriswave”. We find Jacob Rees-Mogg enjoining British plebs (presumably excluding himself) to “do their duty” and enlist to defend their nation, even as those plebs witness government after government refusing to defend Britain’s own coastline in the name of “international law”. And, indeed, we find the recent, cold-blooded assertion by Rory Stewart that the mass rape of British girls by Pakistani-heritage clan mafia networks is a trivial issue compared to real problems, such as the future of AI governance. We also find King Charles hiding in grand thoughts about our technological future: his reaction to Earl Spencer’s revelations was to attend a conference on AI. An aide retorted, in response to press enquiries, that “The King was rather more concerned about the future of mankind than the unkind claims of one man picking at the scars of the past.”

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These two poles represent, between them, the spread of ways a decadent upper class can absolve itself of responsibility. On the one side, by resiling into Patsy and Eddie emotivism, and saying, of anything inconvenient or guilt-inducing: “It wasn’t my fault because I’m nice and a victim.” On the other, by fixating on “the future of mankind” rather than of a particular people, and offloading responsibility to assorted forms of technocracy, from institutions, to international laws, and – now – the dream of a “machine intelligence” that might finally liberate them from decisions and accountability.

A fish rots from the head down. Ordinary Brits are still demonstrably capable of self-organizing in a crisis, for the common good, at a pragmatic scale. If our country is in a bad way, ultimate responsibility lies with our leadership class, which long since committed itself to a general stance of “it’s not my fault”, or “we need to make things even more neutral”. Whether the supposed culprit is personal trauma, institutional racism, Donald Trump, International Law, or AI Swarm Gods, we’re stuck with this ghastly tranche of wet-eyed cry-bullies and cold-blooded universalists, none of whom shows the slightest interest in the one thing they’re supposed to do: lead and serve, in the interests of their own nation.

By contrast with the normal Brits who still cheerfully rally in a crisis, they should all feel ashamed of their own cowardice and crapulence. But they won’t. Shame implies choice, which signals responsibility. And the inability of the class that produces characters such as Earl Spencer, Boris Johnson, and Rory Stewart to feel shame, let alone take responsibility, is precisely the problem we need to confront, if we’re ever to climb out of our current morass.

It’s not really possible to do without an elite. But we really could do without one whose sole unifying refrain is “It’s not my fault”. So my fervent wish, at this point, is that “swan song” refers not just to Earl Spencer, or Diana, or even King Charles (A)III, but all of them: their whole class, generation, and hopelessly decadent worldview.

Going back to acting would be Meghan’s latest self-reinvention, but then self-reinvention is what actors do all the time. It’s also a distinctively American practice, which like many things in the States has its origins in Puritanism. The greatest self-reinvention of all is the crisis of spiritual conversion, after which you aren’t the same person as you were before. You turn from a sinful world to a regenerated one, and there seems no reason why this remaking shouldn’t become a perpetual way of life. When it does, it’s commonly known as postmodernism. The self is plastic, protean stuff, clay in your hands to be molded this way or that depending on how you happen to be feeling. Does Madonna even remember being part of the English squirearchy in a previous incarnation, riding her horse in the Cotswolds? The only force which binds together your various identities is the will to succeed. If that means making jam or dressing up in a giraffe costume, so be it.

In the 19th century, the world was seen as in constant flux, but there was a stable point in the midst of this mutability: the self. It was a kind of substance, rather like the body but invisible. In our own time, flux has invaded the inner sanctum of the self and scooped it out. As Oscar Wilde remarked, truth is one’s present mood. This is all very different from the traditional bourgeois idea of selfhood. One of the great revolutionary breakthroughs of the European middle classes was the notion of self-determination. You were no longer instructed what to think and do by feudalist, monarchical, autocratic regimes. Instead, you decided for yourself. You wrote your own history, rather than playing a humble role in a pre-scripted narrative. The creed of liberalism was born. It was advances of this kind which caused Marx to admire the middle classes so much, a fact of which most of them seem nowadays to be oblivious. To be free meant not just to be unshackled, but to construct your own destiny without the interference of others. What was important wasn’t simply what you did, but the fact that you did it. To that extent, it was an adolescent kind of ethics. Yet it had world-shaking political implications, not least when the idea of self-determination was applied to nations as well as individuals. The result of that was the unleashing of one of the most transformative political forces the modern world has witnessed: revolutionary nationalism.

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There’s a difference, however, between self-determination and self-invention. To shape your own identity suggested that you had such a thing already. The problem was that someone else — the state, the church, the nobility — was forbidding you to be your own master. It wasn’t a matter of plucking your selfhood from thin air, but of being allowed to realize a self which was in some sense already given. Self-invention, however, is a different affair, because now the self becomes nothing more than the story of its endless refashioning, like the life-history of David Bowie. If who you are is somehow given, then this restricts what you might do, and is thus an obstacle to complete freedom. For total freedom, you need to abandon all ideas of a set identity and simply make yourself up as you go along. The result of this, however, is a freedom which is purely empty. It’s what you get when you push laissez-faire to an absolute limit.

Negative freedom of this kind wants to cut itself loose from all external determinants. Like God, it is purely self-creating. Aggressively independent of Nature, history, heredity and environment, it relies on nothing outside itself in order to be itself. This isn’t true of a lily or a can of beans. Nor is it true of an animal like a badger or a zebra, which is completely shaped by the species to which it belongs. And despite the liberals, it isn’t true of human beings either. Freedom doesn’t mean being unconditioned. It means being conditioned in a way which allows you to transform what conditions you. Take language, for example. Language molds our consciousness to its roots, but we’re not just passive effects of it. On the contrary, to be brought up in a language is to learn how to use it creatively, producing utterances we have never heard or spoken before. We start off with the alphabet and end up writing Paradise Lost. To some extent, then, we can determine whatever it is that determines us. And this is what we call freedom. It isn’t true on any significant scale for badgers or zebras. Badgers and zebras don’t have any history of their own (though they may occasionally play a role in ours) because they aren’t built to be able to reconfigure what makes them what they are. They can only be what they are, so that their life is safer than ours but probably more tedious too.

The contrast with humanity is clear. “I can be anything I want!” is one of the most mindless of postmodern mantras, not least in the United States. The problem with this vision, as the Romantics discovered a long time beforehand, is that any actual achievement or identity is automatically diminished. To act is to limit a self which is pure, infinite possibility. For this reason, true freedom would be not to act at all, and so would be purely negative. What Meghan discovered to her dismay was that even the role of princess was imprisoning — that what looked like liberty was more like a privileged form of incarceration. In a notable paradox, those at the very top of the tree, and thus (one might have thought) most free of restriction, may turn out to be the most rigorously scripted of all.

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As an actor, Meghan was able to choose her parts and could always shift from one to the other. She also got to choose her role as Duchess of Sussex. The Duke of Sussex, however, had no such privilege, as he has made a point of complaining. Like most of us, large chunks of his narrative were written for him by others. Few of us are self-authoring, given that being around the place involves having parents, and having parents involves being part of a whole world without ever having been consulted on the matter. But Harry is less self-authoring than most of us and now wants to claim control over his own story.

This idea of life-as-story is a particularly fashionable notion at present. Not everyone thinks of their life as a narrative. You could see it instead as a cycle or a montage or a mosaic, not to speak of a heap of fragments. “Narrative” suggests a certain shapeliness, whereas some of us regard our lives, rather as Henry James saw the realist novel, as “loose baggy monsters”. A human life doesn’t always have the clarity and coherence of a parable. “What’s your journey?” suggests that you feel yourself to be en route to a destination, but we don’t all live with some grand goal in sight. There isn’t that much continuity in every human existence. The philosopher Galen Strawson thinks it not only true but transparently obvious that who he is now isn’t who he was at the age of 10. Besides, everyone’s narrative includes a lot of other characters who usually turn out to be hard to control, as well as spawning a whole series of sub-plots which refuse to slot neatly together. The view that everything in the world conspires with everything else to form a luminously intelligible whole is known as paranoia.

Having been scripted by others, though, Harry is now eager to script himself — or, as he would say, own or take control of his life-story. It’s revealing, however, that he thinks of his life as some kind of property, to which his relation is one of proprietorship. You don’t own your life any more than you own your body. You can’t leave it in a pub by mistake, or swap it for someone else’s. Harry and Meghan think in acquisitive terms even when it comes to their very existence. Your life is a commodity to be invested on the most profitable of terms.

Which is to say, in the current barbarous jargon, that you’re a brand, just as your hair-style or apple chutney is. And that’s where the problems begin. Because a brand is precisely something you can’t exert complete control over. It’s a relational matter, in the sense that whether it takes off depends on the public. In striking out for freedom and autonomy, then, you find yourself the puppet of forces which are entirely anonymous, just as a toothpaste manufacturer does. You can try to fend off that anonymity by writing “Love”, “Meghan” or “As ever” on your products, as though you have a fierce personal affection for every potential customer, but that won’t fool anyone. The fickleness of consumers forces you into yet more desperate or ingenious self-reinvention in order to stay in business. In an age of self-determination, you find yourself adrift in a market in which nobody can be entirely self-determining. Postmodernism marks the point at which the logic of the marketplace begins to infiltrate the ways we think and feel.

In any case, no one can shape the course of their life in isolation from others. To form one’s history collectively is known as democracy. For two people to shape their selves in and through each other is known as love. Let’s hope Harry and Meghan keep on doing that. There may not be much more left.

I have been thinking about that woman lately, because the son of the woman she was weeping over has come home. Yesterday, Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, returned to Britain after six years in Montecito, California.

Let me declare my interests, or rather my lack of them. I hold no brief for the Sussexes. I have not tried the podcasts. I am dimly aware of the jam. I have sat through small bits of the Netflix series, in which two people who moved to California to escape publicity narrate their private lives to camera for six hours. Nor do I much care for the House of Windsor: an emotionally refrigerated dynasty whose one redeeming feature is a hollow, ironical humor flapping at the edges of an inflexible sense of duty. Asked to choose between Montecito and Balmoral, I would ask to see the wine list.

But the return interests me, and not because of the personalities. It interests me because in tragedy nobody gets out of the house. That is very nearly the definition of the genre. Orestes is raised abroad and comes home to engage in matricide; Hamlet is called back to Elsinore by a dead parent who declines to stay dead; the House of Atreus runs on a curse that no amount of relocation can outrun. I once wrote a book about tragedy, and the sentence in it I stand by most firmly is this: “We are still prisoners of the family, even a queer family.” The Windsors are our House of Atreus, with better catering and worse weather. Harry’s flight to California was never the end of the play. It was the interval, and the strawberries and cream have now been eaten.

In an article for The New York Times, under the headline “Don’t Harry and Meghan Know Better?”, Roxane Gay reads the return as she read the exile: as a parable of race. The monarchy, she observes, has cheerfully tolerated wife-beheaders, a Nazi-sympathizing abdicator and a prince who kept up his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein after the conviction, but it could not abide a black woman. About the tabloids she is simply right: the coverage of Meghan was vile, and the family’s refusal to defend her contemptible. And yet race explains less here than it appears to. The machine that mangled Meghan had already destroyed a white, aristocratic, impeccably virginal teenager called Diana Spencer, and it has chewed through every daughter-in-law fed into it before or since, whatever her color or her postcode. The Firm is an equal-opportunity destroyer of daughters-in-law. Gay ends her article with James Baldwin’s question — “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” — and it is the right question with the wrong arsonist. The house was burning long before the Sussexes arrived. What breaks people in that house is not their difference from the family. It is the family.

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Which is why Diana remains the far more interesting figure. I was moved by her death and take no pride in admitting it, being the kind of right-thinking soft leftist who can quote Tom Paine from memory after a couple of drinks. But what happened in September 1997 still strikes me as thrilling, and I persist in thinking it was almost revolutionary. For about a fortnight, England stopped being a Protestant country. The shrines, the votive candles, the flowers rotting in their cellophane, the icons of a wronged woman, the pilgrims sleeping out on the Mall, the conviction that grief must be displayed rather than swallowed — this was a populist catholic insurgency, catholic with a small c. It was an eruption of everything the Reformation was supposed to have buried, directed squarely against the stiff-necked Anglicanism of a family whose head is, after all, Supreme Governor of the Church of England. The irrational national feeling on which constitutional monarchy depends — the affect that it exists to capture and sedate — detached itself from the living sovereign and fastened onto a dead woman whom the family had cast out. The Queen was obliged to come down from Balmoral and bow her head to the coffin of her discarded daughter-in-law, more or less on the instructions of the tabloid press. It was the nearest thing to a revolution I ever expect to see in England in my lifetime, and it was conducted entirely in flowers.

Perhaps Diana damaged the House of Windsor beyond repair. The Firm survived, as firms often do, but like a bell with a crack in it: it still rings on the hour, but the note has never been true since. Everything after — the confessional television, the disgraced uncle stripped of his dukedom, the warring sons, the memoir with its frostbitten confidences — is aftershock. Harry is his mother’s heir in everything except the ability to carry it off: the same weaponized publicity, the same faith that feeling trumps protocol, the same slow discovery that the media that loves you is the media that eats you and will kill you.

So why is there no republic? This is the genuinely strange thing. The monarchy has given the British every possible reason to be rid of it, and yet the republican groundswell obstinately fails to swell. The polls barely move; abolition remains the hobby horse of those of us who own a copy of Rights of Man and hum “Jerusalem” in the shower. Personally, I would prefer a republic. But honesty compels a look at what happens to republics. The United States rid itself of George III and then spent two and a half centuries confecting substitute royalty: the Camelot of the Kennedys, the dynastic ambitions of the Clintons, the Obamas’ court in its tasteful exile, and now a president who has gilded the Oval Office like a Bourbon with a credit line. Abolish the monarchy without abolishing the need for one and you get kings anyway — elected ones, who are worse, since there is no constitutional plumbing for removing them gracefully.

Americans desire monarchy more than anyone. I discovered this in Washington DC on the night Diana died. I was there for a political science conference; a Brazilian waiter broke the news over a late dinner, and he had to repeat it three times before I believed him. I then sat in the lobby of the Sheraton until four in the morning, watching CNN try to assemble the story from scraps while respectable, indeed some world-famous, political theorists wept openly around me. The network’s instinct, in the absence of a court of its own, was to ask Tom Cruise for comment. A republic in mourning reaches for the Hollywood aristocracy, which is the only one it has.

The reason is that politics runs on fiction, and there is no unleaded alternative. Hobbes knew this: the state is an artificial man animated by an “Artificial Soul”, and what keeps the many obedient to the few is not force but opinion and imagination, or perhaps just fancy — the stories we seem to need to keep telling. The question is never whether we live by fictions but which ones, and whether we know it. The British monarchy is a fiction that insists it is a fact: as recently as 2023, a 74-year-old man was anointed with holy oil behind a screen while Handel played, and Parliament looked on as if this were normal.

Wallace Stevens dreamed of a supreme fiction — a fiction we know to be a fiction and believe in anyway, with our eyes open. A republic worth having would be exactly that: a crownless constitution held together not by sacred oil but by the revisable consent of people who know they made it up and might therefore make it better. Whether human beings can be governed that way — whether we can live without kings and queens — is an open question, and the evidence of the past decade is not encouraging. We seem to want thrones the way we want sugar, and the diet versions fool nobody.

Meanwhile, the play resumes. Harry comes home like Orestes, though with more limited plans, one hopes, for the family reunion. Like Hamlet, he is called back to Elsinore by a ghost, and his ghost has been visible for nearly 30 years, on tea towels and old mugs. There will be school runs and security disputes and a reconciliation with the crowned father reported by the very newspapers whose destruction Harry has sworn. Nobody gets out of the house. The best you can negotiate is a room of your own in it.

Monarchy, in the end, is not the oil, the orb or the man in the golden coach. It is a stranger weeping on public transport for a woman she never met. Can we live without kings and queens? The truth is, we have never seriously tried.

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.  

Tragic figures who overreach themselves and come to nothing are traditionally said to fall prey to hubris: for the ancient Greeks excessive pride or self-assurance. Andrew was already an arrogant young puppy by the time he arrived at prep school, and later had his head swollen even further by being applauded for killing Argentinians. The result of hubris is nemesis, when someone or other cuts you savagely down to size. In Andrew’s case, the agents in question are too numerous to count, but they include one of the most courageous of his victims, his elder brother and — probably above all — himself.

Philosophically speaking, the Greeks were for the most part rationalists, but the tragedians among them knew that life didn’t work like that. Everyone was potentially guilty, not least the innocent. This was because the ancient Greeks saw guilt less as a subjective state than an objective affliction, rather like illness or pollution. Oedipus is a so-called guilty innocent: the fact that he never intended to kill his father, or have sex with his mother, is morally speaking neither here nor there. In fact, he never once justifies his actions by pleading ignorance, to the amazement of the modern mind.

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If Andrew is far from a tragic figure, it isn’t only because he lacks the necessary dignity, but because tragic figures must evoke some kind of sympathy. Aristotle writes of tragedy as evoking in us both pity and fear: fear because the destruction of the hero reminds us of our own sickeningly fragile state, and pity because we need to have some sympathy for the protagonist if his plunge from a great height is to move us. You can’t be an Oedipus or a Hamlet if you’re mostly responsible for your own undoing, as is the case with Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.

Andrew doesn’t know very much. No doubt he has some knowledge of ships, horses and dubious commercial dealing, but like almost all of the rest of his family, he’s probably never read a book. This is another way in which he differs from certain classical tragic heroes, whose problem isn’t ignorance but an excess of knowledge. Take Sophocles’s Oedipus, for instance. He is one of the smartest of tragic heroes, not least because he solves the riddle of the Sphinx, by doing so saves his city from destruction. What he doesn’t know, however, is who he is, which is to say who his parents are.

This is also true of Andrew, who of course knows who his parents are but not what ought to follow from this knowledge. To be a prince is to know that you have enormous privilege, but also that you must play it down. You can only maintain it by being suitably discreet about it. In a democratic society, entitlement survives by seeking to conceal itself. The late Queen was said to be horrified by the retinue of cooks, footmen and multi-purpose lackeys that accompanied her eldest son when he descended on some unfortunate friend for a weekend party. She herself went around Buckingham Palace switching off lights to save electricity. If your elite status has no rational foundation whatsoever, but depends in the end on nothing more substantial than the approval of the common people, you don’t flaunt your luxurious lifestyle in ways likely to alienate them.

Instead, you keep in mind the fact that admiration and resentment, veneration and derision, lie cheek-by-jowl in the public mind. You have to make sovereignty look like service. You don’t make public visits to banks, unless they’re food banks. You don’t descend on the offices of transnational corporations but on old people’s homes. Andrew’s problem is that he never learned this golden rule. Rude, bullying, pompous and infantile, he wasn’t only socially superior but actually behaved as though he was, which makes life uncomfortable for those close relations of his who are just as pampered as he — but have the nous to keep quiet about it. He once talked on television about “my first day at public school”, as though to remind us that he wasn’t sent to a back-street comprehensive. To be truly upper-class, by contrast, is to be ignorant of class altogether.

Oedipus does finally come to how little he knows. His search for his own origins leads him to uncover a monster which is no less than himself. At the root of his identity lie murder and incest, a darkness that no mere knowledge can dispel. As with Andrew, the revelation of a sexual transgression brings Oedipus low. In tragedy, you have to be careful what you do, because past events can breed calamitous consequences in the present. What you thought safely buried in the past can return to haunt you. Your own free actions can come to confront you as alien forces. Old ghosts refuse to lie quiet, but rise up to cry out for justice. In the face of this, the tragic protagonist must come to recognize just how frail and finite he is, and only then can he be redeemed.

Lear’s regal delusions run so deep that he has to be hauled through hell for them to be purged. “They told me I was everything”, cries the dethroned king, “’tis a lie — I am not ague-proof”. Caught in a storm, surrounded by fools and madmen, the lunatic monarch comes to acknowledge that he is not everything but nothing (“I am a very foolish fond old man”), and only in this act of self-knowledge can he become something. He has done grave harm to a young woman, his daughter Cordelia, but comes to repent of his crime and beg her forgiveness.

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All this has a political dimension in the play. Knowing his own weakness allows Lear to feel solidarity with the dispossessed:

Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel…
So distribution should undo excess,
And each man have enough.

These are not words one imagines Andrew wakes up with on his lips, or indeed the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Shakespeare writes in Lear that the“superfluous and lust-dieted man” must have a change of heart and “shake the superflux” to the poor. Excessive wealth and privilege insulate the body from the afflictions of others. A superfluous and lust-dieted man isn’t a bad description of how some now view the former prince. There are those of us who believe that princes are superfluous anyway, so that the phrase “a superfluous prince” is as much a tautology as “business ethics” is an oxymoron; but Andrew has taken that to an extreme. He would now seem, frighteningly, to have absolutely no purpose in being around the place — to be surplus to the needs of humanity. That is indeed the kind of forlorn condition which might lend itself to tragedy. But there’s nothing tragic about justice. However futile his life from here on, he has got his comeuppance. His heart is still beating, which is more than can be said for Virginia Giuffre.

King Charles would no doubt be pained by the suggestion that the finest work of his beloved Bard might be read as promoting some kind of communism, or even social democracy. He once called me “that dreadful Terry Eagleton” because he thought that I didn’t venerate the Swan of Avon sufficiently. Even so, he would have done well to make the work required reading for his delinquent brother, alongside stripping him of his house and titles.

Twenty years ago this Wednesday, the woman Diana nicknamed “the rottweiler” entered Windsor Guildhall in a tasteful oyster-silk coat and a big white hat, and walked out with her prince. Onlookers back then were respectful and cheery; the late Queen remarked that her son was at last “home and dry with the woman he loves”. And over the intervening years, “the most hated woman in Britain” has been transformed into “the nation’s grandmother”; harmless, homely and horsey. These days she more resembles her mother-in-law than a minxy Jezebel. This is, after all, a woman who relishes “cooking her own simple supper on the Aga leaning over her dogs… listening to The Archers”. How could one resent that?

But our Queen’s status as “the other woman” has never quite left her, despite the tradition of royal mistresses being far more conventional than the romantic fairytale marriage Diana represented. Joking about ancestral infidelities (that of Edward VII and Alice Keppel) on their first meeting marked Camilla out as a consummate aristocrat — a realist who accepted the chasm between love and marriage, passion and practicality, which persisted in high society. When Charles and Diana became engaged, Prince Philip was pleased because the leggy Spencer girl would “breed in some height”. We commoners find this hard to accept, the judging of the quality of a match by hands, like the purchasing of a racehorse. Hilary Mantel, though, knew that royals are a “breeding stock, collections of organs”. The legs, then, were just part of the cynical selection process for admission into monarchy, and Camilla, so long content with remaining the “Gladys” to her “Fred”, understood this.

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Quite different from the moral codes the commoner abides by, the gentry have until recently always maintained fashionable French-court conventions of infidelity; the role of maîtresse-en-titre was formalized in Paris and emulated in England by Nell Gwynn, Barbara Villiers, the Boleyn sisters et al. Other European monarchies exercised more pious discretion; Spain, for example, laboring under austere confessional Catholicism and the long shadow of the Inquisition — with its emphasis on moral surveillance — couldn’t tolerate such transgressions. Conversely, in 14th-century England, affairs of both men and women in the landholding classes were “far from uncommon”.

Camilla’s story represents an adherence to, not a departure from, the sexual mores of the haut monde: the expectation of romantic love within the practical and contractual alliance-and-dowry structure of marriage — an expectation naively held by the teenaged Diana — is a relative innovation. The late Queen’s temporary froideur towards Camilla — “that wicked woman” — was connected not to the existence of the affair, but the fact that it was permitted to derail the marriage of her heir, a betrayal of convention rather than morality. She herself had never strayed, but it is almost certain her husband and various of her children had. Do what you will, but don’t rock the boat.

Noble mistresses existed precisely because the requirements of matrimony were more stringent than in general society: Camilla was, let’s not forget, discounted from the role of Charles’s wife as recently as 50 years ago because she was not a virgin. Prevented from marrying a paramour for arbitrary reasons of protocol, the nobility accepted the role of mistress as a satisfying, if cynical, alternative. Of course, this arrangement is unacceptable to the British public, whose views on infidelity are exceptional in having remained unchanged despite other attitudes on sex and the family liberalizing. One study from 2023 found that, over the course of 40 years, people had become overwhelmingly more tolerant of same-sex couplings, premarital sex and having children out of wedlock — yet the figure who now agreed that extramarital sex was “always wrong”, 57%, was a slip of just 1% from 1983.

Against the force of these baked-in attitudes, how was Camilla to be brought into the fold? In practice, her rehabilitation involved a series of carefully stage-managed photocalls, a modern royal tradition; this remains one of the few elements of royal life I covet — how I’d have relished being papped looking conspicuously serene after any number of my own romantic clangers. The setting was chosen as Camilla’s 50th at Highgrove; unfortunately she was rather upstaged by Diana’s appearance in a revenge swimsuit, which plastered the tabloid’s front pages that same day. She went quiet after Diana died in Paris just two months later; as every Sex and the City devotee knows, you cannot compete with a dead wife.

An attempt was revived a couple of years on, with a well-choreographed exit from a party at the Ritz. It seems incredible now to think of Camilla as having to be introduced to the public like vegetables hidden in a fussy child’s pasta sauce — but we must remember that the Camilla-Diana melodrama was not just about two women, but about how we expect women to conduct themselves as wives and mothers.

Just as with Angelina Jolie, Monica Lewinsky or indeed Helen of Troy, the greatest moral outrage is generally reserved for the woman who strays, not her partner in crime. Society affords men more forgiveness than it does women; the poor helpless darlings submit to what is so often framed as an insurmountable biological instinct. Women, though, are encouraged to be understanding of their partners’ toddler-level command of their impulses; no such grace is afforded to the Camillas of this world. Why?

Here, the mysterious workings of love are depressingly explicable with science. The theory goes like this: men tend to cheat more frequently and with many more partners via one-night stands; women tend to be unfaithful only in order to “trade up”, carefully risk-assessing a tactical punt for better security and resources for their children via a “mate-switch”. Evolutionary biologists theorize that these behaviors are connected to genetic imperatives: while infidelity can be disruptive in a community, it can also diversify the gene pool, produce more young and provide children with the most suitable substitute fathers possible.

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The double standard in shaming, by extension, makes sense — evolutionarily, high-risk sexual behaviors are more detrimental in women than in men, and so sexual prejudice in attitudes towards infidelity was useful in the world of animal skins and clubs. This also explains women’s particular ire for other women who cheat (in a recent conversation with my mother about this very issue, she said “well, look at Anthea Turner”, still tutting over beef from 30 years before). Women are gatekeepers of sexual morality because of their compulsory caretaking role; it is they, then, who are the most repulsed by peers — or indeed royals — who cheat.

Camilla has been up against royal convention, the romantic fantasies of the public and evolutionary biology… but has her rehabilitation worked? At the Coronation two summers ago, the new Queen seemed born to it; she has broadly commanded the respect of the public in the wake of her husband’s cancer diagnosis, and only been burnished by barbs from Harry. She is pleasant, uncomplaining and traditional, qualities that have evaded the Sussexes; she is stoic in the face of her forever-oddball husband’s fits of pique. Her approval rating has gradually ticked up over time, the fruits of a decades-long master plan. Yet it is difficult to imagine history remembering Camilla more for this latter-day golden age than for the carnage of the Nineties, deliciously scandalous as it was.

The curious history of Camilla Shand, the plucky girl from the polo, tells us more about ourselves than anything else: it shows the British public its own sexual conventionality, the ways in which it remains stubbornly conservative. We may have forgiven, but forgetting is quite another matter. So exercise caution, lusty ladies — and if you must step out, make it worthwhile. Only an heir to a throne will do.

At this, the newspapers were soon in uproar. The prime minister David Cameron called the comments “completely misguided and completely wrong” and the Labour leader Ed Miliband agreed they were “pretty offensive”. Mantel doggedly refused to back down, saying that her remarks had been twisted out of context, and that she was in fact writing with sympathy about the perceptions that are forcefully projected on to royal women, the cage in which they are held to be goggled at. That was true, but also perhaps not the entire truth, for there was still a perceptible trace of authorial vinegar in the portrait: which of us would be happy to learn, even in sympathy, that we were held at low risk for “the emergence of character”?

Royals are public as well as private figures, of course, and authors are free to hang intellectual ideas on them to try out, as designers do with clothes. Yet while much of the lecture was sharply perceptive, I didn’t agree with the portrait of Kate. That word “selected” had rendered her passive, when in fact her behaviour thus far had suggested both an active intelligence and an unusual degree of self-discipline. The context of her entry into “The Firm” was different from that of other royal brides. Unlike Diana, who had barely emerged from the fractured chrysalis of her troubled aristocratic family when she first met the much older, more worldly Prince Charles, Kate was a contemporary of Prince William’s at the University of St Andrews. Her family background, which appeared warm and supportive, was comfortably middle-class. She seemed generally cheerful and unruffled, even when the press was at the barbed peak of its “Waity Katie” hysteria, trying to goad Prince William into a proposal or abandonment.

After the wedding, in her approach to royal duties, she clearly took the role she had inherited with marriage seriously. The royal whose attitude her own most resembled was the late Queen Elizabeth II, who had long understood the essential nature of the job: to turn up to public events looking the part, intuit precisely what was needed — gravitas, fun, consolation or reassurance — and deliver it while keeping one’s personal emotions on the back burner. This is what a monarchy demands, and the ability to act as an impeccable interpreter of the public mood, year after year, is a particular and testing art. A few have a natural aptitude for it, but most of us do not, and would quickly find its scrutiny and restrictions intolerable.

Grace under consistent pressure is an admirable quality. Were a ballet dancer to execute a string of flawless performances, or a pilot to conduct numerous flights without incident, it would not be deemed evidence of an absence of character: quite the opposite. Yet in Kate — especially for those who increasingly conduct their lives online — serene self-possession seems to drive a proportion of onlookers insane: what lurks behind it, what dark secret is waiting to destroy it, how best might it be disrupted? The uncomfortable truth is that what many people deeply crave in a young and beautiful royal wife and mother is not competence, but crack-up.

The increasingly bizarre treatment of Kate, or the idea of Kate, is connected to the most dominant phenomenon of our age: a cultural prioritising of drama over duty. The supply of drama has spilled beyond the confines of the novel, theatre, cinema or television to become a commodity on which our public figures are judged. When Mantel spoke of Kate’s apparent absence of emerging “character” she was assessing her primarily through the hungry eyes of a novelist. In books, central female characters often generate dramatic tension by chafing against their circumstances, by the intensifying dazzle of their discontents, something that Kate refused to transmit. In contrast, Mantel described Diana as a “carrier of myth”: Diana, publicly trapped in the disappointments of her marriage, certainly carried more plot twists than any author had a right to expect. Unfortunately for her, the final one was her shockingly premature death.

Set against this artistic conception of “character” — distinctive qualities or flaws that, one way or another, deliver drama — is the societal judgement “of good character”, meaning someone who is broadly reliable and respected in relation to their behaviour to others. In recent years the electorate, in line with Neil Postman’s warning in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves To Death, has proved increasingly ready to select the former over the latter, even to the marked detriment of our civic health. The former prime minister Boris Johnson instinctively understood it as his job not to deliver the detail of workable policy, but to satisfy the public’s appetite for story: “People live by narrative,” he once told UnHerd’s Tom McTague. In the US, Donald Trump — that relentless generator of low mockery and high fury — is now running for a second term as president, after his first one ended in his supporters storming the Capitol building.

Men are often permitted to survive the frantic generation of drama: it is everyone around them who suffers. Yet women — in art and life — have a greater tendency to be destroyed by it. There is no strutting female equivalent of the male “hellraiser”, but rather a woman who, soaked in the crocodile tears of the tabloids, is tragically “causing concern” among friends. Art and its audiences have always relished the restless struggle and disintegration of female characters who are, or become, unmoored from the harbour of marriage and children. Flaubert’s Emma Bovary — her imagination inflamed by reading novels — is bored with her marriage and disenchanted with motherhood; she seeks solace in affairs and excessive spending, the consequences of which hasten her suicide. Zola’s Nana, a courtesan who ruthlessly captivates Parisian society, has her beguiling face eaten away by smallpox. Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse, immolated on their blazing talent, are hung posthumously high in the musical hall of fame, next to Sylvia Plath in the poetry section and Marilyn Monroe in cinema.

In Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, a middle-aged English woman called Sasha Jansen, mourning an unhappy marriage and a dead child, finds herself in Paris, a vulnerable drifter seeking solace from stray men. Rhys herself, who died at 88 after a precarious but surprisingly long life, had much in common with her literary creations. As the writer and editor Diana Athill crisply put it: “Jean was absolutely incapable of living, life was just hopelessly beyond her. When she was young, she floated from man to man in a hopeless way… by the time she was old, she floated from kind woman to kind woman.”

In Rhys’s latter years — hard-drinking, irascible and impoverished — Athill and a small group of female friends formed what they called “The Jean Rhys Committee” which met regularly to ask “what should we do next?”. Rhys’s claim to such loyalty, I suppose, was the weight of her literary talent, her ability to exert an odd kind of fascination, and the fortunate soft-heartedness of her friends. The dramatic collided with the dutiful, and was kept alive by it.

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From what I can see, the Princess of Wales exists at the opposite end of the feminine spectrum from Jean Rhys. Pinned firmly in place by her royal obligations, her wealth, her marriage and three children, she belongs to the realm of the respectable and dutiful rather than the erratic and dramatic. She is not a “character” in the artistic sense, nor does she desire to be, but both a survivor and upholder of an institution: hers is the territory of the prompt thank-you note, the kept promise, the commitment to public service, the uncomplicated pleasure in children, the stoic endurance of difficult times in the hope that better ones will come along soon. The public senses an emotional solidity in her, and it is partly why she is held in broad esteem. In this age of insistent self-definition, duty to others might be an unfashionable concept, but it is nonetheless one that keeps families and institutions from chaos and collapse.

With the advent of the internet, however, anyone with a keyboard can become a form of author, with the freedom to insert a toxic form of drama into real-life situations. What was extraordinary, during the Princess of Wales’s recent health problems, is how speedily and carelessly such speculations overrode the bounds of decency. It was already known that she had undergone major abdominal surgery, and was taking time to recover. And yet — egged on by the participation of silly celebrities and malicious US comedians — conspiracy theories about cosmetic surgery and affairs and nervous breakdowns spread like knotweed. According to social-media researchers, these were also vigorously introduced and amplified by fake accounts set up on Twitter and TikTok, some associated with Russia-linked disinformation eager to spread the termites of mistrust and doubt in Western institutions. Only the Princess of Wales’s revelation of cancer, which carries a testing drama all its own, served to shut up the majority of them.

Unlike these callous gossips, Mantel recognised her own complicity in dehumanising royalty. Upon encountering the late Queen, the novelist said: “I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones.” The Queen looked back at her, she said, briefly hurt. Mantel warned of the way in which “cheerful curiosity can easily become cruelty” precisely as it has done in recent weeks. Her talk concluded with a prescient instruction for those who comprehend monarchy mainly as a source of entertainment: “I’m asking us to back off and not be brutes.”

In the midst of treatment and recovery, the most hitherto stable of royal women could be forgiven a keen sense of injustice: her job description, it seems, must now include the ability to weather the online public’s fits of brutish mania for drama. With its contempt for duty, and its savage appetite for story, it is hungry to chew up far more than just the Princess of Wales.

Is William in fact a serial cheater? Has Kate left him? A clumsily edited family photo poured petrol on an already roaring bin-fire: perhaps in fact Kate is in a coma or even dead? Not even her announcement, via video, that she has cancer has convinced the internet that she is alive and well. Instead, the recording has been picked over for signs of AI fakery, and dissected by doctors on CNN. Someone deepfaked Meghan Markle making the same announcement, to prove it can be done. And even those willing to consider the possibility it is real have seized on the announcement for another round of Covid vaccination discourse, optionally seasoned with 5G and chemtrails.

A great deal of online response to the cancer announcement has assumed a public right to know. Fox News applauded her “new transparency”; others, meanwhile, complained at the lack of openness. Why couldn’t they be honest with the public about Kate’s illness? Why did they have to lie?

Behind all these complaints lurks the Royals’ ambivalent stance on a core aspect of contemporary culture: the co-dependent relationship between digital celebrities and their audiences. If the Prince and Princess of Wales seem paradoxically under fire today, at the very moment you’d expect them to elicit maximum public sympathy, it’s because their actions reveal them to be at best grudging participants in this world. The escalating madness of the Kate truthers is, in other words, a punishment for her own clear lack of interest in playing the influencer game.

If we have developed a co-dependent relationship with celebrities, it is a byproduct of our revealed preference for loneliness. Notwithstanding post-liberal nostalgia about bygone times of rootedness and thick interpersonal connections, if that’s how we wanted to live we would still be doing it. We may lament the modern condition of pervasive atomisation, and worry about the one in five under-35s who has one or no close friends. But at some level, we have made a collective decision to abandon the neighbour surveillance and moral policing characteristic of more rooted life, in favour of relative isolation and, with it, relative freedom.

That is: it’s nice to be known, but also nice to be anonymous enough to do your own thing. This poses a problem, though, for those people (often, though not always, women) whose preferred topic of conversation is mutual acquaintances. For this demographic, celebrity culture has long provided a common set of “characters” for gossip, in a society where the default is not knowing much at all about your coworkers and everyday acquaintances.

If this were true even in the mass-media age, it has grown still more so in the social media one. William’s mother, the late Diana, Princess of Wales, was ahead of her time in grasping both the symbiotic nature of this celebrity ecosystem, and also the way digital culture would transform it from a one-way to a two-way street.

In the Nineties era of Peak Diana, fame was still mediated by the legacy press: the one-to-many broadcast formats such as TV and newspapers. Despite this, Diana had an uncanny ability to sense her audience’s projections, and play to those longings, in a come-here-no-go-away relationship that presciently anticipated influencer culture. Since then, with the shift from broadcast to digital media, this has become explicit: social media optimises for building fame on the basis of interacting with and seeking and validation from strangers, via “parasocial relationships” that afford a synthetic sense of intimacy for audiences, combined with a sometimes powerful mechanism for speaking back to the celebrity. When it’s reported that Taylor Swift ended her relationship with Matty Healy partly because her fans disliked him, the two-way quality of this relationship is clear.

As this form of social engagement has grown more popular, so it has paralleled (and probably driven) a weakening of real-world interconnections. Already in 2013, studies were showing how online life depletes real-world socialising and interconnection. And this accelerated wildly when, in 2020, Covid lockdowns tipped public culture from physical-first to digital-first, forcing almost all of our common life online and sharply constraining our freedom to associate in the real world. Evidence suggests our real-world social lives still haven’t recovered. Unsurprisingly, amid the tatters of social fabric that survived that time, our craving for synthetic gossip has intensified.

As parasocial fame culture has devoured public life, creators in the medium share increasingly grotesquely personal material, feeding a race to the bottom in “pornography of the self”. Those adept at surviving the pressures of this world can reap considerable financial rewards: think of the Kardashians, for example. But it’s a double-edged sword. If Diana’s life anticipated influencer culture, her death was an equally prophetic warning about the Faustian nature of the dynamic, and the often punitive consequences of embracing symbiosis with an audience.

Pity the influencer, for example, whose private life falls out of kilter with their public persona: take the outrage occasioned by Oprah Winfrey when, after serving as a public face for Weight Watchers since 2015, she revealed she has been using the weight-loss drug Ozempic to manage her figure. And worse punishment still attends those influencers who allow the illusion of intimacy to slip in other ways. When Jordan Cheyenne accidentally published a video of herself in 2021 entreating her toddler to cry for the camera, the blowback she received was less for exposing her family life to the public, than for ruining the illusion of access to her real, unfiltered life.

Like Diana, then, or her other son Harry, many public figures today both invite the public gaze while also making a show of protesting at its intensity, not to mention its dark side. And especially in the United States, many now view highprofile royals merely as a subset of celebrity culture. So is the Royal Family really a legitimate feeding-ground for the content machine? Is baring all for the camera the right thing to do? Perhaps the role of constitutional monarchy is so depleted today that they might as well embrace their fate as regular celebrities.

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Against this, we might argue that royalty is the precise inverse of fame, and its aura long precedes the modern fame engine. Certainly, monarchs have long understood the importance of visibility — but also of mystery. Elizabeth I deliberately made a meme of herself, travelling her kingdom on an annual Queen’s Progress surrounded by emblems that created a dazzling sense of her omnipresence. Elizabeth II also understood the importance of royal appearances, declaring: “I have to be seen to be believed.”

In modern times, too, the Royal Family has acceded to — arguably even embraced — a measure of symbiosis with at least the legacy press. Until recently, though, Britain’s relatively fierce libel laws plus the threat of exclusion from the Royal Rota system controlled legacy press reporting. But the globalisation and digitisation of the news cycle has seen Royal coverage from the wilder US media landscape routinely bleed into the UK, creating a dissonance that has fuelled the digital madness. And as the digital Eye of Horus has grown ever more international, Charles III has signalled a need for clear limits to visibility, insisting on screening the most sacred part of his coronation.

The mix we see from the Prince and Princess of Wales is carefully controlled public appearances combined with near-total lack of personal disclosure. It suggests they too grasp this tradition, and share Charles’s prudent resistance to baring all for their immense would-be online fandom. I don’t blame them for this, especially at a time of family illness when all but the most unhinged internet truthers must surely accept that they have more than enough on their plate. But their reticence about Kate’s illness has occasioned not sympathy, so much as a lunatic mix of hostility and conspiracy theories.

Even the lack of information on Kate’s whereabouts has merely fed into a vast alternate reality game, in which the humanity of its notional subjects comes a distant second to the pleasure of participating in a huge whodunnit. Why? I suspect that this is because their refusal to seek social-media validation reveals something uncomfortable about how dependent most of us now are on parasocial connection.

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The Waleses, that is, have spurned the public twice over. Firstly, by refusing to give of themselves, as gossip-substitutes for an atomised population who would hate village life if they tried it but who still crave the social lubricant of village gossip. And secondly, in declaring through their actions that they themselves still have a real-world community to turn to in times of trouble, and as such have no need of validation from internet strangers.

That is, in withdrawing from public life to weather illness in the family among friends and family, they have stated clearly that, unlike much of their would-be fanbase, they still have a (figurative) real-world village. They have exposed the bottomless pit of collective loneliness and need that underlies the gossip industry — while flaunting their own lack of dependence on its synthetic digital replacement.

No wonder the rumours have grown ever more vengeful in tone. For a growing proportion of the population, the internet is real life now, and those parasocial connections are the real connections. The message is clear: Kate must volunteer herself willingly for sacrifice on the altar of fandom. And if she doesn’t, she’ll be offered up against her will, as punishment for not being lonely enough.

Princess-baiting is a traditional sport for the British press — think about how Sarah Ferguson was treated — but in the Noughties there was a particular savagery in the media’s attitude to famous women. This was the era of “Crazy Britney” and “Slutty Paris” and “Trainwreck Lindsay”, when no gossip could be too vicious and boundaries only seemed to exist in order to be breached. As girlfriend of the next-king-but-one, Kate was in for a rough ride.

In part because of that media environment, but perhaps more out of fear that Kate would attract a similar circus to the one around Princess Diana, her personal life was aggressively defended by the palace from very early on: in 2010, she received an estimated £10,000 payout from a photo agency over privacy invasion. In 2012, British outlets reportedly turned down topless paparazzi photos of her. A French magazine ran them, and five years later, Kate was awarded €100,000 in damages.

As a princess, she appealed to us because she was closer to being a “regular girl” than any of her predecessors. People could be as snobby as they liked about her “new money” parentage, and William’s friends allegedly were, but you could hardly say that picking spouses from the upper classes had been a storming success for the generation above. But despite her status as a commoner, as a public figure, every effort was made to keep her in the closest possible thing to fairytale seclusion.

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Since Kate entered hospital for “abdominal surgery” on 14 January, those carefully guarded borders have become a liability. Only three photographs of her have emerged in as many months: two fuzzy paparazzi shots of her being driven by her mother and husband, and a portrait with her children issued for Mother’s Day. That last was intended to quiet the manic conspiracising around Kate’s three-month absence from the public eye. Instead, it turned into a week-long PR disaster after photo agencies issued a “kill notice” over obvious and inept manipulation.

In response, an already suspicious public entered a red-string fever. There was greenery in the background: did that mean the picture was actually from last year? (Look outside: it’s been a mild winter and an early spring.) Had Kate’s face been montaged in from another photo shoot? (Only if the royals have access to more advanced editing software than anyone else in the world, in which case you’d imagine they would have got the small matter of Charlotte’s cardigan sleeve correct.)

But this frenzied and dubious speculation feels less gratuitous when you remember that the royals really are concealing things. Wild theories rush into the void established in the name of “privacy”. Meanwhile in America, where UK privacy law holds no sway and the royal rota access system is irrelevant, the media freely wades into gossip and rumour that the British press can only prissily hint at. This week, for instance, Stephen Colbert gave a salacious rundown of the “Rural Rivals” situation on The Late Show. All we can do as onlookers is await information.

Kate’s predicament is specific to being a princess, but its origins lie in Noughties tabloid culture. Her brother in law, who received probably the hardest treatment of anyone in his generation of royals, dealt with it by eventually skipping the country. Kate, lacking that option, remains caught in a public image that’s been irrevocably shaped by that decade of coverage.

At least by the time she was engaged, the “Waity Katie” story had been reinvented as a triumph of feminine grit. The couple had briefly broken up before reconciling, and in a Telegraph profile of the princess-to-be, this was characterised as “Miss Middleton [making] it clear to him she would not be taken for granted”. Was it sexist? Manifestly. But royalty — an institution based on breeding and legitimacy — has the sexism baked in, despite our recent experience of living under a queen. And the longer Kate demonstrated her dignified resilience, the more truth you could say there was in the caricature.

Nonetheless, she won, and the media’s change of heart became complete: Kate was now to be protected and cherished at all costs. When Hilary Mantel wrote a critical essay about the Princess’s public image, the British press lost the run of itself entirely. The Mail called it a “venomous attack”, the Sun a “bizarre rant” (both, remember, had been pushing “Waity Katie” stories just a few years earlier). Yet if you look back at what Mantel actually wrote, it’s barely contentious at all:

“Kate seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character. She appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana … Diana was capable of transforming herself from galumphing schoolgirl to ice queen, from wraith to Amazon. Kate seems capable of going from perfect bride to perfect mother, with no messy deviation.”

Being thin and biddable were the exact things that people liked about Kate. It was why she could later be cast in competition with Meghan: if Meghan was all LA pushiness, Kate was the epitome of home counties stoicism. It’s why, until her recent vanishing, press coverage was relentlessly fascinated with her skinny royal legs: “Very pale, very slender, both fine-boned and finely-toned,” salivated the Mail in November — at which point, given she was only a few weeks away from major surgery, it might be reasonable to assume that she was already seriously unwell.

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Kate’s disappearance fascinates precisely because it is the “messy deviation” she was never supposed to commit. Depending on your class politics, she was either a sappy Cinderella, gratefully happy for her elevation; or a girl Gatsby who had scrambled her way into the gilded centre and intended to enjoy all its benefits. In neither version was she ever likely to represent an existential threat to the system she was now attached to.

Royalty, though, is a contact sport played with the whole body, and now Kate’s body has betrayed her. For all the pomp and dignity attached to the monarchy, there’s a robust physicality to the job. Traditionally, bedchambers would be the heart of royal business — a king would entertain his most powerful guests in the same place where he slept and fucked. In the Tudor court, the most esteemed role was the Groom of the Stool — that is, the courtier who helped the king to shit.

This is not an environment where “privacy” can mean quite what it does for other people, and even in our modernised monarchy, the last queen recognised that she had to be “seen to be believed”. The Waleses have attempted, ineptly, to replicate the modern way of doing celebrity — carefully issued press shots, their own curated “behind the scenes” footage designed to present a deeply stage-managed kind of “intimacy”. But what washes for Beyoncé will not wash for a princess, when the public instinctively feels a constitutional claim on the royal body; and anyway, even Beyoncé had to make an album about her husband cheating on her when the rumours started running too hot.

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The clumsy photoshop of the Mother’s Day picture matters because it underlines the suspicion once articulated by Mantel: that Kate is simply too good to be true. An image of perfection substituted for a real woman, while the real woman seems to have been whittled into a cypher. Even when we could see her, she was somewhat difficult to believe in. The bargain of hereditary monarchy is that the flesh is traded for power — not symbolically, but actually, particularly for the queens and princesses whose wombs will carry the line. The longer Kate is out of view, the easier it becomes to wonder whether that’s a trade anyone should humanely be asked to make.

The barriers set up to protect her — or at least, to protect her image — were designed for the last era when the press was truly powerful. Now Kate must navigate the full force of being internet famous, caught between the physical demands of the royal body and an online version of herself that, insubstantial as it is, can be recruited to the wildest kinds of viral fictions. If Diana was the People’s Princess, the last week has made Kate into the Crowdsourced Princess — a much weirder and much less enjoyable role to play.

The image of the sick king runs back thousands of years in the human psyche. We find it first in ancient fertility cults and vegetation ceremonies, and later in the Grail legend. It crops up in the romances and popular drama of medieval England, and lies behind the most famous of modern poems, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”.  At the centre of the myth is a sovereign who has suffered an obscure wound, perhaps in the genitals, perhaps self-inflicted. Or maybe he has simply grown too old and infirm to rule, like an early version of Joe Biden. In some legends, the king is wounded as a punishment for illicit sexual passion, though it isn’t clear whether this includes falling in love with the wife of a Guards officer.

The result of this regal impotence is that Nature’s powers fail and the land is lain waste. The springs of new growth will be unlocked only when the monarch is restored to health by the arrival of the Quester, a courageous young Galahad who will either heal the old man, resurrect his dead body or take his place as ruler. In some versions of the myth, the king is either starved to death, strangled or slain by his own relatives. Brawling within royal families isn’t confined to the present.

For the past two millennia, one particular image of the sick king has fascinated the world: Jesus Christ, the crucified God. Astonishingly, a large sector of the human race worships a God who was scourged, humiliated and tortured to death. This was no perfect, all-powerful deity but a failure, at least in the eyes of what St John darkly calls the world. It’s even doubtful in what sense Jesus can be seen as a king. His life is less an example of sovereign power than a critique of it. It serves to expose the fact that all authority is finite and fragile, all monarchs are damaged ones. The words supposedly attached to his cross — “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews” — are less a solemn announcement than a piece of mockery on the part of the Romans who executed him. Since Nazareth was in the stagnant backwater of Galilee, and since Galilee was a by-word for rural idiocy at the time, the idea that a king might arise from this region seemed as improbable as a Duke of Barnsley.

In any case, Jesus makes no unequivocal claim to kingship in the New Testament. In a satirical smack at royal ceremony, he rides into the nation’s capital on the back of a donkey, not in whatever was the equivalent of a limo in first-century Palestine. He had comrades, not courtiers. It’s certainly hard to see him as the Messiah, a figure the Jews thought of as a militant national leader who would liberate the nation by routing its enemies. Far from vanquishing Israel’s foes, Jesus ends up as their helpless victim.

Even so, Christianity retains the insight that the only good king is a dead one, or at least one who is fatally flawed. Unless God enters into a solidarity of suffering with his creatures in the person of Jesus, exchanging power for weakness, he won’t be able to transform that defective human stuff from within. Weakness, then, is a precondition for success, death of new life. And the same goes for fertility cults and vegetation ceremonies. Unless Nature dies, unless the land is laid waste, there can’t be any regeneration, which is to say that winter is a necessary prelude to spring. The concept of the injured king is an attempt to come to terms with this truth.

For the mind which creates such narratives, there is a set of secret affinities or magical correspondences between the human and the natural. When Macbeth murders his king, storms are unleashed and horses eat each other. The modern mind, by contrast, sees a strict opposition between these two domains, one as absolute as the opposition between life and death. The human is the realm of living spirit, while Nature is dead matter to be manipulated. Since we ourselves are spirits who are partly made up of matter, this fissure runs all the way through human beings. It becomes impossible to explain how these two dimensions of us can fit together — how an immaterial thought, for example, can result in a material action. Hence the dualism which dominates so much modern Western thinking.

A number of factors have helped to undermine that way of seeing, of which one of the most important is climate change. It is now frighteningly clear that the human species and the sphere it inhabits are as inseparable as the two sides of a sheet of paper. There are indeed correspondences between the mind and the world. The ancient myths were true after all. But these correspondences aren’t benign and harmonious, as so many have believed in the past. Instead, the greed and acquisitiveness of humanity are reflected in the turmoil and devastation of Nature. There is a symmetry between the modern human spirit and its material home, but it is a symmetry of disorder. And there’s no gallant knight on hand to ride to the rescue.

There is an ancient tradition that the king is a kind of fool, which reaches a magnificent climax in Shakespeare’s King Lear. How does this equation between the two figures work? For one thing, you have to be a fool to want to be king. Anyone with that much power is bound to be the object of envy and aggression: uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. In some tribal societies, the hapless individual who is about to become chief is symbolically beaten up, or sometimes not so symbolically.

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The wounded king, however, is often seen as semi-divine, and so in a sense is Charles. It’s part of royalist ideology to regard this balding, bat-eared, petulant character as God’s representative on earth. Rather as God sustains the universe in existence, so the king sustains the nation. But he is also the representative of the people, and so marks the point where God and people meet. Members of Parliament represent our particular needs and interests, but the monarch represents us in our pure identity as British subjects, regardless of what form this may assume.

The only problem with this is that there is no such thing as a pure British identity, so that the monarchy rests on an illusion. There’s no part of you or me that is a British subject and nothing else. There are both positive and negative ways of being a member of the nation, but being a member of the nation isn’t a good thing in itself, any more than being 5’10” or freckled is a good thing in itself.

If the sovereign sustains the nation, and God sustains the sovereign, then society would seem to rest on the firmest of foundations. Yet one of the great discoveries of the modern era is that we can do without this metaphysical underpinning, rather as a young child learns to do without its blanket. Democracy means that we aren’t resting on anything but ourselves. There are no longer any eternal assurances or supernatural guarantees. Instead, we take our lives in our own hands, sort things out among ourselves and make things up as we go along. Monarchy is for those who still need a blanket or a Big Daddy. It is a flawed conception, just like the sick king himself.

Ever since the cancellation of the Sussexes’ Spotify deal, it’s been unclear what they’d pivot to next. A Kardashians-style reality show? A wellness empire, à la Gwyneth Paltrow? A high-profile divorce with all the sordid trimmings (and, for Harry, perhaps a sheepish return to the royal fold)? But this week, the next chapter of the Harry and Meghan saga was finally revealed: the pair has purchased the screen rights to Meet Me at the Lake, the New York Times bestselling romance novel by Carley Fortune, with the intention of turning the story into an original film for Netflix.

In many ways, this is a logical next step for the couple — especially for Meghan, given her pre-marriage Hollywood career. The path from acting to producing is well-trodden in the film industry, and has been a particular boon for mid-career actresses who want to pivot away from being in front of the camera. Mila Kunis, Reese Witherspoon and Margot Robbie have all become powerhouse producers, with a sixth sense for finding under-the-radar content that’s ripe for adaptation.

And yet, within minutes of the announcement dropping, a negative narrative had solidified. Far from an unremarkable or even savvy move in an industry one of them already had strong ties to, this development was presented as just another example of the couple’s desperation to stay relevant (“Harry and Meghan ‘buy film rights’ to romance novel to ‘revive media careers’”) as well as their eternal depthless narcissism (“Six ways the book ‘bought by Harry and Meghan’ mirrors events in their lives”). Us Weekly quoted an “insider” who seemed to confirm the personal connection: “The story really spoke to the Sussexes and has a lot of parallels to their own life. Harry and Meghan both think it’s the perfect choice.”

But even if we take at face value the alleged and much-discussed similarities between this book and their lives (and more on that in a minute), this all seems fine. I am no particular fan of the Meghan and Harry Post-Royal Tour de Victimhood, now in its third year, but the fact remains that they do have a Netflix deal, and they have to do something with it. Channelling their efforts into scripted media, for a platform full of ridiculous but compulsively watchable romantic fare, is as worthy a project as any. Unless you were hoping to see the couple’s relationship with Netflix implode in the same spectacular fashion as their Spotify one, it’s difficult to see the issue here, let alone be outraged by it.

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But there’s the rub. Weren’t some people clearly hoping for exactly this? At some point, the public sentiment surrounding the Sussexes curdled from curiosity into contempt, from critiquing their various choices to finding fault with every single one of them. This phenomenon was arguably visible long before their exit from the royal family — as Buzzfeed noted in 2020, the British press had, for years, been chastising Meghan and Harry for the very same behaviours that earned Will and Kate effusive praise. Looking back, it’s hard not to notice how thoroughly Meghan in particular was villainised. Everything she did, from touching her pregnant stomach (“Virtue signaling, as though the rest of us barren harridans deserve to burn alive in our cars”) to eating avocados (“a fruit linked to water shortages, illegal deforestation and all round general environmental devastation”) became evidence of her innately terrible character.

With Megxit, there was her ultra-memeable complaint that “not many people have asked if I’m ok”, and then came the Oprah interview, which was met with nothing short of fury. And while even the couple’s fiercest critics used to concede that whatever else you thought of the Sussexes, they did seem to be really and truly in love, that goodwill has lately vanished amid recent rumours of marital discord; now, every step Meghan takes outside her home without Harry is suspicious.

And when it comes to their latest project, every jab reads like the living embodiment of that joke about how, once you hate someone, even the most innocuous things they do begin to seem obscene and infuriating. (“Look at that bitch eating chicken. Why you eating chicken, bitch?!”)

Obviously, scapegoating people has been a part of the human experience since the dawn of time; obviously, there’s a certain amount of fun to be had in ganging up to hate on someone who has been deemed an acceptable target. But the feeding frenzy surrounding Harry and Meghan’s every move reveals the problem with this: not that it’s cruel (although it is that, too), but that being maximally uncharitable has a way of making you stupid.

Which brings us back to the much-hyped similarities between Meet Me at the Lake and the lives of the couple who want to adapt it, which have been foundational to the media coverage of this project, for better and for worse. Having actually read the book, I regret to say that these alleged parallels are absolute baloney, and that any attempt to make this into an example of Meghan and Harry’s desire to make everything about themselves is utterly contrived. The nadir of this is probably the allegation that one of the eerie commonalities between truth and fiction is, and I am not making this up, that the characters in the book at one point drink martinis together: “The Times previously reported that Harry’s favourite drink is a beer — while Meghan loves a martini or two.” Look at that bitch, drinking a martini. Why you drinking a martini, bitch?!

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Prince Harry is haunted by his ghostwriter

By Kathleen Stock

At this point, it’s hard not to be at least a little sympathetic to Harry’s insistence that he and Meghan have been treated uniquely unfairly by the media, even if the specifics of his complaints tend to err on the side of absurdity. Yes, the couple often behave like a pair of entitled jackasses, but they’re also invariably assigned the role of jackass whether they’re acting like this or not. Of course, it’s easy to understand how a narrative like this becomes so ubiquitous. It’s not even sinister: the people writing these articles have a job to do, and that job is to explain why any of us should devote a single brain cell to the continued, stateside saga of the former Sussexes. And the best way to do that, in a media landscape fuelled by outrage, is to convince people that there’s something bigger happening here than a pair of rich people making a lucrative investment that is basically guaranteed to pay out.

But the truth is that, with the possible exception of its Toronto setting, Meet Me at the Lake has no real parallels to Meghan and Harry’s own meet cute. It’s just a well-written romance that effectively employs all the usual tropes and has inspired an avid fanbase, which pretty much guarantees that any movie based on the story becomes a massive success — any of which would be more than enough reason for a pair of savvy producers to snap it up.

For all these reasons, I expect that Meet Me at the Lake will do well onscreen. It has all the upmarket Hallmark vibes of The Notebook with the sass of a Nineties rom-com: a little sweet, a little spicy, and just enough will-they-or-won’t-they tension to make the ending satisfying. But as for what it says about Meghan and Harry, it’s nothing all that exciting, and it’s something we already knew: they may be a couple of dilettantes when it comes to podcasting or memoir or documentary, but they’ve always had a talent for knowing what a good love story looks like.

I, for one, eagerly await the big reveal. But it’s hard to imagine that whatever Harry suggested could be worse than what Archewell ultimately produced. Apart from a 33-minute holiday special, released in December 2020, the couple’s sole Spotify output was Archetypes, which described itself as an effort to “investigate, dissect, and subvert the labels that hold women back”. Having listened to it, I can confirm: the above is less a mission statement than a strategy akin to the one employed by high-school students looking to pad the word count. (“Webster’s dictionary defines an archetype as ‘a very typical example of a certain person or thing.’ In this essay I will…”.) Meghan appears in conversation with women who, like her, have done extremely well for themselves — the first two episodes feature Mariah Carey and Serena Williams — but who, like Meghan, can still pluck a narrative about being held back by misogyny from even the most stratospheric level of success.

The Archetypes post-mortem has included damning allegations about Meghan’s lack of involvement, including that she pawned off the actual interviewing onto a producer and then recorded herself asking the questions later. Andy Cohen, host of The Real Housewives, who appeared in the final “binary breaking” episode (so-called because, unlike previous episodes, this one had men in it), has described this as “an insane rumor”; from the perspective of a famous person, like him, it is. It’s very clear, listening to the podcast, that Meghan did indeed interview her celebrity guests. It’s equally clear, however, that these are the only guests she talked to.

The academics, journalists, or even just less-famous celebrities whose voices are included on Archetypes were apparently pre-recorded with a producer, with Meghan’s reactions spliced in afterward — sometimes with unintentionally hilarious results. “I mean, isn’t that all so interesting?” Meghan coos, after a lengthy diatribe from the episode’s featured professor about “women and femmes and minoritised people” and “normative social constructs and normative social patterns”. (If by “interesting” you mean “indecipherable”, then yes, very.) And yet, the podcast needs these voices, not only to give it the gloss of a serious exploration of its subject matter, but to counteract the substanceless quality of Meghan’s interviews with fellow celebs.

Of course, Meghan is very busy and important and not obligated to talk to anyone she doesn’t want to; of course, she’s entitled to only speak with people as famous as she is, while leaving her producers to deal with the rabble. But this is undeniably at odds with the relatable image she’s been attempting to sell since Megxit, whether it’s one-on-one with Oprah or to millions of viewers on Netflix: the image of the royal princess turned humble truth-teller. Meghan (who, lest we forget, started out as an actor) is not so much an engaged host as playing the role of one, and hence Archetypes is not so much a podcast as an incredible simulation thereof. You know that saying about a stupid person’s idea of a smart person? This is like that, except it’s a narcissist’s idea of what it would be like to be curious about other people’s lives. When news broke this week that Harry’s own favourite (albeit sadly unrealised) podcast idea was to interview Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump about their childhood trauma, was anyone surprised? At the end of the day, the Sussexes invariably circle back to the only topic either of them are interested in: themselves.

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Hollywood's Cinderella has spoken

By Kat Rosenfield

Not that I blame them. This is, if nothing else, a solid business strategy: the relentless commitment to monetising one’s own life story is itself archetypal of the modern age, not to mention classically American. And despite the entertainment value of Bill Simmons describing the couple as “grifters”, this is not quite the right word for what Meghan is, nor for what she tried to do with her now-defunct podcast. Grifters are typically in it for the money, but the nature of the Spotify contract more or less meant that she could have farted into a microphone for an hour and still get paid, but Archteypes is what she made. She chose the podcast medium; she chose this particular format. Perhaps it is worth asking why.

Is it just that this type of vaguely woke social commentary is cheap and easy and ubiquitous, the lowest-hanging fruit on today’s cultural landscape? Or is it that in our attention economy, wading into the shallowest point in the culture wars — where the activism of the keyboard warrior meets the relatability of the lifestyle influencer — is one of the few ways left to make a name for yourself that doesn’t involve reality television?

Other creators — almost always women — have tried in various ways and forms to leverage this approach to content. Sometimes it works, at least for a while: remember when Hannah Gadsby’s audience-scolding anti-comedy special Nanette was the most celebrated cultural product of 2018? Sometimes, as with Chelsea Handler’s Netflix documentary about reckoning with her white privilege, it’s an unmitigated disaster: the Rotten Tomatoes rating for Hello, Privilege. It’s Me, Chelsea is a dismal 11%. It helps when the creator, or host, is willing to make it personal, and on this front, there are glimpses within Archetypes of what could have been a successful product — one that interwove Meghan’s own struggles with its broader feminist theme.

The problem, in the end, is not Meghan’s story. It’s Meghan herself.

A hallmark of the best podcasts, and what is sorely missing from Archetypes, is a sense of intimacy. The content of an enjoyable podcast is often secondary to the connection you feel with it, whether it’s a sense of sitting in on a lecture from an expert who is passionately obsessed with his subject — as in My Favorite Murder or The Rest Is History — or of overhearing a conversation between interesting people who are also interested in each other — as in Blocked and Reported, or The Unspeakable.

To be clear, Archetypes failed not for lack of trying: Meghan dutifully mimics the format of other, better podcasts, leaning into the microphone and addressing the audience in a direct, confessional tone. But these moments are so obviously scripted — in the sense that a practised actress with a trained voice is reading lines off a page — that they ring hollow. The overall impression is of somebody who knows all the words, but can’t hear the music; a person more concerned with image than connection; a woman who wants to present herself as relatable while speaking only to people as famous as she is. It’s ironic, for someone who fled the UK to escape the constraints of a highly managed life. She seems more boxed-in than ever.

There’s an interesting moment, in the final episode, when Meghan laughingly declines Andy Cohen’s offer to develop a Real Housewives-style series just for her. It’s interesting because, in some ways, this does actually seem to be what she wants: to be the simultaneous hero, author and star of her own life story, reclaiming her narrative in the manner of a Kim Kardashian or a Paris Hilton (also a guest on Archetypes). But to do this, and to make it entertaining, would require ceding control of her image — and it would require being unscripted, sloppy and real in public in a way that she’s clearly uncomfortable with. The Real Housewives do not care what you think of them. The Sussexes clearly do. Harry is currently fighting three lawsuits with British newspapers.

It’s no surprise that Meghan was drawn to the idea of podcasting, the dream of a conversation over which she has total control. But for Archetypes to work, its host would have had to recognise that the point of interviewing other people is to tell their stories, not to use them as a vehicle for telling, and retelling, your own. But even Meghan’s dialogues with celebrity guests have a funny way of circling back to become all about Meghan herself — her Cinderella story, her identity struggles and her yearning to be affirmed and accepted, first by Hollywood and then by the Royals.

And here, though evidently without meaning to, the podcast does manage to fulfil its promise on one front: if you were looking for a 12-hour portrait of the archetypal narcissist, you could not do better than this.

Along the way, the piece shed some interesting light on the psychology of a ghostwriter. As a promising young journalist, Moehringer was asked to write a gossip column for a colleague at the last minute. There he discovered the thrill of writing under a different name: “a kind of hiding and seeking” that liberated him to write more freely. Later, he accepted a commission from tennis star Andre Agassi to co-write what eventually would become the well-received autobiography Open — to be the ghost, if not in the machine then in the text.

Alchemically, through close collaboration with Agassi, a book slowly emerged. Moehringer was somehow both a presence and an absence within it:

“He made countless fixes, and I made fixes to his fixes, and together we made ten thousand more, and in time we arrived at a draft that satisfied us both. The collaboration was so close, so synchronous, you’d have to call the eventual voice of the memoir a hybrid — though it’s all Andre.”

Afterwards, watching Agassi receiving praise for the book’s writing in an interview, he found himself chafing at his anonymity and shouting at the television: “Say my name! Say my fucking name!” In a sense, his New Yorker piece can be read in the same spirit. In a world of great big show-offs, it’s hard for a ghost to stay invisible.

As I read his piece, I started to muse on the role of the autobiographical ghostwriter and felt more and more baffled. In reading an autobiography, there’s a fantasy of getting immediate and intimate access to the author’s mind, hot off the synapses. Sophisticated readers know that most people are unreliable narrators of their own lives. They also know that nearly all books have editors and so are to some extent co-created. Yet with an autobiography, they still expect relatively untrammelled access to the inner life of the book’s subject. After all, if you were interested only in the specific events of a person’s life as he or she very roughly saw them, you might just as well have waited for an authorised biography written by someone else.

Yet the felt presence of a ghostwriter undermines the fantasy of merging deliciously with a celebrity subject’s mind — for you know that someone else stands in your way, cutting you off from the coveted source. Someone else did the mind-merging first and it wasn’t you. And now you are not so much reading a celebrity’s thoughts directly, as reading the thoughts of someone else about those thoughts, no matter what it says on the cover.

In Spare, the presence of that someone else would always have been fairly obvious, even without his name having been leaked to the press. Despite the posh inflections, the book’s sentences are often reminiscent of Chandler or Hemingway — a well-polished American style, compressed and taut, muscular jaw trembling ever so slightly from the effort of pushing down emotional darkness (of which Harry apparently has quite a lot). Yet Hemingway is Moehringer’s literary hero, not Harry’s. In order to have literary heroes, Harry would have had to read some books.

Yet more implausible is the vision of Harry styled as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, at one point musing in Spare that “each new identity assumes the throne of Self, but takes us further from our original self, perhaps our core self — the child”; and adding that “there’s a purity to childhood, which is diluted with each iteration”. It’s a relief when, only a few pages later, he reverts to telling us about the plight of his frostbitten todger. “I went to the North Pole and now my South Pole is on the fritz”. Now that sounds more like our Hazza.

Moehringer seems a bit conflicted about what his role is, precisely. Early on, we learn of an argument he had with Harry about whether or not to include what the Prince assumed was a witty comeback to someone or other. Moehringer demurred, telling him: “You want the world to know that you did a good job, that you were smart. But, strange as it may seem, memoir isn’t about you. It’s not even the story of your life. It’s a story carved from your life, a particular series of events chosen because they have the greatest resonance for the widest range of people.”

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This is a vision of the ghostwriter as puppet-master, overriding the communicative wishes of the subject in order to craft an aesthetically satisfying object for the readership. As Julian Assange once percipiently said to Andrew O’Hagan, contracted to be the ghost author of a book about Assange that never came off: “People think you’re helping me write my book, but actually I’m helping you write your novel.”

Elsewhere though, Moehringer seems more sympathetic to the idea of the ghost author as a releaser of trapped celebrity wind, helping inarticulate public figures achieve psychological relief through the telling of their own versions of events. Agassi “wanted to tell his story but didn’t know how”. Moehringer wanted to “cure” him — to give him “grace”. Desperate to set the record straight after thousands of lurid press distortions, on the publication of Spare Harry thanked his ghost in tears, saying how “it felt incredible to have the truth out there”.

Moehringer even indicates that he too has suffered from an inability to tell his own “story” until now — unable, that is, to answer the many critics of Spare who uncharitably have accused him of sloppiness, inaccuracy, or flat-out lying. He portentously concludes: “If you don’t tell your story you lose it — or, what might be worse, you get lost inside it. Telling is how we cement details, preserve continuity, stay sane. We say ourselves into being every day, or else.”

This sort of thought, firmly in the grand American tradition of loquacity in the name of authenticity, is hardly new — but in the current landscape it strikes me as very old-fashioned. Maybe there once was a more innocent time, when an autobiography or memoir could set out a new version of the facts in a way that silenced previous critics and brought sceptics round. If so, that time seems to have passed. For that sort of world to still exist, the critics and sceptics would have to have open minds, and to feel some sort of responsibility towards the truth as a value in its own right. Or at least, they would have to fear the consequences of getting things wrong in public. This is not the world we live in now.

Instead, we have a world where nearly everyone is online to offer endless comment, where bad news travels fastest, and where there is barely any social cost to getting something wrong about another person. Quite the contrary — there is a lot of low-level social capital to be made about being judgemental about a public figure or just plain vicious. In that case, others who share your dislike for the hapless figure in question will swarm round like flies to honey, and you will all bolster each other in the search for new ways to shore up your initial interpretation. And the first-personal idiom of autobiography won’t help. There is something about the sight of someone trying to personally defend herself from critics that drives those critics wild with renewed savagery. Take it from me.

In this context, public figures already polarising enough to have developed a burning sense of injustice about misrepresentation of themselves in the past are unlikely to be able to change anyone’s mind about them in the future, no matter what new material they put out there. The fans, if any, will remain fans, the detractors will remain detractors, and those on the fence won’t know who to believe either way.

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At most, in writing your “story” you will just provide a whole lot of new material for your enemies to plunder for ammunition. Moehringer himself gives a good example of this, recounting how, stung by accusations of inaccuracy in the book (about a TK Maxx sale, of all things), he put out a series of veiled but meaningful tweets about the partial way memory sometimes works. “My tweets were seized upon, deliberately misinterpreted by trolls, and turned into headlines by real news outlets. Harry’s ghostwriter admits the book is all lies.”

It would be a mistake to think that this only could happen to veiled subtweets — that, if Moehringer had said more, the ambiguity would have somehow dissipated. Misinterpretation can happen to any sentence of yours; any paragraph; any chapter; any book. There is nothing you could ever say in print, or indeed out loud, that couldn’t be misrepresented by interested others as evil, stupid, or risible in a way that will seem believable to many. The trick is to know this, and not to go mad in the knowledge.

Moehringer tells us that as “Borges dreamed of endless libraries, Harry dreams of endless retractions”. It is not in the publishing industry’s interests to tell him, and any others in a similar situation, to stop dreaming. Given he signed a four-book deal, I predict there will be at least one more memoir from Harry in our lifetimes, attempting to set the record straight yet again post-Spare and the latest round of interpretative indignities. And perhaps there will be others too after that. It’s a good time to be a ghostwriter to the famous and misunderstood.

I was devastated on hearing this news. Not because I doubted the Prince’s right to pass judgement, however harsh, on one of his subjects. On the contrary, I would gladly have submitted to a torrent of vile abuse from the royal tongue, feeling it to be no more than his prerogative. If he had officially announced that I was a despicable worm, and was to be treated as such throughout the kingdom, my loyalty would have remained unshaken.

Even so, I couldn’t help being shocked. It was like discovering that God couldn’t stand the sight of me, or that the Pope threw up whenever my name was mentioned. Hearing Charles’s words made me feel like a shadier version of A.A. Milne’s Christopher Robin. “Do you think the King knows all about me?” he asks his nursemaid plaintively, to which she replies with the consoling lie: “Sure to, dear, but it’s time for tea.” It was clear that the Prince knew all about me as well, but more in the way that MI5 or HMRC might. This didn’t bring me the sense of cosmic security one imagines young Christopher felt. It was as though his nursemaid had replied: “She sure does, honey, and she thinks you’re a right prat.”

I assumed that it was my political views, rather than the cut of my jacket or my reluctance to ride to hounds, that Charles found distasteful, and it was this which disturbed me most. I had imagined that royal persons like himself were set above the political realm, impeccably even-handed in their treatment of Tories and Trotskyists. It’s true that he had sent his sons to Eton, but I’d assumed that this was because they might be knocked around a bit at the local comprehensive.

Was it possible that I had spent my life so far sunk in delusion? Fragments of memory floated up, stray anomalies to which I’d shut my eyes: the Queen Mother’s pathological hatred of Germans, Princess Margaret’s comparison of the Irish to pigs, the Duke of Edinburgh’s genial racist gaffes, the vast private wealth of the lot of them. Might there be a pattern here? Even back then, Prince Andrew no longer seemed to radiate the aura of mystery and enigma I had felt about him before. However hard I resisted, it was becoming impossible to avoid the conclusion that the royal family are not politically neutral.

Christopher Robin’s words reveal a certain insight. The idea of sovereignty involves the fantasy of being known by an omniscient power, one which despite searching you to your depths continues to love you unconditionally. The usual word for this is God, but a more familiar term is parent, and the monarch is the ultimate mummy or daddy of us all.

The fiction is that the King knows all his subjects from the inside, but this doesn’t mean that his knowledge of them is stretched so thin that he can’t know any of them in particular. Like Bill Clinton, the sovereign can talk to everyone in a crowded room as though they’re the only person present. It’s natural, however, to think that the King might not have such intimate knowledge, which is why there’s a certain anxiety in Christopher’s question to Alice the nursemaid. If God or the King is transcendent enough to know and love everybody, doesn’t this involve a detachment which means they can’t love or know anybody? How can you be both intimate and all-seeing?

Trying to solve this contradiction is the point of those folktales in which the king moves among his people incognito, observing them at close quarters but in disguise, and thus with no threat to his majesty. He becomes a fifth columnist in his own kingdom. What if the sovereign is so distant that the people feel bereft, abandoned, as the British seem to have felt when the Queen refused to mourn Princess Diana? The Sun’s headline at the time, “Where Is Our Queen?”, can be translated into one fearful infantile howl: “Mummy!”

There’s a problem, however, about parental love. Parents are like political authorities because they are supposed to care for all of their offspring/citizens alike, and in the case of parents to do so unconditionally. You can see this in action whenever someone is accused of a serious crime. All his relatives will flock spontaneously to his support, testifying that no more loving son or big-hearted brother ever trod the ground. “He can’t have done it!” they insist to the press. “I mean, I know him. I’ve known him ever since he was born!” The fact that the Boston Strangler was also known to others is strangely overlooked. I myself am a father, but if one of my children were accused of murder, I wouldn’t automatically assume that they were innocent. All murderers have fathers. Everyone is capable of losing their cool and doing someone in. There’s no inconsistency between being a loving son and wielding a machete.

The idea of sovereignty, then, is both consoling and unsettling. To be accepted by an authority inconceivably greater than yourself is for your identity to be grounded and confirmed. The sovereign gazes benignly at you, and you gaze gratefully back. You have been plucked out of the common herd and invested with special status. You are, in a word, UnHerd. The relationship is, of course, unequal: God or the monarch can know you, but you can’t know them in return, because they are transcendent beings shrouded in mystery. You can only know that you are known. Yet you are also aware that this special relationship is also true of everyone else, in which case it isn’t true of you. If everyone is special, nobody is. And this is one reason for the anxiety which authority engenders.

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Ireland is a Freudian dream

By Terry Eagleton

Real democracies, which is to say republican ones, don’t work like this. They are the only political form which doesn’t need to invoke a legitimating power external to the people themselves. Instead, the people legitimate themselves, in their everyday speech, action and law-making. This lends them an unusual authority, but it breeds uncertainty as well. It means that political society is founded only in itself, with no pre-written script or divine agenda, and this feels close to a sense of groundlessness. Democracies have to make things up as they go along, more like experimental theatre than Shakespearian drama. “The people” sounds like a firm enough foundation, but in reality the people are divided, diverse and keep changing. This is why democracy is the kind of politics suitable to modernity — to a sense of societies as historical rather than eternal, and men and women as self-fashioning rather than determined by tradition.

Being known, meanwhile, isn’t always pleasant, as “that dreadful Terry Eagleton” would suggest. If there’s the benevolent King who is acquainted with what Christopher Robin has for breakfast, there’s also Big Brother. Sovereignty isn’t far from surveillance. “Thou God seest me” can mean “Stop that sinfulness because He’s watching!” as well as “Isn’t it nice to know that God watches over me?”.

The 19th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed a prison with a central watchtower and a circle of surrounding cells. The warders didn’t have the divine ability to supervise all of the prisoners all of the time, but they could take a look at any of them whenever they wanted to; and since the inmates didn’t know when they were being scrutinised, this was equivalent to being surveyed all the time. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault uses this as an image of the surveillance state long before we actually were watched all the time. It’s no longer true, to adapt Abraham Lincoln’s celebrated saying, that you can watch some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but you can’t watch all of the people all of the time.

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Harry and Meghan's Montecito prison

By Terry Eagleton

Democracies work as long as we all agree they should do so. Ironically, however, the same is true of the monarchy. It survives only as long as we maintain the collective fiction that, for example, a young fogey turned old fogey notorious for his fussiness, petulance and self-indulgence, with no claim on our allegiance other than a genetic one, should be revered in quasi-religious fashion. In fact, we know well enough that being king is a job that almost anybody could do, as long as you can walk, smile, shake hands, cultivate a concerned look and do what your courtiers tell you. Manchester United could take it on in turn, with each player doing the job for a year or so.

If Christopher Robin displays a degree of wisdom, so does the child who proclaimed that the emperor had no clothes. Or rather the Emperor is nothing but clothes — only his outward trappings and ceremonial garb. Coronations are solemn charades in which we agree to suspend our disbelief in myth and divine order in order to assuage our fear that, as democrats, we may be standing on nothing more solid than ourselves. As with the currency, it’s our faith in something intrinsically valueless that makes it work. We need an Other, and the Windsors are on hand to provide it. In the days when the monarch had real authority, he or she would dress up in finery partly to dazzle their subjects, but also, as Edmund Burke argues, to cloak and soften the brutality of their power. Kings were men in drag, draping the ugly phallus of their dominion beneath alluring feminine garments.

In the end, however, it doesn’t work all that well. Royalty is meant to represent an oasis of stability and continuity in the increasingly fluid, unstable, unpredictable environment we know as market society. What’s happened instead is that the moral behaviour of that world has now invaded the inner sanctum of the royal family itself, with its litany of break-ups, cock-ups, publicity wars and dysfunctional relationships. It’s worth keeping this in mind as our democracy bows to an unelected head of state.

It still feels strange to say the King, impossible to utter it without savouring the phrase as if in quotation marks: no other British title quite embodies the same tension between the lost magic of the realm and the banalities of modern public life. Replacing the careworn grandmother embodying the post-war diminution of the British state, our new king, part Athonite mystic, part pampered dandy, remains a mystery.

Just like the juxtaposition of Extinction Rebellion’s pagan eco-mysticism with the box-ticking, bell-ringing passive-aggressiveness of Sunak’s cycle cavalry, the King represents two divergent paths for Britain’s future. To supporters like myself, inclined to hail him — partly seriously and partly ironically — as a post-liberal figurehead, a champion of small family farms and a lost way of life, the King may still signal a renaissance of sorts. To his detractors, he represents all that is wrong with the 21st-century establishment. Some view him as the herald of top-down bureaucratic eco-austerity for the masses while the elites preserve their wealth and contentment; others see his recent capitulation to the race grifters and betrayal of a loyal family servant as evidence of all that is most destabilising and harmful about modern British life. There are two kings within Charles waiting to be crowned, just as there are two rival Britains struggling to be born.

The Queen’s funeral, with its sombre pomp and reassertion of the power and majesty of the state, could be interpreted as a rejection of modern Britain as much as the great festive events of her later life proclaimed a celebration of who we are now. What rich stores of symbolic meaning, then, await us at the coronation?

The sheer strangeness of this event, its apartness from modern Britain, is the essence of its meaning. When our king is anointed as God’s chosen in the great stone sepulchre of the British people, we will witness something strange and literally magical. So divorced from modernity as to be almost incomprehensible, we will witness, like puzzled anthropologists, the ancient rituals of our own lost British tribe. The choice of music, of court dress and of religious benedictions that will attend this descendant of both Vlad Dracul and Mohammed, in this most Catholic ceremony of a Protestant country, are rich fodder for grandstanding and debate. All politics, all power, is at heart symbolic, resting on ancient foundations like a modern church on ancient monoliths: only once or twice in our lifetimes will the state draw back its robes and reveal her hidden mysteries to us.

How is Charles to rule and bring this strange duality, the ancient and the modern, into public life? For decades, he was mocked as an eccentric, a weirdo who talked to his plants and praised the rustic hardships of traditional peasant life from within his palace walls. This urge to call him weird as an insult, springs from the same source as the eye-rolling ironic epithet “normal country” levelled at Britain. Instead, it is a compliment. Britain is not a normal country, whatever that would be, and thank God.

From the beginning of recorded history, Britain has always been viewed as a place strange and apart from the rest of Europe and the world, an insular realm of eccentric people and half-understood customs. In the awkward adolescence of his reign, between the inheritance of his role and his donning of the crown, Charles has perhaps hidden his own essential weirdness, in an attempt to fit how he felt modern Britain wants him to be. It is only now, as he prepares to assume the role, that Charles has begun to let his weirdness show.

In its true meaning, wyrd is “fate”, the supernatural destiny imposed on all men, just as Charles’s destiny, long-delayed, has finally settled upon him. We must encourage, through Charles, the wyrd’s manifestations in public life.

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In defence of Little England

By Tom McTague

Consider Charles’s much-analysed choice of the Green Man as his symbol on the Coronation invitations. What does it tell us about our new king? What makes it so fascinating is not that it is a submerged pagan symbol buried beneath Christian decoration — a popular claim modern folklorists reject — but rather the very knowing ambiguity of the Green Man, a Christian symbol of rebirth that gains its power from the winked suggestion of older, deeper roots. It is a symbol so intentionally rich in opposing meanings, so downright weird, that no settled meaning can ever be found: it was created to be puzzled over, argued about, and in doing so to uncover hidden truths. It is time for the Green Man to run riot in SW1, for Charles to enrich British public life with his own fertile ambiguities.

How, for example, would our Green Man king bridge the gap between Palace Green’s eco-protesters, fearful of what they believe to be an apocalyptic near-future, and the opposing political tendency, fearful of what they believe to be a dawning age of eco-austerity? In an age where our dependence on Russian energy and neglect of nuclear power has driven ordinary families into financial difficulty, the argument that Britain’s antiquated housing stock requires better insulation has been widely adopted by urban yimby commentators, evidence of one path through a divided political sphere.

King Charles, tireless promoter of traditional craftsmanship, could make the still-little-known case to the public that it is precisely because Britain’s housing stock dates from before the 20th century, and was built with traditional breathable materials such as lime, that insulation with modern impermeable materials, as Insulate Britain promote, would worsen the problem. This simple truth, well-known to heritage professionals, has been entirely neglected. And who could have a better pulpit to make the case for a better way forward? For if Britain’s largely Victorian houses could be insulated using traditional materials by a scaled-up, newly-trained workforce of high-skilled, high-wage craftsmen, a major political and economic problem could be resolved according to the methods Charles has spent a lifetime promoting.

Similarly, the recent collapse of much of Britain’s intensive agriculture model has heightened the growing clash between those who believe it is the way to food security, and those who believe it is despoiling Britain’s fields, forests and waterways; nor does it keep the nation fed and healthy, nor our farmers in business. As a longstanding advocate for the small family farm, King Charles can bridge this gap: instead of lecturing the nation on how to do better, he could show how the best nature-friendly farming systems work by converting Buckingham Palace’s 40 acres of private gardens into a working small farm. Imagine a rural oasis of hay meadows and rippling fields of grain in the centre of the capital, a haven of wildlife watched over by our benign farmer king. Through taking action, the king can become a living bridge between the capital and the countryside, the old ways and the new.

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While ideas like these may seem trifling and eccentrically small-scale to both the eco-modernists, enraptured by grand geoengineering projects, and to large-scale rewilders alike, it is their pure simplicity that grants them power. While fate has planted him at the nation’s apex, the abiding characteristic of our new king is his genuine love and affection for the humble and vernacular, even if only expressed in an occasional holiday from the super-rich luxuries of his permanent existence. It is a rare head of state who mends hedges and sleeps in peasants’ cottages and monasteries for relaxation (even if his personal lodgings are more those of abbots’ quarters than monks’ cells); he can now share the same powers of regeneration these simple pleasures must bring to him with the nation as a whole.

It is only through converting the advocacy of the Prince of Wales into the necessary labour of showing and doing that our Green Man King can make himself and the monarchy a central, guiding presence in British public life. To heal the new divisions of the coming age, and make the coronation a genuine period of national rebirth, there are worse options than embracing the sheer Weirdness of Charles III.

In the Caribbean, her government had only just ousted the elected prime minister of British Guiana, sparking angry accusations of imperial control. In Australia, a deadly polio outbreak posed a direct risk to her health. In Ceylon, Communist unrest had reached such a level the country’s premier felt he needed to warn the Queen that the visit might need to be cancelled. And in Uganda, Britain’s decision to depose and exile the Kabaka of Buganda, the traditional ruler of the country’s largest kingdom, was still causing ructions. Even in Gibraltar, the final stop of Her Majesty’s grand tour, there were demands from General Franco that the visit be abandoned.

And yet, the entire tour went ahead, millions turned out to catch a glimpse of their new sovereign, and a delighted government back in London felt a sudden rush of confidence about our international standing following the loss of India only a few years earlier.

Last week, the Gallic half of King Charles’s first foreign expedition as monarch had to be cancelled because of the rioting in Paris. And so all he will have to show for his first overseas excursion as King will be a short tour of Germany.

To those of a certain temperament, the contrast between mother and son is more than a little sobering. But rather than lamenting the timidity of modern life or the decline of our national horizons, I say we should cheer them. Charles’s first trip as King might reflect the decline of our global stature, but there is nothing wrong with this decline. It could be a very good thing.

Once you take off the rose-tinted spectacles, the 1953 tour was not quite what it seemed. The objective of the great global jamboree was to “reaffirm the durability of the British Empire”, as Philip Murphy wrote in Monarchy and the End of Empire. The problem was not that it failed in this regard — though of course it did — but that the tour was so successful in every other regard that it blinded the country’s governing elite to the reality of the post-war world.

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Following the Queen’s visit to New Zealand, the High Commissioner, Sir Geoffrey Scoones, wrote that the Queen’s mere physical presence — in her full “regal splendour” — engrained the very idea of the Commonwealth in the minds of those outside Britain. In this Commonwealth, Sir Geoffrey wrote, Britain was just one of several kingdoms bound together in their allegiance to the Crown. Britain was no longer the ruler of an empire — just another country in one great family of nations. The diplomatic idea was that while the empire was no more, the Commonwealth could still protect Britain’s global influence.

The problem was that this wasn’t true. Sir Geoffrey’s idea was that Elizabeth was just as much the Queen of Australia as she was the Queen of England (or, more accurately, the UK). But this never really stood up to scrutiny. There was even an idea at this time that she might turn her court into a kind of travelling circus, moving from realm to realm, London to Ottawa, Canberra to Auckland, to show that she was Queen of all, favourite of none. This idea, of course, bumped up against reality. Elizabeth was primarily Queen of the home country, living in England and leaving the administration of her other realms to her representatives. Underneath the pomp of Britain’s changing imperial order lay the same old country underneath. Britain had entered a post-imperial world — it just did not entirely accept that yet.

Similar delusions were on display during the Queen’s trip to Australia. Like his counterpart in New Zealand, the high commissioner in Canberra, Sir Stephen Holmes, claimed Elizabeth’s presence had ensured the monarchy would remain a central part of Australia’s emerging national identity. Until this point, remember, you could be Australian and British, just as you could be English and British. Maintaining the royal link to the home country was seen as fundamentally important because Britain’s relationship with Australia was key to protecting the country’s global influence.

Once again, though, these ideas owed more to sentiment than cold-headed reality. Much as Australia’s prime minister at the time, Robert Menzies, considered himself “British to his bootstraps”, Australia was on its way to a separate identity with separate interests, not as one of the many “British peoples” around the world, as the Duke of Edinburgh put it, but as Australians, separate from Britain and increasingly dependent on the United States for its security. No matter how many royal tours of Australia the government paid for, this basic reality was not going to change.

Today, Charles more closely resembles the other Kings and Queens of Europe than his mother, just as Britain more closely resembles the other countries of Europe than a mini America. That Charles was only due to visit France and Germany on his first trip — and that even half of this has been cancelled — only reveals the extent to which we have become normal again.

Later this week, Charles will become the first foreign head of state since the Second World War to be welcomed with full military honours at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. He will also become the first British monarch to address the Bundestag. Neither of these things should be dismissed. In today’s world, such things are far more important than some globetrotting tour that would do little to enhance our core national interest.

The point is this: being normal is good. The problem for Britain is not that we are normal, but that we have fallen behind normal in too many parts of our national life — from general levels of wealth to general levels of public service. Striving to be normal could be a liberating national mission, freeing us from the pressure to be anything more. To me, there is actually something quite uplifting about Charles attempting to make the most understated and mundane of foreign visits, quietly going about his business rather than aiming for some grand statement of global relevance or, worse, entering into some competition with his son for American approval. Touring the port of Hamburg, pointing at new green technology is just the kind of foreign visit Charles is good at.

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Earlier this month, Charles’s Dutch counterpart, the King of the Netherlands, toured Slovakia at the head of a business delegation promoting his country’s economy. “The business delegation consists mostly of companies from the waste processing, recycling, soil remediation and circular construction sectors,” read an official press statement. This is the kind of kingship Britain now needs: waste processing promotion. Forget Walter Bagehot’s idea of theatrical “dignified” monarchy. We have no shortage of pomp and ceremony to keep us going each year. And it really doesn’t matter if all this excitement and reverence becomes a purely domestic affair. The Netherlands no longer has much of an international role, but it is extremely rich. I’d take that right now.

We seem to have forgotten that, once upon a time, being a Little Englander was a good thing, a term of abuse for progressives who did not particularly care for the British Empire and wanted more focus on the welfare of those in the home country. The opposite of a Little Englander was an imperialist. Today, that meaning has been lost. Being a Little Englander is now a derogatory term for provincial yokels, many of whom, ironically, are also accused of being in thrall to some kind of imperial nostalgia. How things change.

I say let’s bring back the original idea of Little Englandism. Let’s actively pursue smallness. Let’s concentrate on the condition of England, which, let’s face it, is not great. If it helps us to send Charles on waste management promotional tours of Slovakia, rather than journeys of fancy, so be it. Let’s make England little again.

Clarkson’s words are performative because they don’t just describe a violent assault; they are one. The ancient Greeks saw a closer relation than we do between verbal and physical aggression: the word “sarcasm” derives from “sarkazein”, a word of theirs meaning to tear the flesh. Verbal onslaughts can be a lot more wounding than physical punch-ups. To adapt the old adage, sticks and stones may break my bones but names will really hurt me.

Although her husband has just published a new memoir, Meghan has always been the focus of the latest moral panic to overtake the British middle classes. These spasms of the national psyche break out from time to time, perhaps according to some secret historical law. The last couple of decades of the 19th century were rife with a loathing of so-called decadence: anarchists, opium dens, sexy French novels, flamboyant aesthetes, most of which could be summarised in two sinister words: Oscar Wilde. (Wilde was also an Irish immigrant, which didn’t help.)

Much of this culture was recycled in the Sixties, though the hair got longer, women could (just about) rebel along with men, and the dope changed from opium to marijuana. Among the targets of the nation’s collective moral wrath were The Rolling Stones, a bunch of innocuous youths who triggered a frenzy of puritan outrage laced with sexual envy. Even The Beatles, goodies to the Stones’s baddies, offended some Americans with their hairstyles. (“What do you call that hairstyle?” a US reporter asked Ringo disdainfully. “Arthur,” he replied.) With the campaigning of Mary Whitehouse, the fear and disgust assumed an organised form, hooking up with the churches and the odd dotty aristocrat. Nowadays, it comes from those who find an orgasmic fulfilment in the roar of a Porsche’s engine.

The characters may differ, but it’s always the same storyline. Traditional values are being corroded by some insidious force. The nation’s fibre is being fatally weakened by (and here you can choose) sex, immigrants, liberal-mindedness, sentimentalism, self-indulgence or excessive sensitivity. Meghan is just a contemporary name for these various forms of pollution. She may be an immigrant from America rather than Albania, arriving in a first-class aircraft cabin rather than a dingy, but the desire to defile her flesh is partly to do with the alien culture she represents, which is not so much the States as California. And California, like Rome, is more of an idea rather than a place.

In the meeting of Harry and Meghan, we could actually see the polluting process in action. In the eyes of traditionalists, an upright young Marine with an  impressively high kill-rate, a credit to the British values of loyalty, duty and self-discipline, had been publicly hi-jacked by an ethnically hybrid, touchy-feely starlet who probably consults her astrological chart to decide which colour of tights to wear. It’s hard luck for Clarkson and his kind that this soap-opera star, far from being just one pesky woman, represents a whole shift in social sensibility. It’s increasingly the sensibility of the young, which means that it’s here to stay for quite a while.

With the entry of this American vampire in London into the highest family in the land, woke culture finally penetrated the inmost sanctum of the Establishment and exposed its uglier features. A royal family which ritually praises diversity in the Commonwealth couldn’t handle it on its own doorstep. The battle is now on between American self-expression and British restraint, feeling and convention, wokery and Windsor. In fact, if one wants to be fanciful about it, the American Revolution is being fought out in miniature for a second time. Once again, an America which felt neglected and mistreated by a stiff-necked British Establishment has spurned the Crown and been driven into revolt.

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“Woke”, in fact, is a meaningless term — a floating signifier you can stuff with whatever you want. As Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian: “a hate figure has been created, a shibboleth, a means by which bigots can identify one another and give voice to their prejudice, without fear of censure.” But though woke may be a senseless term, it’s a highly convenient one. Even puce-faced old buffers in Pall Mall clubs are now aware that it isn’t permissible to be openly racist or sexist, so “woke” acts as a useful displacement. You can’t be anti-women, but you can be anti-woke, which means speaking up for good old-fashioned public-school values. Shut up whining, take your punishment like a man, stop picking over your fine feelings and if your head is reeling with confusion stick it under the shower. It’s a philosophy which can be encapsulated in four words — the Duke of Edinburgh — and Meghan is its nemesis. That the Duke’s exit from the royal stage and her entry on to it should have roughly coincided is neatly symbolic.

Meghan has done for her partner what, shamefully, not a single member of his grotesquely dysfunctional family seems to have done: helped him to come to terms with his grief over his mother’s death. That this involved a dash of spookery and psychobabble is neither here nor there. The task clearly couldn’t be left to men whose idea of how to treat newly bereaved children is to wake them up with the news in the middle of the night and then force them to go to church the next morning. More generally, Meghan showed Harry that he was living in an invisible cage, and smuggled in the crowbars by which he could be sprung. He could now see his surroundings through the distancing eyes of a stranger. His partner, to be fanciful once more, is a Henry James-type American heroine who sniffs a whiff of violence and corruption beneath the elegance of old Europe.

The couple escaped, however, to a place which has more in common with their former prison than they might like to think. Both Buckingham Palace and the Californian elite revolve on myths, images and fantasises. Both are places of staggering wealth and privilege which in the form of Hollywood present a facade of harmony and happiness behind which lurk lethal feuds and rivalries. The British monarchy is the longest-running Reality TV show in the world, an upper-class version of Eastenders. The Sussexes have fled from one arena of unreality to another. Both locations are philistine and semi-literate. The difference is that whereas the new world flaunts both its wealth and its feelings, the royal family coyly conceals both. The former is emotionally incontinent, while the latter is emotionally anaesthetised. The royals are public figures with all the reserve of private ones, while Harry and Meghan now belong to a sphere in which the concept of privacy has no place. The social order the prince has left behind believes in sacrificing the self — in duty, honour and obedience — while the world he has embraced is full of extravagant egoism. Neither of them is much engaged with what one might loosely call reality.

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There are, then, two stories to be told. The first is that of an enlightened, democratically-minded young woman who causes the scales to fall from the deluded eyes of a moderately Tory ex-soldier. In a rare moment of illumination, he realises that he has spent his life incarcerated in a cockpit of snobbery, racism, deceit and emotional violence, all of it served up in the best possible taste, and breaks with a lifetime’s social conditioning to make a courageous bid for freedom. In the second story, an autocratic young prima donna sinks her claws into a former upper-class yobbo-turned-Marine, and persuades him to desert his duties and family bonds for a shallow, enormously lucrative career as a star of the very media he has previously denounced. Converting themselves overnight from glamorous but dignified figures into commodities on sale in the marketplace, Harry and Meghan vilify those closest to them and whine all the way to the bank about the injustices they have endured at the hands of the Establishment.

There is something to be said for both versions. They don’t, however, weigh equally in the scales, not least if one recalls the vicious abuse Meghan has suffered and Harry’s awakening to the shackles in which he had been living unawares. The couple were surely right to make their escape. Nor is there a contradiction between Harry slagging off his family one minute and asking for reconciliation the next. Telling the truth makes reconciliation hard, maybe impossible; but without the truth it will simply be a sham.

A “lolcow”, for those who don’t know, is a derogatory, very online term for someone who gains notoriety via attention-seeking behaviour, combined with imperviousness to criticism and lack of self-awareness. And 28 years ago, in 1995, in an emerging world of 24-hour news cycles and ever-hungrier tabloids, Harry’s mother became the first true lolcow. She also set the bar for media oversharing, in the notorious Martin Bashir interview that tipped her from remote, paparazzi-hounded royal to press-courting celebrity megastar. Here, Diana coyly dropped bombshell after bombshell of juicy gossip for the media, interspersed with soft-voiced woe about how awful it was that the media wanted to know everything about her.

In Spare, Harry has followed decisively in her footsteps, producing more than 400 pages of such painfully needy oversharing that every page of airport-novel prose cries out for a hug. And it does so while conveying a queasy sense of squinting through the curtains at some sordid domestic scene. Reading it left me bemused at how the people around this clearly unhappy man could have encouraged him – or at least not stopped him – over-sharing to quite such a degree.

But why do it? Why subject yourself to the hostility and humiliation that anyone could predict would follow these revelations? To a significant extent, the opportunity to lolcow himself in this way is not of Harry’s choosing. Rather, the larger context is the fact that this outdoorsy, obviously basically well-meaning-but-emotionally-mixed-up midwit was not born a prince in (as a wag observed on Twitter) an age where he could perish heroically in some ill-advised charge against Prussian cavalry. Rather, he had a prominent role thrust upon him, unasked, from birth, in an age that has made commodifying ourselves a centrepiece of culture and commerce alike.

I expected to feel exasperation and perhaps distaste reading what has by now been exhaustively trailed in every newspaper as a bombshell tell-all memoir of the notoriously private Royal Family. But I was surprised to find myself feeling deeply sorry for the Duke of Sussex. And if Spare has this unexpected effect, it’s less because it reveals him – as he presents himself – to be the innocent victim of persecutory tabloids and conniving courtiers. Rather, it’s in demonstrating just how ill-equipped he is, by temperament, to navigate the impossible choices with which fate has afflicted him.

In the decades since Diana’s death, ever greater swathes of the human soul have been redirected from human relationships to commercial exploitation. Celebrity culture is perhaps the most well-established and pervasive of such dynamics. It commodifies two other core features of our emotional landscapes, redirecting them from intimacy to profit: the social roles of gossip, and of self-disclosure. As our daily lives grow ever more atomised, we depend more and more on synthetic gossip about celebrities we don’t really know to fill the gaps in our personal “village” and provide fodder for its water-cooler conversations.

If gossip helps to oil the wheels of conversation, so too does self-disclosure. When we share something personal in a conversation, it invites an answering disclosure from the other. Over time, such disclosures create trust and intimacy. And the power of modern celebrity status comes from just such self-disclosures, but delivered asymmetrically: instead of forming part of an interpersonal exchange, the “celebrity” feeds gobbets of gossip to the publicity machine, in exchange for validation, money, or other opportunities.

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Even within my modest platform, I’m conscious of this dynamic. Nothing elicits positive feedback in a column like a juicy personal anecdote. And there is always the temptation to go ever further, spilling more and more of yourself out for consumption by strangers until the result — in some quarters — becomes a kind of pornography of the self.

I can only guess at what relentless press scrutiny — which Harry calls the “fishbowl” — would feel like for someone accustomed to it at such immense scale, since childhood. Or, indeed, how such an individual might feel about the fact that its hunger was partly responsible for his own mother’s death. But if Spare depicts being endlessly “papped” as a living nightmare, it’s also in the nature of Faustian bargains, as Darran Anderson noted yesterday, to offer power as well as a horrible price. It is, after all, a function of Harry’s public profile that anyone cares about his childhood or inner life at all. And if Harry laments the way media scrutiny ruins relationship after relationship for him, he doesn’t seem able to imagine simply opting out altogether. It’s not beyond the wit of man to imagine disappearing altogether; wildly famous celebrities sometimes succeed in doing so. Instead, though, Spare recounts him rejecting an offered position as Governor-General of Bermuda, which he interprets as a plot by Camilla to get him out of the way. Well, yes, but doesn’t he want to be out of the way?

But it really doesn’t seem to just be Harry who wants to be both private, and yet also public. As Spare convincingly (if perhaps unintentionally) reveals, the entire Crown is in hock to the same bargain. At one point Harry recounts being berated by his father for taking legal action against the press, because (as Harry reports a courtier putting it) “one has to have a relationship with the press”. If Spare is to be believed, Charles tells him repeatedly just to ignore the tabloids — while playing the press like a fiddle, sometimes at the expense of his own sons, via carefully-managed leaks.

Harry’s explanation of his father’s behaviour in turn sheds light on his own tragic path to lolcow-dom. After a youth “deprived of love”, Harry speculates, Charles is “dangerously, compulsively drawn” to the “elixir” offered by the media. If Spare is at all accurate, this could apply just as well to Harry. But perhaps what damns Harry, unlike his father, to a tragic fate as lolcow is simply that he’s not very good at managing the balance between disclosure and self-protection, probably because he’s simply not cold-blooded enough. A lolcow is, in essence, someone who isn’t very good at playing the game of calculated self-disclosure; that’s Harry, to a T.

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He clearly understands how avid the machine is for anything relatable. In one genuinely poignant passage, he recounts reaching for his father’s hand at the Balmoral gates, after Diana’s death, and how that gesture set off a barrage of clicking cameras: the media machine capturing an intimate moment, so it could be sold to the public. “I’d given them exactly what they wanted,” he says. “Emotion. Drama. Pain.”

But giving the public its fix of emotion, drama and pain shades over into lolcow behaviour at the point where sharing becomes a toxic cycle. In Harry’s description, at the gates of Balmoral, the cameras were weapons: “They fired and fired and fired.” And yet some go back for more nonetheless. For intimate self-disclosure to strangers rarely produces just empathy. While you may get a measure of this (and Harry has plenty of supporters) you’ll also get objectification, mockery, and further demands for personal details. Then, still needy, and still craving love and validation, those with lolcow tendencies will respond by further disclosure, thus provoking ever more objectification and so on.

My sense of the Duke of Sussex is that, unlike more cold-blooded and self-disciplined operators, he has spent his life since that moment in Balmoral reaching out again and again for a metaphorical hand-hold, only to receive in return another barrage of photography. So he’s given in, and attempted what he calls “honesty” — which is to say, flinging every personal detail into the maw of the machine at once, presumably in the hope that this will finally make the great mass of strangers like him.

Without ever leaving the same studiedly bland, tabloid-register prose, the book lurches between accounts of travel and action, grotesquely over-personal revelations, including about family members who doubtless never consented to be thus exposed, and strangely platitudinous passages of introspection. The cumulative impression is of someone who put his own personality into storage, and bought a replacement one in IKEA.

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What beggars belief is the sheer level of neediness implied by such a wince-inducing level of self-exposure. But it’s hardly difficult to grasp why he should be so needy: his mother’s death haunts almost every page of Spare. He describes Diana as “light”, and reminisces about “Her devastating smile, her vulnerable eyes, her childlike love of movies and music and clothes and sweets – and us. Oh, how she loved us.”

But one twist in this heartbreak is never acknowledged. For if Harry describes the boys at his prep school as “abandoned children”, and we may infer that he considers himself abandoned, by her death, he doesn’t acknowledge that — regardless of how much she loved him — in truth his mother abandoned him before she died. “My mother legendarily said there were three people in her marriage,” he writes. “But her maths was off. She left Willy and me out of the equation.” And indeed she did, divorcing Charles and leaving her two sons behind with him, while she jetted off to beach resorts.

Unable to tip his mother off her pedestal, though, Harry recounts a youth spent seeking maternal warmth wherever it might be scrounged. Spare is full of what a therapist later tells him are “surrogate mums”: school matrons, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, and Teej, an older friend. Meanwhile the sainted Diana can do no wrong.

Perhaps, then, we shouldn’t berate him for vulnerabilities and cognitive dissonances he has, to such a great extent, inherited from her. For Spare also reveals just how far Harry is his mother’s son. He has inherited her fear of the dark, he says, “along with her nose, her blue eyes, her love of people, her hatred of smugness and fakery and all things posh”. But he seems to have followed her footsteps in more ambivalent ways, too. Spare is already as much of a voyeuristic sensation as she was. And it’s not much of a stretch to imagine Diana rationalising her own prioritisation of personal feeling over tradition and obligation much as Harry does, as part of “living in truth”.

Harry talks about fearing “a repeat of history, another untimely death like the one that had rocked this family to its core 23 years earlier”. The clear implication is that he is afraid Meghan might die in a car crash just like his mother. But my sense is that if anyone is in danger, it is Harry. For if he has inherited Diana’s nose, we may infer from Spare that he has also inherited her cocktail of vulnerability, emotional reasoning, and (shall we say) below-average analytic capacity that, combined with unasked-for levels of public scrutiny, has sealed his fate as Prince Lolcow.

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Spare left me feeling genuine compassion for Harry, mingled with a queasy sense of shame for this tawdry era. Another time and culture might have afforded a man such as he an honourable life of leadership, even heroism. Instead, the 21st century has turned him into a broken reciter of Hallmark-tier therapy platitudes, hell-bent on strip-mining what’s left of public affection for him in fruitless pursuit of the empathy he clearly craves.

Arise, then, Prince Lolcow. For your own sake, please buy a few thousand acres somewhere remote, and devote yourself to something healthy and practical such as cattle farming. If you don’t, the media machine whose empathy you so self-destructively crave will continue farming you. And eventually it will grow tired of you, and torture you to death.

After a week of controversial and, at times, cringeworthy leaks from his book, Spare, Prince Harry’s interview with ITV came as an anti-climax. His host, Tom Bradby, gamely tried to stir up trouble while seeming to step back from it, suggesting to the Prince, about his relationship with the Royal Family, “you haven’t so much burnt your bridges as taken a flame thrower to them”. Harry’s response was arguably the closest he came in the interview to the disarming candour of his book, claiming “They’ve shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile. And I’m not sure how honesty is burning bridges. You know, silence only allows the abuser to abuse.” Yet throughout the interview, there is a sense of damage limitation, if not outright back-pedalling, that chimes with the generally scathing response his book has received critically.

As confessionals go, it’s a particularly evasive one. In contrast to the salacious, or salaciously reported, leaks from his book, of frostbitten appendages and so forth, there are few revelations here. There are references to leaked conversations with Camilla, troubling and melancholic remembrances of his mother’s death and the aftermath, acknowledgements that the Cambridges and Sussexes never entirely got on from the beginning, his entirely brotherly relationship with his brother, and so on. Little is surprising and there is much that is conciliatory. In the interview, he concedes “there are two sides to every story” and gives a mature and tender assessment of how difficult Princess Diana’s death must have been for Prince Charles, reflecting as a father himself, “Only now… did I really think about how many hours he’d been awake. And the compassion that I have for him as a parent, having to sit with that for many, many hours, ringing up friends of his, trying to work out, ‘How the hell do I break this to my two sons?’”

Throughout there is the suggestion of vertigo in speaking publicly about the issues compared with how emboldened print can make one feel; his book, by contrast, does not lack boldness and feels, occasionally like it could have been ghostwritten by a republican. Many autobiographical writers are plagued with a feeling they have betrayed and even sabotaged relationships with loved ones, simply by writing about them — “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished” Czeslaw Milosz has been quoted as saying —and there’s a sense with Prince Harry of at least wanting to heal the divisions, while, tragically, perhaps deepening them.

The most telling line, which reaches towards the heart of the matter, comes back to the Faustian nature of fame and particularly the media’s gaze and how that can distort, “After many, many years of lies being told about me and my family, there comes a point where, going back to the relationship between, certain members of the family and the tabloid press, those certain members have decided to get in the bed with the devil.” This reiterated the accusation Harry made against Camilla in his 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper, where he claimed, she was “dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press. And there was open willingness on both sides to trade of information. And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her on the way to being queen consort, there was going to be people or bodies left in the street because of that.” Again and again, in his recollections in interviews and writing, Prince Harry comes back to the media as a baleful destructive force in his life.

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Why Prince Harry went to war

By Tanya Gold

It is evident that, seeking sanctuary from these pressures, Harry often found cold detachment or rejection from his family. There has been much made of Meghan Markle’s apparent reluctance to play the game expected of a royal, but the reticence has been there in her husband for much longer.

What is particularly illustrative and sympathetic about Prince Harry’s relationship with fame is that it was not chosen. In the traditional Faustian transaction, the would-be genius or celebrity sells their soul, knowing that the cost is damnation and believing that the gains will be worth it. With the royals, fame is hereditary, which is as much of a curse as a blessing. The transaction is one-sided. No deal is made and yet the individual assumes precisely the same debt. In a world, even a country, where children are born into horrendous poverty and deprivation, it’s difficult to have sympathy for someone born into immense privilege. Yet it is warranted, given that child we watched walking along forlorn at his mother’s funeral did not choose any of this.

The problem is that Prince Harry is now a man and no longer a lost boy. Though he has chosen an arguably noble route of walking away from an environment that had shunned him, and he has the right to speak his mind and tell his own story, he has not walked away from fame. Sympathy, like any resource, is finite. It is entirely reasonable to wish to escape the stilted environment expected of the royals, the stiff upper lipped omerta that hides a multitude of pain and sins, the expectations to be a well-turned-out blind eye-turning mannequin (some years ago, I found myself in the unlikely company of a drunken lord who informed me that the royals were pitied by the rest of the aristocracy).

It is even more understandable to wish to escape the glare of the lens that played a part in the death of a beloved parent. Having chosen Meghan and America, Prince Harry had the chance to transcend fame and to effectively defeat the presence that has seemingly haunted his life. He could go semi-privately into any number of ventures. Harry was not, after all, a signatory to the Faustian pact. One of the most tragic aspects to what has been unfolding is not just the painful reality of a family schism, but rather that at the brink of escape, Harry decided to return to the table to sign the contract.

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A cursory scan over Twitter will show that there are those who dislike the Sussexes for petty vindictive reasons, casually firing around racist and sexist tropes in the process. Yet there are far more who have sympathy and are interested because it is a human story that resonates, especially those who have been through grief, familial rifts, childhood rejection and so on. The royals are just like us, it suggests. Who knew? The point where sympathy dissipates is with this issue of fame, the courting of it rather than the walking away. This is where the public’s role in the Faustian bargain comes in. This is what differentiates celebrities from the rest of us, the point of departure, and the judgement can and may well be merciless. By aiming for the echo chamber of the terminally online and the patronage of the American establishment, the wider sympathy is lost. It is especially frustrating as the prince had a chance to get out.

Harry’s case is not helped by a mixed tone of grievance and sanctimony. One moment, he is referring to the killing of Afghan militants as a game of chess, the next he is engaging in flagellation about his previous lack of social consciousness. At its worst, it seems distasteful and condescending, the opposite of a spiritual confessional. It undoes the undoubtedly brave work of speaking about trauma, autonomy, or even his right to speak. As George Orwell put it, “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful”, but here even the disgrace feels performative. It feels grubby and out of touch, both too intimate and too remote. It feels, in other words, like fame.

Here lies the deeper issue. Whatever you think of Harry and Meghan or the Royal Family, you are expected to think something — whether acolyte or tormentor. The public are the essential piece of the Faustian contract, as much as the media. We are its creditors. When it is signed, what might begin as human sympathy becomes a detached form of judgement. The figures we gaze at become dehumanised, either as saints or demons. The weight of having to play these roles or simply being perceived as such is no small thing, though we can always say they are well renumerated for their troubles. It is worth considering what the gaze of the media does to such figures, and Prince Harry’s life is an ongoing example, but it is also worth considering what it is doing to those of us who watch.

“Now Abel kept flocks and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of soil as an offering to the Lord. And Abel also brought an offering – fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favour on Abel and his offering but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favour. So Cain was very angry and his face was downcast”.

As we know, Cain was so consumed with anger and jealousy that he attacked his brother in the fields and killed him. He was put under a curse to be a “restless wanderer” on the Earth.

On the surface this is a story of sibling rivalry, something tormenting Prince Harry. As reports at the weekend suggest, the rift between the young prince and his elder brother seems to be widening as publication day for the pointedly titled “Spare” draws nearer. It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Harry. It can’t be easy being the spare, the younger brother whose role in the royal “firm” started in a position of subordination and has become steadily more subordinate as more direct heirs arrive to dilute his lineage.

There are plenty of younger siblings who have suffered in this way although none of us can imagine the particular hardship of being the “spare” to a throne.

Cain and Abel, though, is about much more than sibling rivalry. It contains deeper truths about human nature and the “deadly” sin of jealousy. It sounds something of a warning, therefore, for the spare prince.

Life, and in particular free market society, produces a constant churn of perceived “winners” and “losers”. Society and the media measure people by criteria of material wealth, fame and power. Hollow as these perceived “virtues” may be, they skew our perceptions, driving behaviour and sentiment.

It is natural for the winners and losers to be attracted to systems of belief which support their self-interest. Thus the winners from capitalism tend to support capitalism and the losers tend to seek out ideologies that would challenge or replace it. Those who resist this temptation are the honourable exception — capitalists who see the flaws in free markets, show real compassion and are willing to give their money away; or those vulnerable and poor who bear no resentment or anger.

Unfortunately the exceptions are far too rare.

Ideas of resentment and jealousy echo through time, and played a prominent part in the 19th century, when philosophers sought to create new theories of morality without God. Nietzsche borrowed a French word, ressentiment, to anchor the origins of his moral philosophy. By his estimation, Western moral thinking had its roots in the master-slave relationship.

The weak and marginalised members of society (such as persecuted Christians) resented those who oppressed them (the masters) and inverted the prevailing morality, turning humility, equality and compassion into the highest virtues.

“While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself … the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment.”

The dominant creed of the resentful for most of the 20th century was Socialism. As George Orwell pointed out, socialists don’t generally love the poor, they hate the rich.

When Marxist materialism became discredited with the realisation of the economic failures of the Soviet Union and the rising death counts of Communists and Socialist regimes around the world, the bearers of “ressentiment” turned to other domains into which to inject their venom. Key targets were the spheres of culture, family life, sex and race.

And so was born critical theory, the bastard child of Post-Modernism and Frankfurt School post-Marxism. To this conception we owe the hierarchy of victimhood, the one to which we must now all defer; it also spawned the language of the social justice warriors — words such as “my truth”, “lived experience”, “white privilege” (or any other kind of privilege for that matter) “ intersectionality” and so on.

The virus of critical theory was smuggled into the American culture via academia (two members of the Frankfurt School — Marcuse and Adorno — actually emigrated from Germany to US universities before the war).

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From academia, critical theory (popularly understood as wokery) has infected the media, publishing, Newsrooms, Hollywood, football commentators, public administration, HR departments, and even Big Tech. Perhaps the last place you would expect it to appear is the British Royal family. Surely they are not the losers in life’s lottery?

But that is to misunderstand the nature of resentment. Even within the Royal Family there are those who consider themselves losers. Cain was only upset about his status relative to Abel. It did not matter that he was Adam’s first born son.

Harry has no doubt been deeply frustrated by his status within the family and the nature of his “spare”ness. There is resentment and there is jealousy. Of course the Woke creed appeals. And no wonder Harry adopts its language. Which leaves us, ironically, with a hereditary Prince lecturing us about “privilege”.

There are of course other dimensions to Harry’s story. There is the shadow of his mother and the influence of his wife. But to the extent that he is a victim, he is the victim not only of his family circumstances but also of poisonous philosophers. Perhaps his example can be a cautionary tale to the rest of us.

Paul Marshall is chairman of Marshall Wace. He writes in a personal capacity.

The history of how this idea of individual choice came to dominate our moral landscape is complex and interesting. What began as a worthy cry of individual freedom against exploitative elites — the state, the medieval church and so on — greatly exceeded its intended power, eventually becoming a weapon that could bend reality around the will of individual choice. These days, for example, I can be a woman simply if I choose to be one, irrespective of any biological givenness. Philosophically, this means there are no givens that human will cannot and should not be able to overcome. Truth requires a possessive pronoun, making it submissive to individual will: my truth. All that matters is the choosing. There is only one core moral situation and that is when I point to something and say: “I want it”. The paradigmatic setting for moral reflection has shifted from kneeling in the church pew to standing in the shopping aisle.

Capitalism inevitably plays an important part in this story. The soft Left critique is that capitalism is poor at redistribution and poor at cleaning up after itself — that it doesn’t price in its effects on the environment. On the plus side, it has lifted billions out of poverty and has liberated hitherto oppressed individuals from the restrictions of traditional moral values — the power of the “pink pound”, for instance. In this way, capitalism is a kind of solvent against the weight of tradition: the dollars in my pocket free me to be whoever I want to be, whatever I want to be. Dalit billionaire Rajesh Saraiya is no longer untouchable. How can we not cheer such liberation? My wallet says that I don’t have to abide by your values. For “choice first” liberals, this is all to be counted on the positive side of the register.

We could call this the “Montecito perspective”, but Marx explained it best: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” The Netflix Queen, luxuriating in her ghastly Californian mansion, is a surprising example of precisely what Marx described — her exaggerated bow to the monarch making a mockery of the respect that such a gesture is designed to articulate.

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This is why the “Montecito perspective” contrasts so directly with the “Buckingham Palace perspective”, which is what makes the whole Harry/William drama so much more than a mimetic rivalry between siblings. They are archetypes of two fundamental and bitter political adversaries: very roughly, tradition and the ethics of the market, old world power and new world power, England and America. People will keep on making programmes about Harry and Meghan not because they are intrinsically worth watching, nor because they provide us with any new information about their perfectly ordinary romance, but rather because they reference a very primitive kind of disagreement about the nature of moral reality. Harry and Meghan are compelling in their own way because they are absolute true believers in the kind of moral vision they propound. In direct contrast, many believe that what they think of as being good is the very thing we now need saving from: an ethics indistinguishable from narcissism. The crack between us reaches down to the very bottom.

From the Palace perspective, we are born into a network of relations to which we are obligated from before we take breath. William would use words like “duty” and “service”, a crucial aspect of which is the belief that my life is not all-about-me. It’s not about my will or my having chosen something. Not even about my own personal happiness. I live in the service of something greater than myself. As today’s episodes reveal, while William was somewhere up the M1 opening yet another Community Centre or Homeless Project, Harry was in the departure lounge, giddily breathing into his mobile phone: “We are on the freedom flight.” Little wonder so many of us saw his abdication of responsibility as a betrayal of duty, to both his family and to his country — which, given the nature of the obligations he was born into, amount to the same thing.

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Imagining a happy-ever-after Disneyfied version of royalty, Meghan can be forgiven for not having fully appreciated all of this. Monarchy is not glamour and power; it is bonded servitude — and servitude, as the Queen herself well knew, inspired by a king who divested himself of power to come among us as a baby, one who “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2). Harry had the perfect role model to appreciate all this in his grandmother. Unlike his wife, he should have known better. Was that shame on his face as he watched his fairy princess effect an apparently hilarious parody of the bow? If not, it should have been.

“No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation on another man,” wrote that patron saint of neoliberalism, Ayn Rand, in The Virtue of Selfishness. This amounts to much the same thing as: “I didn’t ask to be born into this family.” But we all come from somewhere, rooted in a place layered by generations of expectation. And the moral call of such expectations cannot be escaped from simply by relocating to California. There is no psychological tabula rasa to be found, even in the land of reinvention. You take your story with you, and especially so if you are a member of the Royal Family. Harry has not freed himself; he has chosen a very empty form of exile. He has sold his birthright to Netflix, and he has sold it far too cheap. All that Hollywood adulation and California sunshine will not be able to quell the emptiness within.

***

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We do have a prince whistle-blower, however, telling his fury across six episodes of Netflix’s Harry & Meghan: the first three were released yesterday, and his memoir Spare comes next month. The TV series opens in the VIP Windsor Suite at Heathrow Airport the day the prince left Britain. It tells the story of his meeting Meghan, a coup de foudre, with summaries of his childhood and adolescence, and hers. There are parts on slavery and the British Empire; the stalking and death of his mother; the behaviour of elements of the media (offering her parents money for stories and paying neighbours to mount cameras over-looking her garden); the run-up to the wedding.

The response from the media — many of whom are being sued by the prince — has been negative. The media are accused of intrusion, where they claim there was none: a shot of the couple with their son was taken from an agreed position, and a picture of a paparazzi wall was from a Harry Potter premiere. Media say the cameras he complains of were permitted by the palace, and many were, but that compounds his misery: his family colluded with it. It is sleight of hand, of course, but who can argue they weren’t hounded? Harry shouted at a photographer as a young man: “Why don’t you just leave me alone?” It made the front page: not as an example of our immorality, but of his.

His mother, Diana, was similarly traduced for her Panorama interview. “She was deceived into giving the interview,” Harry says in the documentary, “but she spoke the truth of her experience”: that her husband abandoned her before their wedding day, but he had trauma of his own. And here he reveals the bitterness of monarchy: they are meat or mirrors. They exist to be consumed, or provide a pleasing reflection, and if they resist this, they will be punished. We require absolute compliance for our attention. He asks, remembering his mother’s tears: what am I part of?

It is so obvious that he has PTSD from his mother’s life and death, there is almost nothing left to say. There are videos of him and William in the documentary looking strained but repressing it to be polite. William shows his teeth in a photocall and lies that is happy. Even their father is shown saying that if you don’t learn to negotiate the cameras, you will go mad. Harry says he remembers very little of Diana from his early life, and that makes sense: if you hide your sadness from a child, you hide everything. He remembers the cameras though: they are his most powerful memory. He says that women he wanted were chased away, as his mother was chased away: “the media…. had driven so many other people away from me”.

Like Edward VIII, he chose a woman who he thought would free him because, as a non-British subject, she was not daunted by status. She enabled him, unlike Edward VIII, to relive the trauma of his mother’s experience, and regain some control of it. He says he fell in love with Meghan when he saw a photograph of her with dog’s ears and a dog’s nose, and that is understandable. He is an English nobleman.

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It is true that Meghan is easy to mock. She is ridiculous in the way that all rich people who want to be known for goodness are, and so is he. She seems aggrieved that when performing royal duties, she had to wear neutrals (fawn, camel, cream). Then we saw a photograph of the late and current queens dressed as Cadbury’s Roses for contrast, and I laughed.

There is a shot of Meghan feeding chickens in Montecito. In the next shot, she is sitting beside a bowl of crystal balls, and I wondered briefly if they were the eggs. She seems uncomfortable expressing emotion and hides under a film of quasi-emotional language so hackneyed it is meaningless. I think it indicates insecurity, not self-love: before one date with Harry, she had a shower because “I wanted to look more like myself”. Does Meghan un-showered not look like herself?

The most interesting thing I read about her is that she is a calligrapher, which is a search for beauty and control. Her surroundings are important to her: Hermes blankets are neatly folded as she cries. But Meghan was the trigger, not the cause, of his semi-enlightenment: he chose her. She is not a reincarnation of Princess Diana, even if he compares her “empathy” and “warmth” to his mother’s. But he is. He cannot leave monarchy. But he cannot stay. He is half-conscious, and half-free.

He knows the inherent cruelty in monarchy because he lived it: the adamantine hierarchy, the suppression of emotion, the demand for ownership, the disconnection of family members from one another. After his mother died, when he wasn’t at school, it seems he was often alone at Highgrove with servants and police protection officers. He can attempt to atone for his “unconscious” bias – his description of his apology to the Jewish community for dressing as a Nazi was awkward, and moving, as I imagined a penitent teenage prince at an audience with the Chief Rabbi. He can call himself a feminist, and environmentalist, and it is true that, as Meghan says, his Instagram feed is filled with photographs of elephants.

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This is where he becomes ridiculous, and pitiable though: where he is half-conscious, and half-free. You cannot leave the royal family and seek to keep the status it confers on you: not if you are repentant for its racism and sexism. You cannot talk about racism and sexism and environmentalism without talking about class. The difference between healing, his obsession, and the lack of it is not just self-realisation: it is money. And he doesn’t talk about class, or money: not one word, though he watches as his wife is wound into a fantastical ballgown by four people. His self-knowledge ends at precisely the point of his complicity.  He is still a prince, with all the expectations and pomp of a prince. We can all speak the truth of our misery, but what happens then?

He knows that some things must be exposed: media viciousness and intrusion, the collusion of his family, and the country; how monarchism isn’t love, but hunger. But he can’t acknowledge that our interest in his story is part of the same culture of unseriousness and worship of power.

He thinks he has a different future now: the Sussex brand, which will run on the money Netflix has paid him to tell his story. It is red-carpet philanthropy, which is bogus philanthropy: a luminous unseeing and unhearing of its own. It does not centre the genuinely dispossessed and the desperate: it can’t. In its glib riches, its insatiable desire for attention without merit, and its commitment to the superficial, it is as dishonest as the life he has left behind.

The Cambridges and Sussexes are at war, according to the media: the next three episodes of Harry & Meghan will be aired next week, on the same day that the Duchess of Cambridge is playing the piano at a carol concert. Remember the battle of the bridesmaids’ tights, when each duchess was accused of inciting tears in the other? This is in the same vein of pettiness.

If it is a war — and the media are determined it should be — it is a war not of substance but of style. It is not about how different the brothers are, but how similar. Both remain monied, driven, and convinced of the importance of their work as a newer world sags around them. If he continues on this path, I wonder if he will ever realise not how far he has travelled, but how little.

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When it comes to their media image, things could be worse for the House of Windsor. Last week, the fifth Netflix season of The Crown began after an overture of outrage deploring the drama’s distortion or fabrication of various episodes in royal history during the Nineties. While former premiers (John Major and Tony Blair) rail against the “malicious nonsense” and “complete rubbish” in the scripts, few champions of the “Firm” have paused to reflect that, even now, the royals enjoy a smoother ride than many of their ancestors.

James Gillray’s 1791 print “Hopes of the Party Prior to July 14”, described above, added one more acid drop to the flood of satirical engravings that lampooned the Hanoverian monarchy — along with other pillars of the ruling class — between 1780 and 1820. In this “golden age of caricature”, with Gillray, George Cruikshank and Thomas Rowlandson as its lords of misrule, palace misconduct and political intrigue unleashed a level of obscene ridicule that makes the snide smears of The Crown’s lead writer Peter Morgan feel like the softest of touches.

Yet a glib contrast between Georgian ferocity and 21st-century gentility will only take us so far. The stance of the shape-shifting Gillray, in particular, is famously hard to pin down. Tim Clayton’s definitive new study of the artist, James Gillray: a Revolution in Satire, notes that his “ambiguous, enigmatic” pen means that “it is rare in mature Gillray for either side to be entirely right or wrong”. Is “Hopes of the Party” an awful warning against the sanguinary horrors of French Revolutionary radicalism (Gillray engraved it two years after the Bastille fell, but before the guillotining of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette)? Or could it be interpreted as a parody of reactionary scare-mongering, a jibe at whipped-up alarms about the rotund Whig leader Charles James Fox — who features as George’s III’s executioner, while his gaunt Tory foe William Pitt dangles from that rope — and his reformist comrades? Proper satire slices both ways: different strokes for different folks.

Yes, Gillray and his colleagues could be brutal. In “A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion”, the bloated, gluttonous Prince of Wales recovers from his vices with an overflowing chamber-pot and bottles of pox-pills behind him. Chamber pots, in fact, became something of a running gag with Gillray. In “Lubber’s Hole — Or — the Crack’d Jordan” (“jordan” was slang for a chamber-pot), the future William IV, then Duke of Clarence, dives through a suggestive gash into a giant receptacle that represents his long-term mistress, the actress Dorothea Jordan. Even when he opted for an epic style, Gillray might be gross. In “Sin, Death and the Devil”, which alludes in his richly inter-textual way to Milton’s Paradise Lost, the wrinkled-breasted, Gorgon-haired Queen Charlotte intercedes in a fight between the naked Pitt and Thurlow (a rival minister), with her hand clasped over Pitt’s genitals. Although that particular scene did apparently give offence to King and Queen, the rudeness — and crudeness — of the “Prince of Caricatura” and his epoch can never be mapped neatly onto anti-Hanoverian attitudes.

Indeed, Gillray’s portrayals of George III and his consort as cheese-paring peasant bumpkins — as in “Frying Sprats, Toasting Muffins” — edged into outright affection. Gillray’s heyday coincided not with a fall but a rise in the royal household’s popularity after the débâcle of the American Revolution. When the widely-welcomed revolt against elite injustices in France turned regicidal and expansionist after 1792, the cross-Channel threat rallied sceptics to the House of Hanover. In “Anti-Saccharrites”, the frugal King is urging sugar-less tea on his daughters not simply to cut costs but as a blow against the West Indian slave trade. What “a Noble Example of Oeconomy”! And in Gillray’s master-stroke of loyalist toilet humour, “The French Invasion — Or — John Bull Bombarding the Bum-boats”, sturdy patriotism and poo gags reach a joint apotheosis. George III has morphed into the map of Britain itself (although he still wears a dunce’s cap in the shape of Northumberland) as he craps majestically — from somewhere around Lyme Regis — all over the hapless French fleet. As Tim Clayton puts it: “The daubs of the caricaturist produced no contempt for ‘Farmer George and his wife.’”

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Never mistake vulgarity for venom. Partisans both of the Windsors and the digital dukes of Netflix (a new elite if ever there was one) should reflect that mere rudeness about royals, however scurrilous or scatological, might not weaken monarchy itself. Critique, mockery and caricature — dim, cheapskate kings, randy, farting princes, blowsy mistresses and all — could leave the institution intact if the idea behind it remained robust. The flawed royal person (in Gillray’s time, that meant above all George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales, then Prince Regent and, at long last, George IV) might guzzle, booze, schmooze, fornicate and plunder at will. But if the core faith in monarchy held, an artist’s vitriol-tipped burin would not in itself corrode the crown.

For much of the audience could still separate frail individual from sacred office. The medieval doctrine of the king’s two bodies — one fallible and mortal, the other an impersonal “body politic” — just about survived in many minds. In his terrific book on London in the great age of satire, City of Laughter, Vic Gatrell argues that star caricaturists “didn’t aim to influence the common people, still less to subvert the monarchical principle”. Besides, mockery usually shadows flattery. Dr Johnson dreaded the time when his name would cease to provoke “calumny or ridicule… for then I would be neglected and forgotten”.

Once the firm hold of an ideal starts to slip, however, and the public no longer accepts a necessary gap between person and principle, then even mild and oblique sniping, Netflix-style, may take a toll. In a disenchanted time, private life and public role have to align. Of course, the player in the royal show who best grasped — and acted on — that insight was the late Elizabeth II. Whereas the politician who has most shamelessly tried to revive in his favour an ancient distinction between the errant human being and the august office-holder who “got all the big calls right” was none other than Boris Johnson. Now there’s a target for some Gillray Redux.

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Gillray, Cruikshank and co. assaulted the royal family but not the royal function. In the age of Tom Paine, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, real revolutionaries certainly did the latter. The circles of the graphic satirists seldom overlapped with theirs, although in the 1810s the Cruikshank brothers would forge stronger radical links. However, even the implacable George Cruikshank fell prudently silent on royal matters after a paltry-sounding royal bribe in 1820.

In 1797, Gillray himself had taken a £200 pension from the Tories while remaining a “deniable” loose cannon. For many years he lived and worked in St James’s Street, in the belly of the Establishment beast. He would have spotted his victims en route to club, town-house or palace. Some called in to buy the sort of prints that depicted them as grotesque bags of piss, pus and wind. Fox himself — the engraver’s beloved bugbear over many years — dropped by to purchase a portrayal of himself as a swarthy, sinister Jacobin insurrectionist (“A Meeting of Unfortunate Citoyens”). He left Hannah Humphrey (Gillray’s landlady, publisher and chaste life-partner) with a cheery “Good morning to you”. The Prince of Wales himself made sure that lackeys came in to buy successive caricatures of his flabby royal personage. There were many of those. Between 1803 and 1810, the Prince’s establishment at Carlton House spent £57 (a lot) on Gillray prints of their master as a preposterous balloon of lust and greed. Sometimes, he just wanted them taken off the market. But vanity loves even a distorting mirror.

You might say that the surface cruelty of Gillray’s time masked an underlying kindness, or at least solidarity. The royal satirists wanted to rock the boat but not to sink the ship. Whereas The Crown lavishes an unctuous, pseudo-respectful concern on its characters (Morgan has called the series a “love-letter” to the late Queen) while not caring too much if it does its bit to send the yacht of monarchy beneath the waves. You may think that a desirable outcome. If so, then the comic hyperbole of Gillray and Cruikshank would offer a more honest mode for hostile royal soap-opera than Netflix’s gear-crashing blend of fancily-written tittle-tattle with boring slabs of po-faced court reportage for “balance”.

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At the high noon of caricature, ribaldry and reverence could rub along together. Meanwhile, Napoleon’s slide from liberator to despot (brilliantly chronicled by Gillray himself) handily blocked the path in many British minds that might have led from burlesque to the barricades. In any case, chortles tend to limit theoretical critique. As Clayton says of prints such as Gillray’s “Presentation of the Mahometan Credentials”, with the Turkish ambassador pointing a long phallic scroll at the royal couple as Pitt the pet monkey cowers at their feet, “they induce laughter, not hatred”. Even (especially?) at their rudest, Georgian and Regency graphic satires have a strong flavour of Carry on up the Throne-room.

Their artists’ slaps and digs bruised Hanoverian flesh but broke no vital bones. Once the tide turned in the direction of reform and respectability in the 1820s and 1830s, memories of the debauched Prince Regent and his idle clan did nothing to stop the emergence of Victoria and Albert as discreet, bourgeois monarchs for an increasingly discreet, bourgeois nation. Today, in contrast, the simpering faux compassion of The Crown has neither the candour of a principled aversion to royalty nor the coherence of a principled defence. Gillray and the satire squad’s tough love did not kill the monarchy; arguably, they made it stronger. In contrast, the unaccountable plutocracy at Netflix want to stifle it in a long, slow, sickly kiss of death.

In episode two, Jonathan Pryce’s Philip tells his (much) younger blonde friend Penny: “The one thing human beings do the minute they make a commitment to a life together” is “grow in separate directions”. His imagined advice to the vulnerable Diana (preparing to detonate her Andrew Morton “bomb”) is even more incriminating: “Be creative… you can do whatever you want, you can make whatever arrangements you need to find your own happiness”, as long as “you remain loyal to your husband and loyal to this family in public”. But the show doesn’t dare go further.

Likewise Philip’s marriage to Elizabeth has always been a tough subject for biographers. There is no hard evidence that Philip was unfaithful, and while Her Majesty was still alive the issue was all the more sensitive. This may explain the strange detour in Gyles Brandreth’s otherwise excellent biography Philip, the Final Portrait. Promising an interrogation of the Duke’s reputation as a womaniser, Brandreth seeks to establish what Freud would have made of Philip’s female-heavy early childhood. (He was a longed-for son arriving late into a family of four girls.)

Brandreth explores the hypothetical possibility of Philip having “penis awe”, perhaps even “phallic swagger” — both conditions which apparently stem from disproportionate female attention and devotion when young. He tells us what we already know: that Philip liked the company of young attractive women, but his discussion with a Freudian psychologist is inconclusive. Apparently, men with “phallic swagger” aren’t always serial adulterers.

Had Brandreth really wanted to land a psychobabble blow, he would have looked into the male role models in Philip’s life. There was his father’s failed marriage and glamorous lady friends in the Riviera, his uncle Lord Mountbatten’s notoriously “open” marriage, not to mention his Greek uncle Big George and Marie Bonaparte’s “unconventional” relationship. Monogamy did not have much currency in the Duke’s wider family.

In many respects Elizabeth and Philip’s marriage was in keeping with the pair’s pedigree, upbringing and exceptional status. What went on behind closed doors in their marriage is a moot point and one which has disproportionately focused on the importance of monogamy at the expense of arguably greater goals — an enduring marriage and stable family monarchy.

Aristocrats have long played by different rules, and in the first half of the 20th century, when marriages were often undertaken for practical and dynastic reasons, an exclusive physical relationship was rarely a prerequisite for a lasting union. Between the wars, commentators promoted the idea of emotional and spatial independence in marriage. In 1935 co-founder of the National Marriage Guidance Council, Edward Griffith, recommended “the independence of each must be guaranteed”. Others were more explicit: “A woman may love her husband with all her heart, but even love needs an occasional rest.” And those women, invariably without an income of their own, had to shut up and put up.

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But times were changing fast. Service girls, having enjoyed rare freedom outside the domestic arena during the war, bought into new idealised notions of a companionate marriage. These modern unions were based on affection, friendship, and sexual gratification; it was anticipated that a spouse would meet all of their partner’s emotional and physical needs. Or as a panellist on the 1954 Royal Commission of Marriage and Divorce put it: “We are coming to expect more and more of our marriages.” It was these expectations that meant “marriages today are at risk to a greater extent than formerly”.

Take 99-year-old Daphne Attridge for instance. As a young woman, she served in the female army (ATS) during the war and keenly followed Philip and Elizabeth’s love story. Like many, she got engaged during the conflict (and promptly unengaged). Until she found her perfect man, she pinned her romantic hopes vicariously on the royal couple’s relationship. “We wanted to know they were in love. That mattered to us.”

This post-war companionate model of marriage has endured, but marriages in general have not necessarily. As the Commission predicted, higher expectations led to greater disappointment and a rapidly rising divorce rate. Despite the best efforts of both church and state, marital breakdown quickly became a hallmark of modern living, with Elizabeth and Philip’s union an almighty exception. But then, they were playing by different rules, weren’t they?

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There is no doubting the late Queen’s devotion to her husband; she was sticking press cuttings about sailor Philip’s wartime adventures into her scrapbook aged 14. As for the nomadic Prince, steadfast Elizabeth was a game-changer. However, their union lent heavily on more independent models of marriage in vogue in the early 20th century: Elizabeth did not hang out with Philip’s “funny friends” who entertained him in Soho supper clubs, at Cowdray Park playing polo, and on (and off) the River Solent. She avoided Cowes Week “like the plague”, pursued separate equine hobbies, had agency and income that vastly outstripped her husband’s and slept in her own bedroom. (According to the author and campaigner Marie Stopes, interwar champion of Married Love, the latter was a sensible move. Apparently separate bedrooms prevent “everyday association” which “tends to reduce the keen pleasure each takes in the other”.)

By all accounts, even Charles was irked by his father’s latter-day friendship with Penny; perhaps he was also miffed that there had been a spread featuring 13 women in Tatler, entitled “The Duke of Edinburgh’s Fan Club”. And yet somehow, in both cases, Philip got away with his reputation enhanced: a raffish old man at worst. Who could resist the outspoken Duke in his dotage, stumbling around Sandringham, riding carriages with his sometime blonde companion and driving when dangerously old? Like his father, Charles had also inherited Mountbatten as a pre-marriage mentor, but with very different results. Times had irrevocably changed. The posh propensity to turn a blind eye no longer washed in a society where divorce was prevalent, and modern celebrity promised riches outside the royal club.

Elizabeth and Philip’s union was forged in a different age, when commitment to monarchy and marriage trumped everything else. Ultimately their 73-year union not only stood the test of time, it was a great success, and one which the couple were justifiably proud of. The Queen, never an open book, divulged her tips for a successful marriage in 1972 — the year of the couple’s Silver Wedding anniversary — explaining that a Christian marriage should be “tolerant and understanding”. Fifty years later, the Duke confirmed the Queen had “tolerance in abundance”.

Exactly what that says about the dynamics within our late monarch’s marriage is open to interpretation, as the Duke no doubt intended. After all, Elizabeth and Philip came from an old-fashioned school of thought — it was important to be seen, but, where possible, royalty should not let in too much “daylight upon the magic”. As Walter Bagehot explained, “its mystery is its life”.

For a millennium there were Royal Sieges, Royal Weddings, and Royal Jubilees at Windsor. But nothing, in living memory, like this Royal Funeral; the Queen — a most revered and respected and beloved Queen — was to be buried within the King George VI memorial chapel. A million-strong crowd was expected. An invading wave of grief vaster than any the authorities had planned for, and more than Windsor could really take. A unique British Hajj.

It was standard for locals to see the Queen in Windsor. This is a Royal borough — the Firm owns 4,500 acres —  and the family took its name from the town. In return, the town received the Real Presence of Her Majesty, riding in horses in the park, or wheeling over asphalt in a Land Rover to her chapel. Windsor was charged with glamour by association.

After Elizabeth died, the town whirled into action: the paranoid iron railings, camera cranes and subcontracted stewards, whose hasty assembly marks every major public spectacle in the Kingdom, appeared. This was the heartland of the grieving process.

When the Queen was crowned, in 1953, a third of her subjects believed she was placed on the throne by God. There was no foreign travel, no wine, no Lady Chatterley’s Lover. No real teeth in the mouths of half the adult population. Stalin ruled Russia and virtually the whole of Africa belonged to Europe. The British had just informed the UN that they did not see how it was possible to abolish flogging in their mandated territories, thank you very much.

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Yesterday, there were thousands of people everywhere. Then thousands more. Walking from Slough and Staines through the misty morning, along closed roads, past tent cities set up for stewards in the greens around the town. More streamed in for the funeral.

The crowds are candidly patriotic. Monarchy is something they feel in their bodies. It is a powerful internal force, not a theory, not an idea. It’s an obvious decision: take the pram, and the dogs, to Windsor. They say the Queen was theirs. They say the same things, over and over: we expected her to go on forever; we knew her all our lives; we wanted to pay our respects. Trails of flowers are left, under trees, under the hard glare of the castle walls.

I’m reminded of Walter Bagehot, Monarchy’s most supercilious theorist. For the Kingdom, he said, the monarch was simply “a visible symbol of unity to those so imperfectly educated as to need a symbol”. The portraits of Queen Elizabeth, hung in every shop window across the town — including the Thai Massage parlour — are pure symbolism. She looks as exact and fictitious as the lines on a map. People are not always sure what to do when a symbol dies. I’m told they almost ran out of champagne in The Ivy Windsor on September 8. Hallowed British etiquette: if in doubt, drink.

Otherwise, a child walks up to one Elizabeth in an estate agent’s window, stops, pulls a handful of conkers from her pocket, and lays them there in a small line below the image. An offering. Walking around Windsor, Bagehot would have thought himself vindicated.

Yet he was too cynical. Being a fantasy does not make this unreal.When you speak to enough mourners, you realise Elizabeth was more than symbol. She was not abstract to Lee, a huge bull-thick slab of a man who is in charge of the catering in the Great Park. He cooked for the Queen twice when he was a chef in the Army. “She sat in the mess with 400 blokes, like anybody would.” The recollection cuts him somehow. “She remembered my name, three years after the first time we met.”

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Or David, a garrulous ex-guardsman, who is on his third wreath-laying trip to Windsor this week. Tourists are making him pose outside the castle gates with a corgi. He served in the household division. The Queen was as regular as post in his life for 18 months. What was she like? The memory enters his face and complicates his bonhomie. “She was… strict.” He always feared she would have him locked in a cell if he slouched on the parade ground.

Elizabeth was the people’s to make of her what they will. I begin to lose count of the number of mourners who compare her with their mothers, or grandmothers. “It’s like losing her all over again”, says one woman.

The mourning is not exclusively for the Queen then. It’s for them, and their families. They relate the Queen’s pain to their own; somehow this is the same pain their grandmothers felt. They saw them ground down by life and imagine that was the Queen’s fate too. All these grandmothers, never-ending in our heads, amen.

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A thick human hedgerow grows in two parallel lines up and down the Long Walk. We watch the funeral on jumbo screens. The silence here can straighten shoulders. When we sing God Save the King, the words feel curious in our mouths. Someone stumbles off to cry behind a portaloo.

Grace tugs the edge of her Union Jack shawl. She came to Britain from Ghana in 1985. “I am the Commonwealth”, she says. A producer from ITV keeps calling her, begging her to come to London to be interviewed. But Grace wants to be in Windsor. She turns her phone off.

“We have a saying in my country: when the frog dies you will know the length of the frog.” I ask her what sort of frog Elizabeth was. “A very good frog”, says Grace. “The best frog.”

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She tells me to wait under a tree, and returns with a cardboard cut-out, clearly well-used, of the Queen. “The moon and the stars will follow her,” Grace intones, posing for photos with machine-gun-bearing police officers.

After midday, we stand at the top of the Long Walk, waiting for the procession. There is static in the air. People say things out of nowhere. “Arlo, please stop, or I shall strap you in the pram.” Somebody says she will freeze her Bramley apples. “Once she’s in there, that’s it, it’s over — it’s over there, you can see the chapel.” Another, thinking ahead, wonders how long it will take to get back to Paddington.

A row of notables, in a dream of hierarchy, stands on the opposite side of the walk. They are wearing furs, white gloves, and spotless ruffs. On our side, there are no pearls, only Sandra handing rice crackers to perfect strangers. The first thing she did when the Queen died was post a poem on Facebook. They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old… “Me and Paul watched it all on the telly, everything”, she says. “There was so much we never knew.” She talks about the Queen like a song she can’t remember the words to. The telly told her to come to Windsor, so now she is forcing a rice cracker into my hands.

All of us shaped by television and language and the jokes we share, have never had so much in common: we are waiting on this smooth baize runway, in the sun, to watch her go home. And we are sharing the same frustrations in this crowd, which is ten heads deep. The same elbows in our faces, the same children crying and rustling; the irritations and bathos and peevishness, all the subterranean currents that flow beneath the splendour. Time feels like it’s buffering. Sandra sighs. There will be no more rice cakes.

It begins with a soldierly bellow. Then, hush. Then the squashed pom-pom thud of cannon half a mile away. They scatter rooks from the elm-trees, who corkscrew overhead. People tell each other to look.

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Look: the procession glints in the far distance. It moves into clarity. Cavalry in outline, a haze of red wool, eerie piping. Everybody is filming the slow, square marchers. Everybody wraps chains around these minutes, to keep them alive, to keep her with them.

They are filming the old style, the British high idiom, bury the Queen. Pageantry separate in kind and scale to any they have seen before, or will ever see again. A precious echo of the country this used to be. All this power kept in reserve for today. There are flashing swords, gorgeous armour, and blazing uniforms, but gentleness is the overwhelming impression. Militarism to send off a Grandmother, not to project power. Grief, not anger. We are its witnesses.

When the crown is level with my face there is so much brass in the air you can taste the metal. People close their eyes to stretch the crowded seconds out. The music rings flawlessly in a dozen directions. Skin and bone absorb the moment. A key is turned. History has been released from reality.

The car wheezes forward for the last time, followed by four billion eyes, through the gates of Windsor Castle. The Queen is swept along and swept up into the cheerful English heaven she believed in. She takes her final seat in the stands, with Charles I and George III, Henry VIII and Victoria, and all the others, even poor King John.

As dusk fell, we sloped back down the Long Walk, and the thumping drums faded away. Screens showed the Queen alive, accepting some carnations from school children. Elizabeth had no grand idea. No message of hope and change. No calls to arms. Her life was blockaded by duty. She seemed to ask nothing of us but to do ours too.

The death of the Queen might eventually invite more sceptical and wide-ranging reflection. Georges Clemenceau said of the French Revolution that it was a bloc — to be accepted or rejected as a whole; the same is true of the British royal family. Any individual monarch is the product of an institution that revolves around the hereditary principle. Real monarchists must ask themselves whether they believe in this system enough to accept all its potential consequences. Remember that if Prince Charles had broken his neck playing polo in 1976, we would now be awaiting the coronation of King Andrew.

Curiously, a “successful” monarch and, especially, a long reign weakens the monarchy as an institution. During such a reign, loyalty comes to focus on a person, rather than on the Crown as an institution. Note how frequently, in recent years, politicians have answered questions about their views on monarchy with some anodyne remark about their admiration for the Queen. The cult of an individual sovereign increasingly overshadows all other members of their family, including their eventual successor.

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That heir, waiting in the wings, will have accumulated a great deal of baggage by the time that they get to the throne — whether that baggage means actresses and obesity (as in the case of Edward VII) or an unsuccessful marriage and a history of publicly expressing political views (the case of Charles III). The problems of a long reign are exacerbated when the monarch is a woman. Partly because they were comparatively rare in British public life until recently, Queens lend themselves to mythologisation.

There are two striking and worrying precedents for what happens when a long-serving monarch dies. The first is Elizabeth I. Her death was followed by an unsuccessful king (James I), a catastrophic king (Charles I), civil war, regicide and, for a time, republic. The second is Victoria, whose death was also followed by a period of turbulence for the monarchy, culminating in the abdication crisis of 1936. I am not being entirely flippant when I say that the First World War was, in some ways, a civil war within Victoria’s own family — in which the English branch came off much better than the German or Russian ones.

Their long reigns served to occlude problems that then came back to haunt the next monarch. Elizabeth I — who refused to “open a window into men’s souls” — was careful to cultivate a useful ambiguity over religion. But that ambiguity was linked to her personal idiosyncrasies — her refusal to marry, for instance, avoided the question of whether she would take a Protestant or Catholic husband — so that it was hard for the monarchy to sustain after her death.

The ambiguity of Victoria’s reign was less deliberate. Her long period on the throne and, particularly, her partial withdrawal from public life after the death of her husband, helped to conceal the extent to which (much to Victoria’s own distaste) the monarchy had lost its political power during her reign. It was significant that politicians did not consider it necessary to call a general election when she died: they had done so as a matter of course after the previous monarch’s death. Still, the monarchs that came after her did not really reconcile themselves to the institution’s loss of political power until the accession of George VI in 1936.

The central ambiguity of Elizabeth II’s long reign revolves around Britain’s relations with the wider world. Before her accession, she pledged herself to serve “our imperial family”. But the empire went in the early years of her reign and was replaced by the Commonwealth — Enoch Powell, always attentive to the precise meaning of constitutional terms, believed that the most important speech he ever made concerned the addition of the letter “s” after “realm” in the Royal Titles Bill of 1952. Elizabeth’s death has now raised awkward questions, long suppressed, about what the Commonwealth itself means and, in particular, whether the British monarch will remain its head.

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In some ways, the personalisation of the monarchy is more marked now than it was in 1901 or 1603. This is partly because of other changes in the British state. It is often suggested that every aspect of the constitution hinges on the monarchy. But in some ways, the reverse is true: the institutions of the British can get along perfectly well without a monarch — as was shown during the interregnum of 1649-1660 — though the monarchy has, in the past, been sustained by its relations with an infrastructure of ancien regime institutions.

In 1953, I suspect the Queen herself would have said that being head of the Church of England was the most important of her duties. Now the idea of a state church seems peculiar — most vicars would give you a blank look if you point out that parliament has not sanctioned the prayer book used in most churches. As for the House of Lords, it is now, for the most part, an assembly of retired, middle-ranking politicians — not a single one of the six surviving former prime ministers has bothered to take a peerage. The institutions that have long propped up the monarchy are ailing.

She was also always held to be above politics and often presented as representing an integrity that elected politicians lack. Yet the briefest glance at the register of members’ interests or parliamentary expense claims reveals that MPs most interested in personal enrichment tend to be fervent admirers of the Queen — and keen collectors of honours. One might also point out that two of the most important figures at the court of King Boris (the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, and Lord Geidt, advisor on ministerial standards) had previously worked in the royal household.

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For all the talk of the monarchy being “apolitical”, no serious observer doubts that the monarchy serves the interests of the Conservative Party — often, as when George V promoted “National Government” in 1931, serving those interests by going along with the Conservative claim that their own policies were “apolitical”. A group of MPs closely associated with Thatcherism, including Norman Tebbit and Nigel Lawson, wrote an interesting document in 1978. They were struck by the show of affection for the Queen during her Silver Jubilee; they recognised that it might reflect “a deep nostalgia, in part for what is thought of as a comfortable past”, suggesting that they needed to be careful with calls for radical change. All the same, they concluded that the spirit of the Jubilee would work to their advantage: “People will be more attracted by a promise … to restore some of the valued things they have lost than by promise of a vague, bright tomorrow.”

But Conservatives are not quite the royalists they sometimes make out. They are heirs to a political tradition that looks back to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (when James II was abruptly ejected from the throne) and emphasises the pre-eminence of the parliament — especially the House of Commons. Churchill paid ostentatious deference to the young Queen Elizabeth and took the side of Edward VIII during the abdication crisis of 1936. All the same, Churchill was blunt to the latter: “When our kings are in conflict with our constitution, we change our kings.” He also, as First Lord of the Admiralty, once tried to name a ship HMS Oliver Cromwell.

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Conservatives found it easy to be loyal to Elizabeth II because her public statements — in favour of family, nation and the armed forces, and prone, in recent years, to evoke a certain memory of the Second World War — fitted with their own political vision. It will be interesting to see how they get on with a monarch who recently, albeit unintentionally, let it be known that he disapproves of their asylum policy and who has devoted much of his life to drawing attention to the dangers of climate change.

King Charles will, I suspect, not have an easy time. His reign will be relatively short and he will spend much of it in the shadow of his mother. The historian Peter Hennessy recently wrote that his generation (he is more or the less the same age as the King) found it hard to imagine any monarch other than Elizabeth II. Like many remarks that sound conservative, this is, when you think of it, profoundly subversive. Saying a monarch other than the present one if unthinkable is, in effect, saying that the continuation of monarchy is unthinkable.

And, while we are on the subject of unthinkable things, consider the dramatic constitutional rethinking likely to be brought about by, say, the break-up of the union, an attempt to re-enter the European Union, or the creation of a written constitution — all things desired by a significant minority of the population and all things that might raise questions about who should be head of state. For all the talk about centuries of continuity, I doubt if any realistic observer is sure the monarchy will survive for another 70 years. If it is to do so, it needs to get away from an emphasis on the supposed personal qualities of any individual King or Queen and rest once again on the abstract quality of the Crown. Perhaps one day historians will recognise that the most important constitutional commentator of the period was not Sir Simon Schama or Lord Hennessy but Johnny Rotten, who marked the Silver Jubilee of 1977 with the words: “She ain’t no human being.”

John Osborne, the world’s principal Angry Young Man, was incensed by that sort of talk. There was a “trough of Queen worship”, he raged, “the National Swill”. And he described monarchy as “the gold filling in a mouthful of decay”. His attack was only to be expected, of course — there’s no point in having Angry Young Men unless they’re working themselves up about something or other.

But other isolated voices of dissent were beginning to be heard, and some were harder to ignore since they came from within what had recently been dubbed “the Establishment”. There was, for example, Woodrow Wyatt, then a Labour MP though later a disciple of Margaret Thatcher. “Mooning about the Royal Family is one of the main contributory factors to Britain’s plight,” he complained in 1956. “It saps our dynamism. It makes us dwell on the past.”

Or there was John Grigg, who could hardly have been more Establishment: Eton, Grenadier Guards, Oxford, Tory parliamentary candidate, latterly the 2nd Baron Altrincham. So when he said rude things about the Queen in his 1957 article “The Monarchy Today” — published in the magazine he edited, the National and English Review — it proved especially controversial.

He was no republican, Altrincham insisted, he was merely seeking to reinvigorate the monarchy, which was too remote, surrounded “almost without exception by people of the ‘tweedy’ sort”. But at the centre of his criticism was the Queen herself. Five years into her reign and she really needed to buck her ideas up. Her public persona was that of “a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect, and a recent candidate for Confirmation”, while her “style of speaking is frankly a pain in the neck”. What was to become of her “when she has lost the bloom of youth”?

The article didn’t win him many new friends. It was roundly condemned by pretty much everyone, from the Archbishop of Canterbury (who hadn’t read it), down to the leader of the Conservative group on Altrincham Council in Cheshire, who wanted to distance the town from the man who bore its name. Nor did the abuse stop there. “Altrincham, if we ever see you in the street, we’ll do you in,” said one of the many letters he received. “You go too flamin’ far when you criticise our Queen.” It was signed: “Eight (loyal to the Queen) Teddy Boys”.

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Nothing came of that threat but he was thumped in the face by the Deputy Chairman of the League of Empire Loyalists (a far-Right group that went on to co-found the National Front). The assailant was 64-years-old and didn’t pack much of a punch, so he got off with just a one-pound fine, together with the sympathy of the magistrate: “96% of the population were disgusted and offended by what was written”.

A couple of months later, journalist Malcolm Muggeridge — still then in his incarnation as iconoclast — joined in with his own article, “Does England Really Need a Queen?”, written for the Saturday Evening Post. His analysis was hardly startling. “The British monarchy does fulfil a purpose,” he wrote. “It provides a symbolic head of state transcending the politicians who go in and out of office.” But as he made his way to his somewhat obvious conclusion, he dropped in some wonderfully scandalous titbits of upper-class gossip. “It is duchesses, not shop assistants, who find the Queen dowdy, frumpish and banal,” he revealed. The whole thing had become “a kind of Royal soap opera”.

Like Altrincham, Muggeridge found himself under severe and sustained criticism. Angered by the distorted, misquoted accounts of his article, he consulted a lawyer on whether he could sue for libel, but was told that, while there undoubtedly was a case, “in view of the circumstances, and the particular matter at issue, I could not count upon a jury or a judge taking an unprejudiced view”.

What these early critics demonstrated was that in a world of sycophancy, there was a good deal of media mileage to be made from thumbing one’s nose at the royals. Played right, there was a career in this.

The man for the job was Willie Hamilton. He was a Labour MP from 1950 to 1987, yet the only national coverage he ever received was in his role as an outspoken republican, “the Hammer of the Windsors” as the press liked to call him. He complained about the cost of the monarchy, describing the royal family as “scroungers”, but there was a deeper complaint that sometimes surfaced: the Queen represented a class that had “deeply hurt the class to which I belong and which I represent in our sovereign Parliament”. For years he was Fleet Street’s go-to guy for a bit of outrage on a royal news story; a happy event such as a wedding wasn’t complete without Hamilton carping about the cost. His autobiography was titled Memoirs of an Anti-Royalist, because this had become his identity; effectively he’d been subsumed into that great royal soap opera, the pub cynic who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.

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Others were drawn in as well. Come the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, John Grigg, the former Lord Altrincham (he’d renounced his title in the interim), returned to the storyline. This time he praised “her exceptionally steady character” — which was pretty much what he’d condemned her for back in the Fifties. “She looks a Queen,” he now wrote. “She behaves decently because she is decent.”

The Silver Jubilee also saw the soap opera acquire an alternative theme-song: “God Save the Queen” (1977), the second single by punk band the Sex Pistols, sneering about a “fascist regime” and how the Queen (who “ain’t no human being”) “made you a moron”.

It was incendiary stuff, and would have been so at any time, let alone when the Jubilee was reaffirming the nation’s love of monarchy and providing a desperately needed moment of unity in the midst of strife. The promotional artwork, picturing the Queen with a safety-pin through her lip, added visual injury to aural assault. The record was banned by radio and television; it was deplored by MPs; leading retailers declined to stock it, and pub chains refused to have it on their jukeboxes. Meanwhile members of the group were assaulted on the streets by the contemporary equivalents of the “Eight (loyal to the Queen) Teddy Boys”. But the single still shifted 200,000 copies in Jubilee Week alone.

Punk now being associated with anti-monarchy sentiment, others followed, from the underachieving — the Exile’s “Jubilee 77” and the Drones’ “Corgi Crap” (both 1977) — to the over-ambitious: Derek Jarman’s movie Jubilee (1978). But it was the Sex Pistols who became so closely associated with the moment that they got dragged into the soap, not as regular characters, but always there or thereabouts at special times. When the Queen celebrated her Golden Jubilee in 2002, it was marked by a band reunion, accompanied by yet another greatest hits compilation (inevitably titled Jubilee), and a re-release of the offending single, now seemingly part of the ceremonial trappings.

The single was back 10 years later for the Diamond Jubilee, with excited talk of it getting to #1 in Jubilee Week. (It didn’t.) This time, singer John Lydon disowned the whole thing: “I wish for no part in the circus that is being built up around it.” The band also declined an invitation to appear the opening ceremony of the London Olympics that year, though a snippet of “God Save the Queen” was included. It didn’t upstage the Queen’s double-act with James Bond, though.

As the Sex Pistols’ rebellion faded into the warm haze of nostalgia, the problem for others was that there was nowhere much further to go, short of summoning up the spirits of Oliver Cromwell, Madame Guillotine and Yakov Yurovsky. And there was no call for that.

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In any case, republicanism had rather lost its forbidden allure. This was apparent even before the martyrdom of Diana in 1997. Five years earlier, Alastair Campbell, then the political editor of the Daily Mirror, denounced the royal family as “the apex of a class system that exposes John Major’s ‘classless society’ for the slogan that it is,” and called for Betty Boothroyd, the Speaker of the House of Commons, to be elevated to the monarchy: “Queen Betty has a rather truer ring than Queen Diana.”

The same year, Sue Townsend’s novel The Queen and I was premised on the election of a republican government, leading the royal family to be rehoused on a rundown council estate. The Queen and Princess Anne are sufficiently practical to adapt to their changed circumstances; Prince Philip not so much. Less seriously, there were books such as Stephen Haseler’s The End of the House of Windsor and A.N. Wilson’s The Fall of the House of Windsor (both 1993).

And then in 1994, the Independent on Sunday became the first mainstream paper to declare itself in favour of the abolition of the monarchy. We needed an elected president, the paper declared, and it asked its readers who that should be. Again, Betty Boothroyd won support, coming in second, ahead of Jarvis Cocker, the singer with Pulp, but behind the people’s choice, Tony Benn. (The highest ranked royal was Princess Anne in eighth place, just behind Richard Branson.)

In such a climate, it was hard to make a mark, though many continued to try. In his first book, God Save the Queen? (2002), Johann Hari, then writing for the New Statesman condemned the Queen’s “cruel neglect of her children”, and said the abolition of the monarchy was necessary “for the mental health of those involved”. The book helped launch Hari on a career that saw him win the Orwell Prize for political journalism (even if that was subsequently withdrawn), but it was incapable of generating the same notoriety as Lord Altrincham or the Sex Pistols had managed.

And maybe it was all grist to the mill. The monarchy has survived the centuries by adapting to new social demands. Its function, as Malcolm Muggeridge pointed out, was as “a useful unifying element in a society full of actual and potential discord”. And if society wanted a pantomime villain or two to express republican views, then that requirement could also be accommodated. “God save history,” sang Johnny Rotten. “God save your mad parade.” And then he too took his place on the periphery of that mad parade, forever associated with the institution he so disparaged. In his respectful tweet to mark the passing of Elizabeth, he included the picture of her that had been used to promote “God Save the Queen”. This time, there was no safety-pin.

This is partly why, just a few months ago, the ARM issued a celebratory statement titled “Australians reject King Charles”. According to the ABC survey the ARM was referring to, 53% of Australians did not want Charles to become king, while only 35% were in support. Today, then, despite the fact that the government’s flags are flying at half-mast and Parliament has been suspended for two weeks, the republican cause in Australia seems in strong shape. Indeed, the newly elected Labor Party government is the first to appoint a Minister for the Republic, Matt Thistlethwaite, whose job is to prepare the grounds for a future referendum on Australia becoming a republic.

Such a vote will be necessary, as any change to Australia’s system of government requires a constitutional amendment, which can only be done via referendum. Yet the government is currently preoccupied with its proposed referendum on enshrining an indigenous voice to parliament. Senior ministers have therefore suggested that the republic referendum would likely have to wait until the government’s second term, which will be in 2025 if the ALP is re-elected.

Despite this delay, republicanism is clearly back on the political agenda and is enjoying substantial support at the highest echelons of government. An unpopular King now sits on the throne in Britain. What could possibly go wrong?

While the circumstances are certainly propitious, if the ARM believes that a favourable result would simply fall in its lap, they could end up bitterly disappointed. Let’s not forget: we have been here before. In the Nineties, when Australia was gearing up for its first referendum on the republic, a majority of Australians supported the change. Successive polls showed the margin in favour of a republic was roughly two-to-one. Yet in the 1999 referendum, the republican cause lost by 45% to 55%.

Of course, the circumstances today are not entirely similar. Whereas the current Labor government and its leader, Anthony Albanese, is in favour of a republic, John Howard, who was Prime Minister at the time, was a staunch monarchist who put forward an unpopular model, in which the Head of State would be elected by parliament, not by voters. Malcolm Turnbull, a future Liberal prime minister, who was leader of the “yes” vote, later told Howard that he had broken “the nation’s heart” by manipulating the referendum to get the result he wanted. This was largely true, though the republican defeat was also enabled by a split within the movement over the preferred model for electing an Australian Head of State.

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Still, the Nineties would turn out to be the highest point of support for the republic. Recent polling has shown that more Australians do not support a republic than those who do. At 34%, support for the republican cause is at its lowest ebb since 1979. Perhaps surprisingly, only 26% of voters aged 18-24 said they would support a republic, the lowest of any age group. A large share, over a quarter of all respondents, said they were uncertain how they would vote. If many of those decided to vote “yes” the republic vote could still win, but they would need to be won over to the cause. The biggest challenge facing the ARM, then, appears to be a debilitating one: public apathy. The republic just does not seem to excite Australians anymore.

This in itself is surprising, given the way the monarchy and its unelected representative in Australia, the Governor-General, have significantly intervened in Australian politics. Only this year, newly released documents showed how Governor-General John Kerr corresponded with the Queen’s Secretary throughout the dismissal of the ALP Whitlam government in 1975. The letters revealed how Kerr railed against the Whitlam government, attacking its policy decisions, and even asked whether the monarchy would consider using its powers to dissolve it. And more recently, it was uncovered that Australia’s current Governor-General, David Hurley, secretly swore in former prime minister Scott Morrison to several ministerial roles during the pandemic. These appointments, which could have had a monumental impact on government operations, were not recorded anywhere on Hurley’s publicly available schedule, again raising questions about the powers vested in the Governor-General’s office.

And yet so many Australians, including younger citizens, just don’t seem to care about introducing a republic. In part, this reflects the ARM’s firmly middle-class characteristics. The Movement was established by prominent journalists, academics, lawyers, corporate figures, and some politicians in 1991. The same professions dominate today. Although these individuals undoubtedly bring a wealth of relevant expertise and knowledge, one negative consequence is the ARM’s heavy emphasis on the symbolism of becoming a republic and on designing the perfect selection process for an Australian Head of State, while paying relatively little attention to articulating precisely how a republic would benefit ordinary Australians.

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This is the most important issue because the fate of the republic will not be decided in meeting rooms. For the constitutional amendment to take place, Australians need to vote “yes” in a referendum. And symbolism and identity, seen as self-evidently important to the ARM, don’t appear to be vote-winners. Absent a stronger positive case, many Australians might just vote to keep what they know.

To make matters worse for the ARM, the debate for a republic is now happening in a context of serious decline in Australians’ trust in their public institutions and democracy. A spike in trust in democracy during the early stages of the pandemic swiftly fizzled out, and was followed by the second biggest recorded decline in 2022. This explains Queen Elizabeth’s remarkable and enduring popularity. Many viewed the Queen as dutiful and publicly minded, a source of continuity and stability in contrast to their feckless politicians and globally oriented elites. Irrespective of King Charles’s personal standing with Australians, their declining faith in democracy makes this a difficult moment in which to argue for the inherent benefit of elected office.

Queen Elizabeth’s death should therefore be a moment of collective reflection and debate for Australia. The end of her 70-year reign represents a major fork in the road — a time to assess where we came from and, perhaps more importantly, where we would like to go. Tragically, there seems to be little appetite for this: republicans seem to expect the transition to happen almost by itself, while monarchists are also counting on inertia to keep things as they are.

Neither side seems capable of, or interested in, mounting a compelling, positive case for their cause. And given the void left by the Queen’s passing, the monarchists’ job appears to be the easier one.

It was her fate to preside over perhaps the fastest and most dramatic decline of any nation’s wealth and power in recorded history, a bitter function she fulfilled with compassion, quiet dignity, and a sincere Christian devotion to her duty. She oversaw the creation of 21^st-century Britain, and if she felt the same ambivalence over the results that we all do, she kept it to herself. Through it all, she kept a fractious nation united in turbulent times, the one calm and steady certainty we have all known through lives of constant, and unsettling change.

Listening to the BBC radio news reporting her last great task of state, the appointment at Balmoral of Liz Truss as Prime Minister, I noticed that our state broadcaster made a point of explicitly recording that the nation had undergone yet one more smooth transition of power. Not every nation is blessed with such orderly transitions: no wonder the reaction from quarters of less happy realms, where such peaceful continuity can only be dreamed of, has at times been as bitter and jealous as we have seen. A nation is a family writ large. As Orwell wrote, Britain is “a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks.” And as at any time of loss and change, it is in moments like this we are shown who mourns with us, and who does not, who our family and friends are, and who they are not.

For these are solemn mysteries, not readily understood by other tribes. Anyone who meets a member of the Royal Family remembers the occasion for the rest of their lives. The encounter is shared, brought out in conversation over decades. And in the same way, anyone who has lost a parent will feel a part of themselves sharing this moment of our King’s loss: witnessing the Royal Family’s grief we remember our own loss, an entire nation joined in a collective act of remembrance and contemplation. For as the Austrian political theorist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote: “a monarchy involves all the troubles, problems and joys of family life, on a large and public scale.”

My mother was born in London, two years into our late Queen’s reign, to a family of strong Irish republican sympathies with little love for the Royal Family. Yet even so, the collective rituals of our state, embodied in the Royal Family, would come to envelop her, as she lived and died under one Queen’s long reign. Just as we all remember that strange, disordered time, I remember, as a callow and cynical teenager, my late mother respectfully attending the crowds that watched Diana’s cortege pass down the M1 motorway through Hertfordshire towards London and her funeral. The collective act of sympathy and commemoration that reinforces the nation as a unit had brought her too, with no inherited links of blood or sentiment, within the British family fold.

And in the same way, this liminal moment of transition from one way of life to another will live on in my own family story, just as it will in yours or in any other British family’s. On Thursday evening, I went to pick up my eldest son from Scouts just after the news broke; we strolled along the harbourside to get fish and chips from a chippy where the radio played national anthem and we heard the Prime Minister paying her respects. At six years old, he will remember this moment for the rest of his life: what he was doing, what we said, what we ate together sitting, as we never do, in front of the television, watching the state broadcaster like every other British household. In such a way are nations strengthened and maintained as a collective body by the family unit around whom our state’s rituals revolve.

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But all things must change, and the nation our new King has inherited is not a happy one. There is much for him to do to keep our collective family together, and we must hope that he will play a more active role in governance than his mother felt her due. Our constitution grants our monarch greater political power than the Queen chose to exercise, and we are fortunate that our new King possesses a willingness to intercede in public life that has at times tested the patience of Prime Ministers. He must be encouraged to continue: whatever his personal foibles, his instincts are good and just, and his decades-long critiques of globalisation, of our despoliation of our natural and built environments and our pell-mell rush towards the mythical horizon of progress have been tragically borne out by events.

What do we know of how our new King intends to rule? He is, after all, a man, like the nation he now rules, of strange and esoteric depths, both progressive and conservative in ways our party system does not adequately reflect. In his little-discussed 2010 book, Harmony, Charles remarks in a “call for revolution” that “it is very strange that we carry on behaving as we do. If we were on a walk in a forest and found ourselves on the wrong path, then the last thing we would do is carry on walking in the wrong direction. We would instead retrace our steps, go back to where we took the wrong turn, and follow the right path.” For, as he writes: “I cannot stress the point enough: we are travelling along a very wrong road.”

A follower of the Perennialist philosophy of René Guénon, and an admirer of the great American writer and farmer Wendell Berry, King Charles III has observed that: “Just as natural species, once lost, cannot be re-created in test tubes, so traditional, so-called ‘perennial’ wisdom, once lost, cannot be reinvented. This is the real damage being done by our disconnection, which is fast becoming all but complete in the modern world, all the while proving that the great experiment to stand apart from the rest of creation has failed.” A Christian mystic, a layer of hedgerows and protector of the soil, there is a mythic quality of identification between our King and his land which we have not experienced for some time.

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For Charles III, inspired by the Orthodox Christianity of his fathers, believes sincerely that “we need to escape the straitjacket of the Modernist world view” and has for decades shared his “concern from the very start… that Western culture was accelerating away from values and a perspective that had, up until then, been embedded in its traditional roots.” As he writes: “What I could see then was that without those traditional ‘anchors’ our civilisation would find itself in an increasingly difficult and exposed position. And, regrettably, that is what has happened. This is why, ever since those disturbing days, I have expended vast amounts of energy to help save what remains of those traditional approaches. I knew they would be needed for a ‘rainy day’ which I fear is now close by.”

What is our King’s vision of a just and rightly-ordered realm? As he writes, “in the 21st century we desperately need an alternative vision… a future where food production and its distribution will have to all happen more locally to each other and be less dependent, certainly, on aircraft; where the car will become much more subordinated to the needs of the pedestrian; where our economy will have to operate on a far less generous supply of raw materials and natural resources.” It is of a land “where the character of our built environments once more reflects the harmonious, universal principles of which we are an integral part”. A King moved to write a book in which he condemns the poisoning of our seas and rivers will have much to advise a Tory government that has overseen our disastrous, squalid water system: our one-time anti-monarchist leader Liz Truss will be fortunate in such an example of what true British Conservatism, of every field and hedgerow, actually means.

In practice, King Charles has done more than anyone living in this country to promote humane and people-centred farming and architecture, and to preserve as a living tradition the historic arts and handicrafts of not just our own culture but of man’s patrimony as a whole. And as King, there is more that he can do, and must be encouraged to do. It is right and just that both the Communication Workers Union and the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers have called off their planned strikes for next week in honour of our late Queen, but the bonds of respect that bind state and sovereign, ruler and ruled must go both ways. It is, for example, beneath the dignity of our state that the Royal Mail, founded by Henry VIII in 1516, be parcelled off and sold to foreign investors at the behest of EU directives, a course of action that 96% of CWU members opposed. A state must guard and protect its assets and its workers just as it does its great rituals and ceremonies: the Royal Mail is no less a part of our history than Windsor Castle and the Palace, and the accession of Charles III must bring into being the revival of the British state, or else the British state, our shared home, will be lost entirely.

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For there is still much for us all to win, just as there is still much for us to lose if we continue further down our wrong path. Consider the one last great infrastructure project of our late Queen’s reign, the Elizabeth Line, and imagine what we would gain from a revival of the British state’s power and glory under her son and successor. Imagine His Majesty’s Railways, linking the beautiful and humanely-planned new towns our King could oversee on the Crown Estate, just as he has expressed his own philosophy in warm brick and stone in Poundbury and Nansledan on his Duchy of Cornwall lands. A benign and thoughtful King can do much to guide an inexperienced Prime Minister at a time of crisis. As he wrote: “I wonder if we might see wisdom in the Chinese word for ‘crisis’, which also means ‘opportunity’? It is almost a knee-jerk reaction to try to put things back as they were when we hit such a crisis, but we could be more positive and forward-looking and consider another approach that could create something different — a framework that is more sustainable; an approach to economics that is more proportionate, balanced and connected; an economics that recognises the need for harmony.”

Queen Elizabeth was fated to reign over a British state in sharp and calamitous decline, and it may yet be our new King’s unhappy fate to preside over the dissolution of our United Kingdom. But we must be thankful that our King understands there are great opportunities to be found and utilised in our current time of crisis. An unpopular Prime Minister taking office at such a dangerous and turbulent period will be naturally inclined to lean on the continuity and legitimacy only our monarchy affords, and a King equally inclined towards politics and a guiding role in our nation’s development must surely make use of the rare destiny he has been granted, for which he has prepared for his entire life. There is time still to save our struggling family unit, and rebuild our shared home towards the humane vision both our King’s faith and instinct guide him — a great Carolean restoration that will mark his place in our national history.