On the eve of the Oprah interview with the couple, which aired on CBS on Monday at 1am GMT, it was indeed fair to expect that the impartial viewer would come away thinking: “Six of one, half a dozen of the other.” For those who were already Team Windsor, there were aspects that would grate enough to confirm their views: Oprah’s faux toughness, the mad opulence of the garden backdrop, the very carefully choreographed frankness. It’s possible, for instance, for the royal family to be inhumane, hierarchical to the point of lunacy, snobbish and racist – and simultaneously for Prince Harry and Meghan to be spoilt and high-handed. It’s possible, of course, in any clash between two factions, for everyone to be in the wrong. Photograph: Neil Mockford/GC ImagesĪnd so we come to last night’s interview. This buried a landmine that has detonated a quarter of a century later, upon contact with that other fixation of the same media, race: or, more specifically, dog-whistling racist tropes. Instead, it catalysed quite a cunning, self-justifying switcheroo from the gutter press: we had to hound the woman because the public demands it, the public is just so interested. Her death should have sparked a conversation not just about an intrusive press but about what the family represented, whether its hierarchies and rules could survive any more contact with living, sentient modern souls. Fair play, it was a decent thing, when she held hands with HIV patients, but generally speaking, she was just a Sloane in an egalitarian age, a pretty relic. She was neither a feminist nor any other kind of icon. She was not our people’s princess we may have watched Martin Bashir’s Panorama interview but with an idle rather than passionate interest. If you are of a certain age, you might recall that before she died, we were not all trying to dress like her. The post-rationalisation of Diana and her place in culture is almost hallucinatory at times. Instead, the opposite happened: far from posing difficult questions about whether all this invasive scrutiny was warranted or humane, the tragedy seemed to elevate it, to usher in a belief that this obsessiveness between a society and its head of state and her offspring and in-laws was somehow natural. Was there not a case for just giving it all a rest, especially given that the core traits of royalty, the bits that made them so unusual – restraint, self-abnegation, respectability – had been more or less torched by Prince Charles’s generation, anyway (it wasn’t just Camilla and Fergie and their antics Prince Andrew, who, of course, was then still just a buffoon with no Jeffrey Epstein taint, had added to it with It’s a Knockout). Curiosity had driven a woman into a pillar, so you might expect a generalised reflection on the nature of it – what were the paparazzi hoping to see? A divorcee, going about her business, with a gentleman caller. The death of Diana changed all that, but in a counterintuitive way. That pretty much sums up the experience of the royals pre-1997. Eventually, hawkers started selling eggs. But we could see for ourselves that it was not interesting – and then everyone got annoyed and some of us (not me) threw eggs. There grew a peculiar resentment of gawping at something that was only interesting because it was untouchable. You may recall David Blaine, the magician who lived in a glass box above the Thames for 44 days in 2003: people really wanted to know what he was doing, even though we could see what he was doing – and that was mainly nothing. Whatever curiosity surrounded them, they simply did not reward it, and the regular response to that, after a few centuries and whatnot, was to not be terribly curious. What did they actually care about? Manners, duty, causes, the Commonwealth. They were caught between two irreconcilable forces – their own culture of discretion, on one side, and intense, 24-hour scrutiny on the other – and they navigated that with a studied blandness. The family (I seriously dislike the affectation of calling them “the Firm”) survived while there was nothing to see. Tabloids were fascinated, but it was more of a convention than news – like a splash about tomatoes causing cancer, it was the out-of-office auto reply of the industry, a fallback. A seldom remembered fact about the royal family is that, before the death of Princess Diana, it was not normal to be interested in them.
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