The exiled royals are caught between their need for attention and their disgust at the tabloid media crusade against them. I won’t pick a side in this tawdry culture war

It may have been straight after Megxit – when Meghan and Harry decided to “step back” from the royal family in 2020; or it may have been a year later, when Oprah Winfrey stepped in to clear things up in a long interview that made everyone in and around the history of British royalty – basically all of us, everywhere – sound quite bad. Either way, it was a while ago that I decided to have no further view on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Or were we supposed to change their address once they’d left: Commoner and Commonness of Sussex? Not my concern: as I said, no further view.

Called upon to pick a side in any given culture war, you always have to gloss over certain complexities and contradictions, and nowhere more so than in this one. Inconveniently, it’s possible for all the things to be true. It’s possible that there are racists in the royal household, and for Meghan Markle to have been rude to members of it. It’s possible that Prince William bullied Prince Harry remorselessly, while Harry himself, in a different context – a Spotify production meeting, for instance – is the difficult one. It’s possible, indeed observable, that the British tabloid media waged a crusade against Meghan, attacking everything from her comportment while pregnant (according to the Express, she used “sneaky tricks to flaunt her bump”) to the implications of her vegetable preferences (the Daily Mail memorably associated her, via the avocado, with human rights abuses, drought and murder). It’s true that much of the red-tops’ coverage was racist, and plausible – as Meghan and Harry argue convincingly in their 2022 Netflix documentary – that this unleashed a tide of white-supremacist bile on social media.