"The Spare will not be in the shadows."
January 5, 2023 11:46 PM   Subscribe

Prince Harry's memoir, "Spare," has been leaked to the press and OMG. For those complaining that previous interviews and documentaries didn't spill enough tea or have enough drama, THIS ONE'S FOR YOU. There is enough dirt on everybody (particularly his "archnemesis" brother William) that the palace will be LOSING THEIR MINDS.

Meghan: Diana: Charles: Camilla: Kate: Good god, William: Even himself: Harry’s allegations are not just about a royal fist fight – but the very real dangers of hereditary power  
posted by jenfullmoon (288 comments total) 40 users marked this as a favorite
 
Oh god! make it all go away

And these people are our head(s) of states (in NZ)? time to do the full republic thing and let them go their own way
posted by mbo at 12:24 AM on January 6, 2023 [58 favorites]


I’m with you mbo. Also my head of state in Aust and I can’t believe we haven’t got rid of the bastards yet.
posted by awfurby at 12:55 AM on January 6, 2023 [13 favorites]


The fact a massive industry feeds off the drama around and paparazzi glimpses of these people is just so sad.
posted by neonamber at 1:08 AM on January 6, 2023 [26 favorites]


I hope Harry destroys the royal family, they're key to the horrid class system and much of the other evils there (I grew up there). Britain could be so much more but continually held back by the 1%
posted by unearthed at 1:32 AM on January 6, 2023 [38 favorites]


The Royal Family occupy a niche in the political ecosystems of Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada which is empty much of the time in the US — until it’s filled by the likes of Donald Trump!

Who was essentially a monarch, and fit into the monarch shaped hole in the political souls of human beings. And that was and is the ultimate source of his power and appeal.

In other words, having a crew of hopelessly ineffectual Royal bumblers like the Windsors protects you all from Donald Trumps — as well as Vladimir Putins.

Not a prophylactic to be casually dispensed with, however much it may irritate, chafe, and bind from time to time.
posted by jamjam at 1:34 AM on January 6, 2023 [47 favorites]


We had our own little Trump though, in the form of Johnson. Didn't protect us from that.
posted by Dysk at 1:43 AM on January 6, 2023 [51 favorites]


He was like a mild case of the flu that might have killed you without the Windsor vaccine, though.
posted by jamjam at 1:47 AM on January 6, 2023 [8 favorites]


If the monarchy has served any protective function, then that will have been more by accident than design. Remember there were two decades when the UK was one tragic demise away from ending up with a King Andrew.
posted by misteraitch at 1:56 AM on January 6, 2023 [34 favorites]


Ah, well. Next time we have a government you'd trust to rewrite the constitution from the ground up, give me a shout. I'd be interested to see it.
posted by Grangousier at 1:58 AM on January 6, 2023 [6 favorites]


In other words, having a crew of hopelessly ineffectual Royal bumblers like the Windsors protects you all from Donald Trumps — as well as Vladimir Putins.

I don't think anyone in the EU will forget the comments made by UK politicians in the run up to Brexit. It was "shithole countries" said in somewhat more polite terms.

[I'm not saying other countries in the EU don't have our fair share of anti-foreigner/racist attitudes .... but the royals preventing a Trump/Putin? Hmm. The UK has quite a history there, past and present.]
posted by UN at 1:59 AM on January 6, 2023 [13 favorites]


Recent UK elections have been presidential in nature, as people choose between the leaders of the party instead of the elected MPs. The constitutional monarchy -which means the queen and recently the king - has been a useless position that did nothing to stop Liz Truss from tanking the uk economy with her financial dumbness. The monarchy is useless in all regards, except as pomp and splendour. Let’s privatise them.
posted by The River Ivel at 2:04 AM on January 6, 2023 [12 favorites]




Next time we have a government you'd trust to rewrite the constitution from the ground up, give me a shout.

The Country shall have a taxpayer-funded royal "family" portrayed 24/7 by professionally-trained actors. Actors may change over time; roles shall be constant, with natural additions and retirements due to births,* deaths, the inception and dissolution of romantic relationships, and similar events.

The royal family being taxpayer-funded, citizens shall have a say in determining plot arcs, character traits, and production sets. Parliament shall have an additional say, as well as the veto, as the doings of the royal family may be expected to have an effect on the cultural health of the Nation.

* Casting and working hours for infants and young children shall follow industry standards.
posted by trig at 2:36 AM on January 6, 2023 [42 favorites]


It like the car crash you cannot like away from, the reason people watch daytime TV, like the zoo, and feeling like their own disfunctional family is less disfunctional, absolutely not healthy, for anyone.
And that is way the monarchy is not going away anytime soon.
posted by thegirlwiththehat at 2:39 AM on January 6, 2023 [3 favorites]


This is all so sad and pathetic.
Princess Diana was a whiny, melodramatic sentimentalist, so it's no surprise that her sons are the same.

I'm a reluctant monarchist, for similar reasons to jamjam's. I think of the alternatives and shudder. But I prefer the model we have in Scandinavia, where the royals have less money and even less power than the British. It still isn't perfect.
posted by mumimor at 2:59 AM on January 6, 2023 [12 favorites]


The royal family being taxpayer-funded, citizens shall have a say in determining plot arcs, character traits, and production sets.

Brilliant, supporting the creative industry as well as the nation... I'm sure there must already exist a burlesque troupe somewhere with a diva called Queeny McQueenface.
posted by protorp at 3:02 AM on January 6, 2023 [7 favorites]


I saw the bit about him losing his virginity with an older woman who treated him like a pony on twitter last night and assumed it was parody.
posted by biffa at 3:12 AM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]


I hope Harry destroys the royal family, they're key to the horrid class system and much of the other evils there (I grew up there).

It looks like he’s gambling there’s more money and fame to be had by living in loud, permanent, social media-soaked “conflict” with it.
posted by ryanshepard at 3:32 AM on January 6, 2023 [13 favorites]


I bet Peter Morgan really, really regrets saying The Crown ends after next season.
posted by basalganglia at 3:39 AM on January 6, 2023 [5 favorites]


Ghost Diana having her Queen of Thorns moment right now.
posted by corb at 3:50 AM on January 6, 2023 [5 favorites]


I like the play on words of the title of Harry's book: you have a) extra, as in the heir & the spare; you have b) bare, no excess (of which this book appears to be the opposite); and you have c) extremely angry or upset, as in "going spare"
posted by chavenet at 3:50 AM on January 6, 2023 [22 favorites]


The title is a Harry Potter reference, no?

"Kill the Spare"
posted by Zumbador at 4:26 AM on January 6, 2023 [3 favorites]


Sorry, guys. I’m not cool enough to sneer at this. I am firmly anti-British monarchy, and I am utterly here for this. Be messy, Harry!!!!!!!!!!
posted by joyceanmachine at 4:47 AM on January 6, 2023 [72 favorites]


I believe the French had a good solution for all the antics of royalty.
posted by Fizzy Kimchi at 4:52 AM on January 6, 2023 [23 favorites]


Nothing on the list above seems any different from royal family antics through the ages. Brits clinging to the wreckage of empire. Poundshop Succession with pointy hats.
posted by aeshnid at 5:02 AM on January 6, 2023 [6 favorites]


The title is a Harry Potter reference, no?

More like the royal duty to pop out an "heir and a spare".
posted by scruss at 5:21 AM on January 6, 2023 [39 favorites]


I now know way, way, way more than I ever even began to care to about Harry's 'tugger.' Literally off-the-scale TMI
posted by From Bklyn at 5:32 AM on January 6, 2023 [3 favorites]


As someone who was never interested in the private life of the royals, it was sure nice in the pre-Internet days where the only way this inundated your everyday life is by glancing at a certain kind of magazine at the grocery stores or flipping past Entertainment Tonight or A Current Affair. Now you can't avoid what's going on with them anywhere online! (Obv different you live in the UK.)
posted by Kitteh at 5:44 AM on January 6, 2023 [15 favorites]


War of the Roses 2 starting off a real snooze
posted by JoeBlubaugh at 5:54 AM on January 6, 2023 [1 favorite]


With the exception of the fame and the tiara, their problems all just seem so middle class 🥱
posted by phunniemee at 5:54 AM on January 6, 2023 [8 favorites]


I have little sympathy for the royal family but I think it's reprehensible that Meghan and Harry are using their family's dirty laundry to fund their lavish lifestyle. It's incredibly hypocritical and cynical to claim that you want reconciliation while selling out your family to the entire world. All the revelations so far have been utterly banal and Meghan and Harry come out looking like spoiled narcissists.
posted by sid at 5:57 AM on January 6, 2023 [17 favorites]


From the outside, I remain mystified at the affection so many people in the UK (and in some of the colonies) have for these people. To me they look more like parasitic clowns, but those would be fighting words in a lot of settings. The list of incredibly petty things in the links above doesn't do anything to change my mind about these people.

(And I'm definitely not saying that we are automatically better just because we gave the finger to monarchy a couple of hundred years ago -- we've clearly developed our own class of parasitic clowns who do all the crappy stuff without reciprocating with beautiful architecture and big pagent-like ceremonies.)
posted by Dip Flash at 6:04 AM on January 6, 2023 [9 favorites]


The Country shall have a taxpayer-funded royal "family" portrayed 24/7 by professionally-trained actors. Actors may change over time; roles shall be constant, with natural additions and retirements due to births,* deaths, the inception and dissolution of romantic relationships, and similar events.

Can we get Claire Foy back as the Queen? I thought she was good.
posted by briank at 6:09 AM on January 6, 2023 [18 favorites]


Drama queens… 😴
posted by beesbees at 6:18 AM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]


hope Harry destroys the royal family, they're key to the horrid class system

(Laughs in American.)
posted by ocschwar at 6:22 AM on January 6, 2023 [47 favorites]


The security costs for Harry and Meghan have been estimated at £4 million per year. They lost 95% of their income when stepping down from royal duties. Even with a reputed net worth of $50 million that is going to drain the family's finances without book deals and TV exposés.
It's a vicious trap they are in, driven out of the UK by the media and then driven straight into the arms of the US media by a need to make money. I don't envy them.
posted by Lanark at 6:22 AM on January 6, 2023 [81 favorites]


The Country shall have a taxpayer-funded royal "family" portrayed 24/7 by professionally-trained actors. Actors may change over time; roles shall be constant, with natural additions and retirements due to births,* deaths, the inception and dissolution of romantic relationships, and similar events.

Ooh, I was wondering what they'd do for the next season of The Rehearsal...
posted by Pitachu at 6:23 AM on January 6, 2023 [6 favorites]


All the revelations so far have been utterly banal and Meghan and Harry come out looking like spoiled narcissists.

And that's the royal family's super power, isn't it? They dwell in a world that's absolutely banal to the core, so even their abuse towards one another comes off as banal. I'll admit there's a lot in those links that has the feel of "he disrespected me at the cotillion!" but that's just how these emotionally distant twits roll and it still hurts, especially if you're the "spare" or the wife of the spare who has to also put up with racist in-laws while still maintaining the necessary decorum to not be ripped to shreds by the tabloids for disrespecting a thousand year old institution.

Remember the scene in Our Flag Means Death? "Those words though....they sounded polite but they still stung" "That's called passive-agression".

I have trouble relating to Harry and Meghan, but I'm not going to automatically dismiss their experiences because of that, especially since the rest of the royals are such terrible people.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:44 AM on January 6, 2023 [45 favorites]


...he writes in the book, which comes out Jan. 10, adding that he didn’t want to overshare about his penis.

I think it's too late for that!
posted by TedW at 6:48 AM on January 6, 2023 [3 favorites]


10 Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king.
11 He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots.
12 Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots.
13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.
14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants.
15 He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants.
16 Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle[c] and donkeys he will take for his own use.
17 He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves.
18 When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”
19 But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us.
20 Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.”

- 1 Samuel 8:10-20
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:52 AM on January 6, 2023 [43 favorites]


War of the Roses 2 starting off a real snooze

That's because Harry is quietly courting the noblemen and raising funds for an army; then, as soon as King Chuck is gone, he will make his claim to the throne and it will be on! That little tiff with the dog bowl was just foreshadowing.
posted by TedW at 6:53 AM on January 6, 2023 [6 favorites]


After politely reading many MeFi posts on blaseball, Eurovision, Game of Thrones, the Bulwer-Lytton contests, that really difficult invite-only trivia league, GBBO, and spelling bees, I wholeheartedly embrace this post.

My grandmother used to buy the Star and Enquirer and mail them to us when she was finished with them. I found Kitty Kelley's books earlier than I should have. From a young age I was forged to be ready for this day.

I ate up the Netflix documentary but with the release of Spare, I will evolve into my final celebrity trashgossip weasel form. May I, and all of those like me who aren't above it all, live long enough to see Prince Louis's memoir.
posted by kimberussell at 6:54 AM on January 6, 2023 [93 favorites]


I saw the bit about him losing his virginity with an older woman who treated him like a pony on twitter last night and assumed it was parody.

Rumor is it was Elizabeth Hurley.
posted by box at 6:57 AM on January 6, 2023 [5 favorites]


The Royal Family occupy a niche in the political ecosystems of Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada which is empty much of the time in the US — until it’s filled by the likes of Donald Trump!

This is... a take.

The United States president is both the head of state and head of government. The head of government can do a hell of a lot more damage to a country than a head of state, and there's nothing stopping a fascist from being elected head of government in any parliamentary system--hell, look at Italy right now.

At the end of the day, either you believe in self-governance or you don't. Arguing to keep a monarchy because the rabble can't be trusted not to elect a lunatic is an argument for feudalism.
posted by rhymedirective at 6:58 AM on January 6, 2023 [33 favorites]


Canadian small-r republican here. I can dream about casting off the institution, but I know it's not going to happen absent a devastating war or other massive crisis requiring a complete rebuild of the state. The British royals aren't going to go away anytime soon, but luckily for Canada, they're fairly irrelevant.

I won't get the abolition I want, but if every now and then the curtain gets pulled back, and we get to see what a rotten bunch are at the top and have a good laugh at their expense -- I'm totally here for that. Bring on the trashy gossip!
posted by Capt. Renault at 6:58 AM on January 6, 2023 [9 favorites]


How hard would it have been for The Firm to treat Meghan with any grace in the first place? What did they think they were going to get out of it?

(throwing Wills and Kate under the double decker bus for the Nazi uniform is really skilled petty, though...)
posted by armacy at 6:59 AM on January 6, 2023 [17 favorites]


's incredibly hypocritical and cynical to claim that you want reconciliation while selling out your family to the entire world.

Not if part of what you're particularly angry about is that 1) they lied about you and your wife to the press and 2) your brother broke a media-related promise that the two of you would never engage in the practice that you'd both agreed was a key element in your mother's death.

There are worlds and worlds and worlds and entire colonial systems of race and oppression between what I grew up in and what Harry grew up in, but one common element is the requirement to stay silent, both publicly and privately, when faced with toxicity and abuse from people who are higher-up than you. You're just supposed to take it and never say anything bad to outsiders about what is happening.

So yeah, stay messy, Harry. I hope he says his piece as many times as he wants as loud as he wants for as much money as he can possibly get.

All the revelations so far have been utterly banal and Meghan and Harry come out looking like spoiled narcissists.

Uh, it isn't banal to physically assault your brother, encourage him to wear a Nazi uniform even as a joke, then hang him out to dry in the most public and humiliating way possible, and encourage racist abuse of your brother's spouse.

Harry still hasn't said which family member made that terrible comment wondering what the color of his kid's skin would be.
posted by joyceanmachine at 7:00 AM on January 6, 2023 [102 favorites]


I believe the French had a good solution for all the antics of royalty.

Once upon a time, so did the English.
posted by thivaia at 7:06 AM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]


The French has the gonadinal fortitude where the English did not. Both cut off the head of a king. Both had dictators take control afterwards. Both then had a horrible king come to power soon after. The English simply replaced him with another royal, while the French decided the institution of monarchy was a bad idea.

The English wimped out. The French did not.

/derail

As to the book, it's not like he has a career to fall back on. He was in the military, but he's too old to go back into the service or completely break with the UK by joining the US army. There's the old tradition of nobles going off to be mercenaries, but I think that's frowned on these days. He's got valuable gossip and unfortunately that may be his only value these days. So if this is what's required to keep him and his spouse and kids living at the level of physical comfort they are used to, go for it. Embarrass all those racist assholes. Even as he's embarrassing himself.
posted by Hactar at 7:18 AM on January 6, 2023 [24 favorites]


Can I ask a question? In the very little bit of media I have consumed about the Royal Family, what seems to be hanging RIGHT THERE, unspoken, is the possibility that Prince Harry is not King Charles’s biological son. Given everything that’s come out about the royal marriage around that time, it certainly seems possible. Has he addressed this rumor in any of the documentaries or in the memoir? Do you get the impression that this is something they’ve addressed with each other directly? Do you think it’s likely the suspicion of it is driving some of the family’s rage and abuse?
posted by Merricat Blackwood at 7:26 AM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]


The French has the gonadinal fortitude where the English did not. Both cut off the head of a king. Both had dictators take control afterwards. Both then had a horrible king come to power soon after. The English simply replaced him with another royal, while the French decided the institution of monarchy was a bad idea.

It's the "dictators take control afterwards" that deserves examination, if you have a strong stomach. There are reasons those dictators (and the mobs they couldn't always control) came a cropper. (And to be utterly pedantic, the French monarchy did not stop with the guillotine.)

Judicial murder and assassination as political tools tends not to work well in the long run. Or even the short, for that matter.

As to the book- eh. Reel one of Roshomon, other reels probably never to be made.
posted by BWA at 7:36 AM on January 6, 2023 [5 favorites]


Rumor is it was Elizabeth Hurley.

Katie Price and Jilly Cooper also big fans of horses and of deflowering.
posted by biffa at 7:38 AM on January 6, 2023 [1 favorite]


It looks like he’s gambling there’s more money and fame to be had by living in loud, permanent, social media-soaked “conflict” with it.

Given that he was already unimaginably rich and famous from the moment of his birth, I wonder how much of an actual incentive that stuff is. No doubt he might prefer to be those things on his own terms/of his own making as much as possible, but he's never going to be self-made rich & famous in the way that people who aren't born into royalty can be.

As someone else who grew up in an abusive home (that was neither rich nor famous, but was obsessed about public appearances, my parents caring more about looking like good parents rather than actually being good parents), I've taken a tremendous amount of satisfaction over the years in skewering other people's perceptions of what the household I grew up in was like on the inside. And I absolutely can't fault Harry for getting a kick out of doing the same. That strikes me as a much stronger and more rewarding motivation for all of this than seeking yet more money & exposure.
posted by terretu at 7:38 AM on January 6, 2023 [48 favorites]


Gossip weaselliness aside, I've always believed that Harry wanted out long before Meghan came around. He has famously always hated the press and tried to create his own life just on the perimeter of what the family would allow. Harry isn't above reproach - I think he could have done more to prep Meghan for what she was getting into instead of hiding themselves from the press and I also think he only hates the cameras he can't control - but losing your Mom in such a public way was a raw deal for a 12 year old. Kudos to him for doing some work to get himself to the place he is now.

It was the blatantly racist treatment of Meghan and their son plus his family's refusal to interfere (honestly, nobody was going to fire William and Kate from the Royal Family if they put out a statement) that finally pushed Harry to separate.

Other than my own lowbrow enjoyment of watching Harry drag everyone, I hope Spare dampens the narrative that Meghan is an evil puppetmistress who made Harry turn his back on his family. Even if half of what Harry says is a lie (and I believe he has receipts for everything) Charles, William, and their staffs are quite awful.

(Diana was also very messy and used the press for her own interests, but she has been lionized in death.)
posted by kimberussell at 7:42 AM on January 6, 2023 [39 favorites]


I won't get the abolition I want, but if every now and then the curtain gets pulled back, and we get to see what a rotten bunch are at the top and have a good laugh at their expense -- I'm totally here for that. Bring on the trashy gossip!

Sometimes I can enjoy the curtain being pulled back; sometimes it feels like pointing and laughing at a bunch of people having various degrees of success and failure grappling with mental health issues & other trauma from having to live as part of this dysfunctional institution. Today feels more the later for me; just what a bunch of awfulness that people are living with both in terms of what they are doing to each other and having inflicted on them in the name of preserving this system.

I'd be in favour of having a royal family of beavers for Canada's head of state. They could live in a nice big pond, build their dams & lodges, and periodically perform a ceremonial tail slap to give assent to legislation.
posted by nubs at 7:44 AM on January 6, 2023 [25 favorites]


Can I ask a question? In the very little bit of media I have consumed about the Royal Family, what seems to be hanging RIGHT THERE, unspoken, is the possibility that Prince Harry is not King Charles’s biological son....

The specific rumours were that he was the son of Major James Hewitt. They are untrue, Hewitt is on record as saying that he did not meet Diana until after Harry was born. It has been reported that Charles himself told Harry about the rumours and that they were definitely not true. Diana had several affairs in the late 80s and 90s, but there's no evidence she was unfaithful to Charles before her children were born.

Harry also has a very strong family resemblance to both his father, Charles, and paternal grandfather Philip. The rumours really relate to the fact that Harry is redheaded, but red hair runs in both his parents families and is a recessive trait.
posted by plonkee at 7:46 AM on January 6, 2023 [34 favorites]




So yeah, stay messy, Harry.

Right, like that time he compared killing brown people to playing a video game.
posted by sid at 7:51 AM on January 6, 2023 [5 favorites]


There are worlds and worlds and worlds and entire colonial systems of race and oppression between what I grew up in and what Harry grew up in, but one common element is the requirement to stay silent, both publicly and privately, when faced with toxicity and abuse from people who are higher-up than you. You're just supposed to take it and never say anything bad to outsiders about what is happening.

Common to practically all dysfunctional families. The absolute worst thing you can do is to break omerta.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:59 AM on January 6, 2023 [26 favorites]


armacy, american english isn't immune: “beaten like a red-headed stepchild”, anyone?
posted by scruss at 8:07 AM on January 6, 2023 [8 favorites]


Anyone who thinks that monarchy is some sort of check on humanity's worst must have not heard of colonialism? The slavery, the hands being cut off, the looting, the fighting a war just to push opium... does any of that ring a bell?
posted by splitpeasoup at 8:07 AM on January 6, 2023 [19 favorites]


Hat tip to jenfullmoon for making the thing I don’t want to read about so easy to read about ;)
posted by Phanx at 8:08 AM on January 6, 2023 [20 favorites]


Writing about frostbite on your penis as image rehabilitation …

We can all agree that this is a lot of misdirection in the form of sensationalism, right? Because it does seem to be working.
posted by Bottlecap at 8:10 AM on January 6, 2023


It's a vicious trap they are in, driven out of the UK by the media and then driven straight into the arms of the US media by a need to make money. I don't envy them.

They could, like, get jobs.
posted by Jon_Evil at 8:11 AM on January 6, 2023 [26 favorites]


CMD-F "goblin mode"
posted by goatdog at 8:24 AM on January 6, 2023 [9 favorites]


It's fun BUT where's William's affairs and that nonce Andrew...
posted by kingdead at 8:24 AM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]


like, get jobs
I remember there being a fantasy where they quietly left The Firm, and global celebrity itself, behind.
He gets a job flying helicopters for the Canadian Coast Guard, and she plays a tissue pathologist on CSI: Vancouver.
They allow the rest of the fam to decay messily while they're just going on vacations with Gordo and Barb from next door. Who needs to come up with funding for millions in private security when you're irrelevant normies?
posted by bartleby at 8:25 AM on January 6, 2023 [28 favorites]


Can I ask a question? In the very little bit of media I have consumed about the Royal Family, what seems to be hanging RIGHT THERE, unspoken, is the possibility that Prince Harry is not King Charles’s biological son ... Has he addressed this rumor in any of the documentaries or in the memoir? Do you get the impression that this is something they’ve addressed with each other directly?

It's not unspoken, Merricat Blackwood, it's right there in the post:
King Charles made ‘sadistic’ jokes about Prince Harry’s ‘real’ dad.

I've just been listening to a podcast about Ultra Processed Food (stuff that basically has zero nutritional value, but which prods your body to want to consume it nonetheless).

I feel like all this bullshit is the news equivalent. I don't like it, I'm not interested in it, it has zero value to anybody least of all me, I avoid it as much as possible and yet every now and then I look round and I've put myself in a thread full of it and can't help consuming it, and find myself feeling gross and regretful as a result.
posted by penguin pie at 8:25 AM on January 6, 2023 [17 favorites]


what penguin pie said

step in dog turds and you too will be stinky and shitty
posted by elkevelvet at 8:31 AM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]




I have little sympathy for the royal family but I think it's reprehensible that Meghan and Harry are using their family's dirty laundry to fund their lavish lifestyle. It's incredibly hypocritical and cynical to claim that you want reconciliation while selling out your family to the entire world. All the revelations so far have been utterly banal and Meghan and Harry come out looking like spoiled narcissists.

I have a lot of sympathy for them and I think it is entirely justified. Harry was born into celebrity, he didn't choose it. Members of his family have used their considerable connections and influence with large media companies to engage in a sustained campaign of harassment against Harry, his wife and their children. When he and Megan announced that they wanted to withdraw as working royals the harassment didn't end, it escalated.

Now they are castigated by the press for daring to tell their story on their terms. "Spoiled narcissist!?" give me a break. Harry didn't choose this life, he was famous from almost the moment of conception. He doesn't have some inflated view of his own self importance in the story, to the contrary his sense of self worth seems to be deflated from a lifetime of abuse by his father and brother. The spoiled narcissists are the King, Queen Consort and the Prince and Princess of Wales.
posted by interogative mood at 8:39 AM on January 6, 2023 [68 favorites]


Dang it, will you people please stop tempting me to have an opinion about this?
posted by straight at 8:46 AM on January 6, 2023 [48 favorites]


Whoever reads this thing, please just drop me a MeMail about any passages that describe how/whether The Talk includes emphasizing the importance of not impregnating commoners in particular.
posted by Etrigan at 8:46 AM on January 6, 2023 [5 favorites]


I am well prepared for this media product by a theme another media product (The Crown) returns to again and again: that the royal family are rich rednecks flailing as the social conventions, which once constrained and protected them, lose power. That Harry, Will and Charles appear mainly to be arguing about whose wife is the more ruthless social climber is darkly hilarious to the extent it's not horribly tragic. I wonder what the book says about Sarah Ferguson and the Countess of Wessex ... also middle class women who made it good in royal family terms...
posted by MattD at 8:52 AM on January 6, 2023 [5 favorites]


At first I had thought that Canada had the "no foreigners buying real estate" law because of Chinese investors.

But its timing to all this has me thinking more broadly on Canada's decision as it could be anti-anti-monarchial, as well.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 8:55 AM on January 6, 2023 [1 favorite]


If 2023 can just take care of destroying the Monarchy (sorry Mum!), the US Republican Party, and Putin, it will be forgiven for a bunch of sins. Adding in major positive shifts on climate action (protecting Amazon etc) and it would be even better.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 9:04 AM on January 6, 2023 [14 favorites]


Now they are castigated by the press for daring to tell their story on their terms.

Sympathy for the Royal?
posted by elkevelvet at 9:09 AM on January 6, 2023 [3 favorites]


Count me among the Canadians who wants to abolish the monarchy, but I can't help it: every time I look at those boys I instinctively side with Harry because William looks like a cop.
posted by klanawa at 9:14 AM on January 6, 2023 [59 favorites]


And here I thought there were a lot of revelations in that interview they did with Oprah a while back.

Just scratching the surface!
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 9:34 AM on January 6, 2023


I have always sided with Harry, at least since there was a serious rift. I still feel a bit sick reading all this, though, possibly because it requires me to look at the royals not with historic detachment or indifference but active dislike.

You hate to see their pretty little children growing up with the idea, in the back of your head, that they will either be terrible people or spend their lives on the run from the terrible people they live with. I'm reminded of an Irish PM who, around 1900, took the floor and publicly refused to join in on the traditional congratulations of the birth of another prince, saying that this child too was likely to be useless and a drain on the exchequer. (I wish I could look this up, but I don't have the right search terms. I seem to recall that the baby grew up to be the Duke of Windsor, and if so, he wasn't wrong.)

For its heirs, most royalty is a kind of ... I don't want to say "bondage" or "servitude" because those are very real and much worse. But it does mean being born with the expectation of having no inner life that cannot be accessed, no wide choice of careers or of romantic partners, no autonomy that others take for granted. It may not be as bad as other fates, but it still should not exist.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:36 AM on January 6, 2023 [15 favorites]


(Erratum: I should note that some royals don't go through this. There are continental royals that go to college and get jobs, learn skills, etc., and although it is at an elite level, they do live more like people. There was the king who worked as an airline pilot, and the Dutch prince who went to Harvard for a grad degree and stood in line at Au Bon Pain like everyone else, a thing not even Trump probably ever did.)
posted by Countess Elena at 9:40 AM on January 6, 2023 [12 favorites]


To be honest I don't have any sympathy for them when they preside over a country that still has massive wealth inequality and rampant classism from which they materially benefit. Being in a spotlight sucks, but not knowing where your next meal/rent check comes from is infinitely worse.
posted by Ferreous at 9:46 AM on January 6, 2023 [13 favorites]


I'll just leave this here - I think it sums up the American impression of the royals well.

Also, def. on team Harry and Meghan. Go get 'em kids.
posted by Toddles at 9:54 AM on January 6, 2023 [1 favorite]


and the Dutch prince who went to Harvard for a grad degree and stood in line at Au Bon Pain like everyone else,

Funny you mention that. Harvard, which owns the buildings, kicked out Au Bon Pain and the cheap Chinese restaurant, and made the area much more fancy and less accessible to the public.
posted by Melismata at 10:07 AM on January 6, 2023 [7 favorites]


All Canada needs is someone to rubber stamp the appointment of the Governer General on the government's recommendation.

So beavers seem fine.
posted by lookoutbelow at 10:11 AM on January 6, 2023 [4 favorites]


Harry still hasn't said which family member made that terrible comment wondering what the color of his kid's skin would be.

My guess is he thought that if he didn’t name names, people would just assume, probably correctly, that it was Philip.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 10:14 AM on January 6, 2023 [3 favorites]


Apparently, Harry told Oprah it wasn't QEII or Philip.
posted by joyceanmachine at 10:27 AM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]


why why why
posted by bluesky43 at 10:38 AM on January 6, 2023


I say they should replace the royals with Disney animatronic versions, so when you go to the palace you got your singing bears over here, and your ka-chinging heirs over there. And just for good measure, an animatroic Rowan Atkinson in one corner continuously overpronouncing the 'b' in 'bears' and Eddie Izzard in the other going on about monkeys in French.
posted by zaixfeep at 10:39 AM on January 6, 2023 [4 favorites]


one better: AI royalty whose births, deaths, love affairs, etc. are procedurally generated, and who can make special appearances via hologram at important state functions, behaving with dignity when necessary and being scurrilous online for the benefit of the tabloids
posted by Countess Elena at 10:45 AM on January 6, 2023 [3 favorites]


Declare every citizen an equal monarch, everyone shares the throne.
posted by fimbulvetr at 11:01 AM on January 6, 2023


No pegging? I'm out
posted by ominous_paws at 11:02 AM on January 6, 2023 [7 favorites]


Every time I hear about Charles/William/Harry and their quarrels and shenanigans, I think of this Christine Lavin song. The song has aged badly in many respects, but it's about the level of seriousness I think the internal quarrels of the House of Windsor merit from an American like me.

The racist shit they've done to Meghan is awful, though.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 11:04 AM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]


Declare every citizen an equal monarch, everyone shares the throne.

Like how Sweden shares the national Twitter account but I have found out they stopped that in 2018.
posted by Mitheral at 11:14 AM on January 6, 2023 [1 favorite]


All Canada needs is someone to rubber stamp the appointment of the Governor General on the government's recommendation.

Although that might raise the little matter of Crown lands. Depending on where you sit, of course, eliminating the monarchy and any rights to that land could be a net positive. See also: Land Back.
posted by warriorqueen at 11:20 AM on January 6, 2023 [5 favorites]


AI royalty whose births, deaths, love affairs, etc. are procedurally generated, and who can make special appearances via hologram at important state functions, behaving with dignity when necessary and being scurrilous online for the benefit of the tabloids

monarchy but blaseball, please
posted by BungaDunga at 12:05 PM on January 6, 2023 [5 favorites]


I say they should replace the royals with Disney animatronic versions

Aardman, surely!
posted by trig at 12:26 PM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]


I have mixed feelings about Harry, as well as HarryAndMegan, but they seem like the best of a bad lot. Not that that's saying much, but if we were all forced to Choose Your Royal, I'd be on Harry's side 10 times out of 10.

(I'm just boggled that someone thought "Spare" was a fucking Harry Potter reference. That fandom really thinks the world revolves around it, doesn't it.)
posted by tzikeh at 12:49 PM on January 6, 2023 [35 favorites]


How long before Seth Rogan plays Harry in a biopic?
posted by SoberHighland at 12:54 PM on January 6, 2023 [1 favorite]


Metafilter: my final celebrity trashgossip weasel form
posted by eckeric at 1:07 PM on January 6, 2023 [11 favorites]


(I'm just boggled that someone thought "Spare" was a fucking Harry Potter reference. That fandom really thinks the world revolves around it, doesn't it.)

Thought it was a book about bowling, was greatly disappointed.
posted by JanetLand at 1:11 PM on January 6, 2023 [29 favorites]


Seth Rogen and... Rashida Jones? Does it have to be biopic Oscar bait, or can they play it for laughs and have her breaking him out of the palace with funny hat guys running after them?
posted by Selena777 at 1:27 PM on January 6, 2023 [19 favorites]


the cheap Chinese restaurant

Yenching had already closed, to be replaced by the actually rather pleasing Clover Labs. Word was that after 40+ years the family was done.

The real damage to Harvard Square has been done by the PE guy who bought up most of the buildings on the stretch where Mass Ave. splits off into Brattle St. and has been murdering the resident businesses one by one. Been waiting for the other shoe to drop on Cardullo's for a while now.
posted by praemunire at 1:30 PM on January 6, 2023 [7 favorites]


Oh god! make it all go away

it's easy if you try
posted by philip-random at 1:30 PM on January 6, 2023 [1 favorite]


Selena777, did a triple take of amazement at the brilliance of your idea. I would see your movie SEVERAL times
posted by epj at 1:36 PM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]


I really really want another series of The Windsors, but I fear that reality may have out-batshitted the sitcom.
posted by fimbulvetr at 1:50 PM on January 6, 2023 [5 favorites]


The Country shall have a taxpayer-funded royal "family" portrayed 24/7 by professionally-trained actors.

We may have missed our chance four months ago, but I think if upon the death of Elizabeth, we'd just smoothly slotted Olivia Colman into the role, it would have been fine for everyone (of course, Ms Colman would have had the occasional long afternoon on commonwealth visits watching folk dancing, but in return for a guaranteed long-running role, she might have been okay with that).
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:04 PM on January 6, 2023 [10 favorites]


Anyway, I hate to have a side in all this, because I don't care about ceremonial royals at all, but going to have to go with the high-profile victim of institutional and media racism and the husband who gave up a lot to get her out of a truly toxic situation. They can't just become nobodies, and no one's forcing anyone to buy their book/watch their series/whatever, so I have no trouble with them dining at the same table as the other royals, so to speak.
posted by praemunire at 2:26 PM on January 6, 2023 [27 favorites]


In other words, having a crew of hopelessly ineffectual Royal bumblers like the Windsors protects you all from Donald Trumps — as well as Vladimir Putins.

Stares in disbelief from Ireland while muttering something about The Famine Queen, aka Victoria.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 2:30 PM on January 6, 2023 [25 favorites]


“...could this paternity mystery relate to: In British English, the word 'ginger' is sometimes used to describe red-headed people (at times in an insulting manner), with terms such as 'gingerphobia' and 'gingerism' used by the British media.”

It may have been only in the last ten years that I learned that there was any kind of stigma attached to being a redhead, and specifically that this stigma is still (very mildly?) active in the UK.

I think it's probably because I read more non-US anglophone novels and watch more non-US media now than I did earlier in life that I've only learned this so recently.

Anyway, surely I'm not the only American who is just utterly baffled at this particular prejudice. It's one of those cultural things I imagine has some interesting history behind it, but from the outside seems very arbitrary.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:41 PM on January 6, 2023 [14 favorites]


Oh, you guys. They're all just people, doing the best they can, which isn't that great in the systems they've all been handed.

It is totally possible to have compassion for _all_ of them at the same time, while also recognizing that all of it needs to change urgently.

reprehensible that Meghan and Harry are using their family's dirty laundry to fund their lavish lifestyle

I believe they're constrained by a need (perceived or real, probably real) to retain security to protect themselves and their children.

Princess Diana was a whiny, melodramatic sentimentalist, so it's no surprise that her sons are the same.

I'm not sure if this is a joke? I mean, maybe she was more emotionally open than the average northern European, but it's far from clear that stoicism is better than being "whiny" (i.e., voicing one's needs instead of hoping they're magically perceived and met).


Meghan and Harry come out looking like spoiled narcissists.

Could someone please, please suggest some way they could advocate for themselves _at all_ where they couldn't be portrayed this way? I think it's probably impossible. Anyone who has the strength to believe they know what's best _for themselves_ while other people want something else for them will have a hard time being perceived as noble.
posted by amtho at 2:43 PM on January 6, 2023 [55 favorites]


In my craziest, most conspiratorial moments, I wonder if the royals realized they were never more popular than during the drama-filled, tabloid-crazy 90's and this is their attempt to recapture that magic.

Gossip weaselliness aside, I've always believed that Harry wanted out long before Meghan came around.

Agreed and this book has made it obvious. And I give him props for making it clear that he was driving that choice and it wasn't evil Meghan stealing him away. He wanted out and finally found a woman willing to marry him and help him leave.

He has famously always hated the press and tried to create his own life just on the perimeter of what the family would allow. Harry isn't above reproach - I think he could have done more to prep Meghan for what she was getting into

So apparently this information is coming from a Spanish copy of the book that The Guardian had translated and I can't say how accurate it is but it sounds like Will and Kate were fans of Suits (which was pretty popular in the UK a decade ago?) and because of that and the casual way former girlfriends were treated he expected Meghan to be treated the same or even better than previous girlfriends. However, it's also possible that he was never serious enough about another girlfriend for them to get the royal treatment so he was just blind to what that entailed.

I think it's reprehensible that Meghan and Harry are using their family's dirty laundry to fund their lavish lifestyle. It's incredibly hypocritical and cynical to claim that you want reconciliation while selling out your family to the entire world. All the revelations so far have been utterly banal and Meghan and Harry come out looking like spoiled narcissists.

Weird. Pretty sure Meghan doesn't have credits on this book. Why is she in this? She actually had a job before this, had her own money, and has a successful podcast too.

When he and Megan announced that they wanted to withdraw as working royals the harassment didn't end, it escalated.

That's where I am (and on the "burn it down" side too.) Harry was born into a weird tax-draining human zoo and was castigated for staying (especially when as a spare he's not "useful" once the heir has kids) then he's castigated for trying to put some distance between the Firm and himself but still staying in the Firm, and he was castigated for leaving. Short of building a time machine and dismantling the royalty decades ago, what was he supposed to do?

Anyway, surely I'm not the only American who is just utterly baffled at this particular prejudice. It's one of those cultural things I imagine has some interesting history behind it, but from the outside seems very arbitrary.

I think in the UK, it comes from red-hair being associated with the Irish. And in mainland Europe, maybe it has to do with antisemitism as red-hair was associated with Jewish people. At least in medieval Europe.
posted by asteria at 2:44 PM on January 6, 2023 [20 favorites]


Ireland, by the way, replaced the monarchy with an elected head of state, and it seems to have worked out fine for them.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 2:45 PM on January 6, 2023 [10 favorites]


>They could, like, get jobs.

Can they though? Maybe there is an alternate timeline where Harry pursued academic work, or established himself in some kind of business or profession, or made a long-term career in the military, or otherwise settled on some independent way of finding and adding value in life.

But as of now, he's a guy with really high living expenses who's pushing 40 and struggling to find direction and, I gather, has very limited professional skills outside of the rarified world of the royal family. Maybe more importantly, I bet he has absolutely no enculturation into the norms of modern working life. I've heard (definitely unsubstantiated) that when he and Meghan moved to California he tried to get a foothold in the tech industry by demanding outlandish compensation and equity stakes for being, at the end of the day, an empty-shirt "advisor" and an interesting name on the About Us page.

It's completely understandable that he might not be well calibrated on his position in a foreign (in more ways than one) professional environment. But my fellow Americans, would you want to deal with Prince Harry as your new hire... or your new boss?
posted by 4rtemis at 2:48 PM on January 6, 2023 [22 favorites]


They could, like, get jobs.

Again, Meghan has had, like, jobs. She has worked. She was not born rich like Kate or an aristocrat like Diana.

As for Harry - what would he do, outside of something in showbiz, that would pay enough for their security costs? He's not the son of the Dutch king or the Danish king where he's been raised closer to a normal person and is more of a local celebrity. He's famous all over the world and was raised in a weird human zoo. All of that means that there are probably a lot of people that would want to hurt him or his family.

So the idea of him becoming a normie helicopter pilot is as realistic as Marie Antoinette becoming a shepherdess. His skills are limited to the military, philanthropy, and being a royal. And only one of those pays.
posted by asteria at 2:58 PM on January 6, 2023 [27 favorites]


That's it, I'm a republican. Sorry it's taken me so long, I know other people got there faster. But I'm here now...
posted by ianso at 3:00 PM on January 6, 2023 [1 favorite]


They could, like, get jobs.
Can they though?


Perhaps one job that Harry could do is "author"? Perhaps he could write a memoir? I don't know if anybody would be interested in the resulting book, but if they were, it could be a way he could earn money through his labour. I'm sure that would please all the critics.
posted by Superilla at 3:00 PM on January 6, 2023 [85 favorites]


Harry isn't above reproach - I think he could have done more to prep Meghan for what she was getting into

I'm not sure he recognized that it was necessary - he seems to have still been somewhat blind to the awfulness of his family at that point. Just think of the unkindness of his family in condemning her for not recognizing that their weird hierarchy rules applied in private as well as public. She probably spent a lot of time saying to him "you know that's not normal, right?"
posted by Preserver at 3:10 PM on January 6, 2023 [7 favorites]


I'm not sure if this is a joke? I mean, maybe she was more emotionally open than the average northern European, but it's far from clear that stoicism is better than being "whiny" (i.e., voicing one's needs instead of hoping they're magically perceived and met).

Yeah, Diana had a bunch of issues, but I appreciate that she pushed her boundaries to support people with AIDS at a time when few of her class would.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:13 PM on January 6, 2023 [39 favorites]


It was the blatantly racist treatment of Meghan and their son plus his family's refusal to interfere (honestly, nobody was going to fire William and Kate from the Royal Family if they put out a statement) that finally pushed Harry to separate.

Last weekend, I binged a bunch of episodes of the podcast A Little Bit Culty, led by two people who were NXIVM whistle-blowers, and I learned a lot from it. They frame their interviews around the questions: How did you get in/what did you think you were getting into? What finally woke you up so that you left? and How is your healing going?

I was raised by a dad who is a classic narcissist, and am recently separated from a partner I stayed with for far too long after things started going bad. We were together 29 years in all, the bad stuff really started happening about seven or eight years ago, I decided to leave on December 8, 2021, and then it took me until mid-October of 2022 to actually be able to move out.

These cult-related questions really resonated with me and my own experiences, but they've been on my mind thinking about Harry and Meghan as this story percolates to me even though I haven't read any of the full stories about it. Often there's a long period of cognitive dissonance during which a cult member sees that the cult is toxic or harmful in one way or another, but they can't make up their mind to leave, or they're too convinced they can't survive outside the cult. I believed for a long time that I couldn't care for myself if I left my partner, until the day, the very moment, when I realized it didn't matter: I had to leave anyway. I'm not surprised Harry has been suffering with that for a long time, and that it took a "straw breaking the camel's back" moment for him to leave.
posted by Well I never at 3:17 PM on January 6, 2023 [35 favorites]


I love mess
posted by fluttering hellfire at 3:24 PM on January 6, 2023 [10 favorites]


One of the things that all of these chats about Harry and Meghan have uncovered is that you will get more support working as a barista than you ever would attached to the royal family. Your manager might actually listen to you if you're not feeling well and can't handle a day in front of the espresso machine.

If you're attached to the royal family and have problems coping with what's going on? Too bad for you, they're not set up for that. Absolutely no resources. Oh, you just gave birth? GET OUT THERE IN FRONT OF THE PAPS. Nobody cares if you're a wreck.

They are, however, perfectly prepared to iron the king's socks every day. Priorities, people!

I suppose living in incredible plushness is some comfort, but obviously not much of one. And it doesn't even begin to compensate for the incredibly racist treatment that Meghan received.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 3:33 PM on January 6, 2023 [13 favorites]


What sort of cultural conditioning makes people feel any remorse for royals, especially british ones? They're parasites on the countries they "rule". I can't fathom the logic that somehow a barista making minimum wage to be screamed at by customers has it better than british royalty.
posted by Ferreous at 3:41 PM on January 6, 2023 [7 favorites]


I've always felt a bit sorry for Harry. I know what it's like to grow up with an asshole father who considered you a failure the day you were born. I don't think he owes the family any loyalty at this point. And it's not like he and Meghan started this whole feud-by-proxy in the press; I don't see why taking the high road should be their sole responsibility.

If he doesn't manage to rise above his upbringing and make something productive out of the rest of his life, at least he's making an effort to break the cycle for his kids. When the kids are a little older, I wouldn't be surprised if Meghan went back into showbiz in some capacity, maybe in the production end.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:52 PM on January 6, 2023 [24 favorites]


There is enough dirt on everybody (particularly his "archnemesis" brother William) that the palace will be LOSING THEIR MINDS.

How awful!
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 4:07 PM on January 6, 2023 [1 favorite]


Their Archewell company has a production division (the multi-year Netflix deal was signed in 2020).
I remember something about the tiara hoopla that may or may not be true (MM's first choice being denied, because Eugenie had dibs?), but that it showed up late is pretty petty.
posted by Iris Gambol at 4:10 PM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]


The royal family is a particularly clear example of two things:

That capitalism damages the rich even as it provides advantages to which they cling;
And that having sympathy with an individual in a bad situation is not the same as believing that they are structurally underprivileged

I mean, Harry and Megan aren't going to go to the wall - the royal family isn't going to let them be homeless on the street even if they burn through all their money on security and mismanagement. And presumably once the kids are a bit older Megan could go back to acting or host a TV show and make enough to keep them in upper middle class style at least. And they have enough wealthy friends that someone somewhere would put them up in their luxury guesthouse if things got really bad financially. So they are certainly better off than pretty much everyone who works for a living.

But at the same time, I think that it's a huge injury to someone to bring them up in such a way that they can't have a normal education and can't have a normal career. Harry can't live like some kind of, eg, minor Danish royalty and just get a professional degree and a job, both because he has been deformed into a life of celebrity and wealth and because no one would leave him alone if he did.

If we're going to get rid of the monarchy (and why not do capitalism while we're at it) yes, fine, we can integrate him into the new society and expect him to live like anyone else, but while we live in this celebrity-ridden trash fire, he individually is going to have weird choices to make and few skills to make them with.
posted by Frowner at 4:17 PM on January 6, 2023 [49 favorites]


this stigma is still (very mildly?) active in the UK.

When I lived there in the 80s nobody pushed the red-headed stigma on me, but people were very confused by my name given that I was 1. not red-headed and 2. female, because apparently the name was assumed to be a boy's nickname. It took me a long time to associate the name thing with this traditional tune.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 5:01 PM on January 6, 2023 [4 favorites]


"The mountains and the canyons start to tremble and shake
The children of the sun begin to awake (watch out)
It seems that the wrath of the gods got a punch on the nose
And it's startin' to flow, I think I might be sinkin'
Throw me a line, if I reach it in time
I'll meet you up there where the path runs straight and high
To find a queen without a king
They say she plays guitar and cries and sings,

la-la-la"
posted by clavdivs at 5:15 PM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]


For me, having not read the book but watched the 6-part Netflix documentary, it's about the security. It's about them absolutely needing security, because of the state of the world. And that moment in the doc when they find out their family-provided security is being pulled? Harrowing. Beyond everything, I think they are rightfully scared for their lives (more than just the usual level of "the paps are photographing everything we do") and I think that will never change for the rest of their lives. The lure of "I killed someone in the British royal family!" is always going to be a siren song for someone on this planet. And heavy-duty security, 24/7/365, has got to cost a hell of a lot.
posted by BlahLaLa at 5:22 PM on January 6, 2023 [21 favorites]


Even if their fears WEREN'T realistic (which they are) I would never blame a man whose mother died the way she did for being afraid of being chased by photographers.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:40 PM on January 6, 2023 [32 favorites]


They could, like, get jobs.

I see them working very, very hard to try to make money while making the world better.
posted by amtho at 5:41 PM on January 6, 2023 [7 favorites]


The Daily Mail have published 17 pages about Harry's book today with the headline 'Oh Spare us!', so they are grumbling about all the publicity he is getting, while also writing about it, for 17 pages!
posted by Lanark at 5:55 PM on January 6, 2023 [11 favorites]


HI, I posted this and had to actually work all freaking day!

After politely reading many MeFi posts on blaseball, Eurovision, Game of Thrones, the Bulwer-Lytton contests, that really difficult invite-only trivia league, GBBO, and spelling bees, I wholeheartedly embrace this post.

Thank you! You too, eh? The BRF are a far better reality show than the Kardashians, for sure, mostly because so many of them are so bad at it.

So yeah, stay messy, Harry. I hope he says his piece as many times as he wants as loud as he wants for as much money as he can possibly get.

Me too.

Uh, it isn't banal to physically assault your brother, encourage him to wear a Nazi uniform even as a joke, then hang him out to dry in the most public and humiliating way possible, and encourage racist abuse of your brother's spouse.

Right. A lot of this is pretty damn bad, but getting into a brawl with your grown-ass brother in your 30's is something even most dudes do not do at that age. Being a shit to your son, ditto. Feuding in-laws, etc. This isn't all petty whining bitching, especially if it was happening to you all at once.

Harry still hasn't said which family member made that terrible comment wondering what the color of his kid's skin would be.

IT'S WILLIAM IT'S WILLIAM AIN'T NO WAY IT'S NOT WILLIAM. He haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaates Meghan more than anyone else on earth and was against the marriage. It's William. I am surprised this is the one thing Harry hasn't confirmed so far, but I'm about 99% sure it's William.

Hat tip to jenfullmoon for making the thing I don’t want to read about so easy to read about ;)

*takes a bow* Thank you!

I really really want another series of The Windsors, but I fear that reality may have out-batshitted the sitcom.

Have thought same. Though the whole "Middletons are Romani" thing was pretty weird and inexplicable (note: Romani is not the word they use on the show, but MeFi won't let me say the actual word) and I bet people would complain about that one now.

They can't just become nobodies, and no one's forcing anyone to buy their book/watch their series/whatever

Yup. They wouldn't be able to get privacy even if they were wanting it. They probably can't drop off the face of the earth enough for that.

Anyway, surely I'm not the only American who is just utterly baffled at this particular prejudice. It's one of those cultural things I imagine has some interesting history behind it, but from the outside seems very arbitrary.

I kind of assume the redhead hate is some kind of anti-Irish thing, but I am afraid to Google on this topic. And I like redheads, so.

I believe they're constrained by a need (perceived or real, probably real) to retain security to protect themselves and their children.

Yup. I note it's been said that Harry gets worse threats because of his military service, actually. They gotta make a lot of money just to make sure they don't get murdered.

As for Harry - what would he do, outside of something in showbiz, that would pay enough for their security costs?


This too.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:04 PM on January 6, 2023 [18 favorites]


only in the last ten years that I learned that there was any kind of stigma attached to being a redhead

I guess there is some places, but I always thought "red-headed stepchild" was an idiom referring to a kid who is treated poorly because they don't look like Dad (i.e. hmmm there's no redheads in our family...) And an ironic one given red hair is a recessive trait.
posted by straight at 6:46 PM on January 6, 2023 [4 favorites]


Scott Tenorman did not die for this handwringing.
posted by fluttering hellfire at 7:17 PM on January 6, 2023


Penile frostbite!
posted by medusa at 7:20 PM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]


I'm just boggled that someone thought "Spare" was a fucking Harry Potter reference. That fandom really thinks the world revolves around it, doesn't it

😕

That was me. Sort of ironic to expect a South African to be aware of the random details of the British Royal Family, and accuse me of thinking the world revolves around another British cultural artifact that I happen to know about.

I thought this was a space where a person could ask a genuine question without getting slapped down and sworn at.
posted by Zumbador at 7:50 PM on January 6, 2023 [26 favorites]


“I thought this was a space where a person could ask a genuine question without getting slapped down and sworn at.”

I raised an eyebrow at your commemt myself, but you're right that there's no reason to be a dick about it.

-

Nobody's mentioned Harry's disclosure of his supposed kill-count in Afghanistan. I'm not going to judge someone about how they deal in their own head with what it means to kill in war; but it's very tone-deaf and just insensitive to talk about it (and comparing it to a video game) in public like he (reportedly) does in the book. I think that is going to get a lot of criticism.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:28 PM on January 6, 2023 [14 favorites]


Harry's a twat from a long line of them. The monarchy should be abolished, and it's shocking to me to hear anyone under 60 express affection for these grifters.
posted by chaz at 8:31 PM on January 6, 2023 [9 favorites]


Maybe not affection but a tiny amount of sympathy maybe? They had no more say about the circumstances of their birth than someone born into poverty. And whilst they might have more choices in life than a poor person, choosing to leave is - well you've seen how that goes.

I feel like the line from 'The King's Speech' where Guy Pearce (King Edward) whines "have I no rights?" to which Colin Firth replies "no, you have privileges" sums it up quite well. You have wealth and privilege but no freedom. If I was born to that I reckon I'd suck it up, do what I was told and ride the gravy train, and I think more of us here than we'd care to admit would do the same.

Harry was incredibly brave to leave, although I felt at the time that he was trying to keep the privileges of royalty without any of the responsibility. I still think this is true but I'm not as sure any more.
posted by pianissimo at 9:38 PM on January 6, 2023 [9 favorites]


I'm still trying to catch up on all the articles that came out today.
I do read Celebitchy because they do keep track of more royal drama than most places. I admit their commenters generally have a giant hate on for Kate, pretty much for reasons of (a) they suspect she was a mean girl to Meghan, (b) they think she's lazy, doesn't do her job much and doesn't do it well when she's doing it (I don't pay attention to what royals do for "work" much so heck if I know), and (c) a bunch of commentary on wiglets and buttons for some reason that I just can't get worked up about.

I usually can't get worked up about Kate, I think she's professionally bland and that's the best way to survive marrying into the BRF, and I don't think there's been a whole lot of evidence proving the mean girl accusations. But Harry's book, well. Yeah, looks like that's exactly what happened. They weren't wrong.

I get the feeling that W&K just found Meghan and the hugging and the lip gloss and the baby brain comment and the kid's dress and whatever else totally off putting from the get-go (plus possible racism) and they probably got all bitch eating crackers about her and then HERE WE HAVE GONE about all of this. Like it's all petty stuff Meghan didn't necessarily think was a problem and they were all HANDS OFF BITCH RESPECT MAH ROYALTEH and here we are.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:10 PM on January 6, 2023 [8 favorites]


it's a huge injury to someone to bring them up in such a way that they can't have a normal education and can't have a normal career
As Auden said of the rois faineants, they also were political prisoners of a kind.
posted by clew at 11:36 PM on January 6, 2023


What sort of cultural conditioning makes people feel any remorse for royals, especially british ones? They're parasites on the countries they "rule".

You can have sympathy for individuals while hating a system. And please, remind us who the royal under discussing, Harry, "rules"? How much taxpayer money he receives? I think it's batshit that we face, and fund, a royal family. All the more reason to cheer someone opting out.
posted by Dysk at 12:11 AM on January 7, 2023 [6 favorites]


My feelings about Harry are immensely bolstered by the damage he's doing to a completely awful institution that has done many terrible things and continues to be publicly funded window dressing on a colonial past and present day rotten class system.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 12:18 AM on January 7, 2023 [12 favorites]


Though I do feel Charles existence is a way to make others feel their own narcissist parents maybe weren't the worst they could have been saddled with. So there's that, I guess.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 12:20 AM on January 7, 2023 [7 favorites]


And that moment in the doc when they find out their family-provided security is being pulled? Harrowing. Beyond everything, I think they are rightfully scared for their lives (more than just the usual level of "the paps are photographing everything we do") and I think that will never change for the rest of their lives.

Prince Harry and Meghan faced 'credible threats' by far-right extremists, says Met Police's ex-counterterror chief Neil Basu (also).

Given the racism of the press and alleged racism from within the royal family, this puts a whole new light on the decision to withdraw security.
posted by plep at 12:36 AM on January 7, 2023 [10 favorites]


I know Harry is mostly right, but as the responsabile elder sibling of a well meaning but hot mess of a brother, I can feel William's eyerolls over the years, like all of them.
posted by thegirlwiththehat at 12:36 AM on January 7, 2023 [5 favorites]


How is there no comment saying "Harry's book 'Spare' is not cricket" yet?

Also when I lived in England a decade ago there was a red cat that would come to our back patio and we called it "The Ginger Bastard" and tried to get it to like us and it never did. However there was a tuxedo that acted it like owned our place. I had no idea our apartment was a royal estate and we were acting out a preview of the coming royal drama.
posted by srboisvert at 8:13 AM on January 7, 2023 [5 favorites]


If I was born to that I reckon I'd suck it up, do what I was told and ride the gravy train, and I think more of us here than we'd care to admit would do the same.

I don't think so? At least not in Harry's generation. The golden cage that Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margret found themselves in was still very much a cage, but Margret could attend parties and whatnot without paparazzi following (and spinning) her every move. The older generation was able to live in a pretty comfortable bubble, in an era where many people's marriages were somewhat loveless, and crucially, it's not like there were numerous depictions of ordinary British life in the 1940s/1950s/60s - or at least, not on the scale today thanks to the proliferation of TV and whatnot. I mean, Harry and William presumably grew up watching TV/movies about normal kids enjoying their normal lives. We also know that Diana made a point, the best she could, of getting her kids to see at least some life outside the royal bubble. And it seems relevant Harry 'met' Meghan via Instagram - certainly, social media has made the bubble around the royal family pretty weak.

I'll admit, I didn't have a ton of sympathy for Harry an Meghan until I watched their Netflix docuseries. My feeling before then was pretty much "Yeah, I get why they left, but it's hard to feel bad for people with that much wealth." What changed for me was seeing how from his birth, Harry was non-stop followed by cameras - the clip where Diana confronts some paparazzi telling them 'Look, I promised my boys a fun private day skiing, we gave you some material at the start, but now I really need you to leave, you're upsetting them' and the guy just ignores her - it's clear these people just did not get a break from it. And then of course, the clip at Diana's funeral, where both Harry and William are forced to smile and shake people's hands - brutal. This generation had to be child performers at a level few other people have had to do - it's kinda a wonder Harry isn't more messy.

I suppose as an American, it wasn't until seeing the docuseries that I really got just how relentless the paparazzi are today in the UK around the royal family. Yes, I knew they were bad, but I had never really understand the extent - perhaps because in the US there isn't really anything equivalent - our celebrities are mostly over-exposed by choice.
posted by coffeecat at 8:22 AM on January 7, 2023 [13 favorites]


Ivan Fyodorovich: "Anyway, surely I'm not the only American who is just utterly baffled at this particular prejudice [against redheads]. It's one of those cultural things I imagine has some interesting history behind it, but from the outside seems very arbitrary."


Googling "Judas red hair" gets you:

There is no description in the New Testament of Judas' physical appearance, but it became traditional for artists in the middle ages to represent him with red hair, what Shakespeare described as 'the dissembling colour'. It was a physical trait that had long been associated with treachery.
posted by Jody Tresidder at 8:42 AM on January 7, 2023 [2 favorites]


I can't fathom the logic that somehow a barista making minimum wage to be screamed at by customers has it better than british royalty.

The logic is this: the barista can quit and become something else.
Harry can never, ever, not be a British royal.
posted by caryatid at 10:58 AM on January 7, 2023 [3 favorites]


I remember as a child temporarily living in the former Yugoslavia (Montenegro) going to the movies with my mom - it was a low budget American Western, with "Serbo-Croatian" subtitles. At one point the villain tells someone something like "fat people are stupid," and my mom started giggling. After the movie, my mom, who could speak Serbian, told me that she laughed at that because it was subtitled as "redheads are stupid."

The person being addressed did not have red hair.
posted by Rumple at 11:23 AM on January 7, 2023 [1 favorite]


I don't think so? At least not in Harry's generation.

Yeah, I wouldn't. Awful job. I don't exactly pity the royal family, but I'd hate being in their position. I keep remembering the line that ended a New Yorker Megxit story: "It is infinitely better to be a working actress in Toronto than a Duchess in Buckingham Palace." I mean -- given the chance between starving and being royalty, sure, royalty is a great gig. But the reason these people are so petty and unpleasant is that they're comparing "being royalty" with being rich and unbothered, like their entire social circle. It's probably even worse, in that only the monarch and the heir really have extravagant wealth at their command. The rest of them are just surrounded by it, with ample opportunities to couchsurf at their billionaire pedophile friends' houses. I'm actually curious about how the aristo mind works here. Do they think about how they'd get a bigger slice of the will if they'd all been commoners? Or is it, "if only I'd been born first, everything would be mine?"

But yeah, if they're surrounded by rich people who get to do whatever they want, I imagine they must feel unfairly targeted. In that scenario, the only reason why they would want to be royalty is to be more important than anyone else. And to those folks, it must be infuriating to get upstaged by a new cast member.
posted by grandiloquiet at 11:53 AM on January 7, 2023 [6 favorites]


Maybe he could get a job?
posted by Ideefixe at 12:53 PM on January 7, 2023


"The full extract from Prince Harry's memoir Spare, in which he details his controversial "kill count" of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, can be published for the first time by Yahoo."

At less than a thousand words, it's still a lot more nuanced than what's been reported: While in the heat and fog of combat, I didn't think of those twenty-five as people. You can't kill people if you think of them as people. You can't really harm people if you think of them as people. They were chess pieces removed from the board, Bads taken away before they could kill Goods. I'd been trained to "other-ize" them, trained well. On some level I recognized this learned detachment as problematic. But I also saw it as an unavoidable part of soldiering. Another reality that couldn't be changed.
posted by Iris Gambol at 12:56 PM on January 7, 2023 [18 favorites]


Prince Harry’s ghostwriter is so famous that George Clooney made a film of his life:
When Prince Harry chose to work with ghostwriter JR Moehringer on his institution-shaking memoir, Spare, he was not taking half measures. The American writer and Pulitzer prize-winning journalist does not have a huge output, but he is known for his immersive approach to subjects, his preoccupation with the father-son relationship, and his capacity to “go deep”...

Madeleine Morel, an agent who “matchmakes” book projects with ghostwriters, said Moehringer had come to epitomise the ultimate in ghostwriting.

“He’s the pinnacle,” she told the Observer. “I’m sure everybody aspires to be him. He’s such a brilliant writer. It’s very hard to ghostwrite a book and at some level never have it sound like it was written by somebody else.”
posted by TheophileEscargot at 1:00 PM on January 7, 2023 [7 favorites]


Thanks for all the hard work that went into pulling together this post!

(Insert Michael Jackson eating popcorn gif here)
posted by St. Peepsburg at 1:13 PM on January 7, 2023 [4 favorites]


Also no matter whose side you stand, asking to borrow lip gloss is super gross.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 1:30 PM on January 7, 2023 [6 favorites]


Maybe he could get a job?

Points at the spectacular comment above.
posted by kimberussell at 2:14 PM on January 7, 2023 [8 favorites]


As it turns out, not skilled as a writer. His book is ghostwritten.

His wealth was estimated at around $30 million in 2020; surely he’s comfortable waiting for the right opportunity to come by?
posted by coldhotel at 2:34 PM on January 7, 2023 [2 favorites]


Speaking as the elder of two english brothers of a similar age, it was totally Wills. I recognise way too much.
posted by inpHilltr8r at 3:19 PM on January 7, 2023 [2 favorites]


Allrighty, I've done another roundup of hot goss.

  • NYT: How to Watch Prince Harry’s Interviews About ‘Spare’

  • NYT: The Rollout of Prince Harry’s Book Is Chaotic. Sales Are Still Surging.

  • Prince Harry Reveals How Meghan Markle Met Each Member of the Royal Family: Queen Elizabeth II, Prince William and More

  • "After the queen’s hasty exit from their first meeting, Meghan asked Harry about the assistant that had been “holding her purse” during the meal. The duke then explained it was Andrew, Elizabeth and the late Prince Philip’s second son. “She definitely hadn’t Googled us,” Harry wrote."
    Other commentary and aftermath:
    That means that when they made the decision to step back from their roles as senior working royals, Harry and Meghan were left with a meager sum of $10 million (estimated by Forbes), largely made up of the inheritance from Harry’s late mother’s estate.
    Of that number, $5 million reportedly went toward a down payment for the couple’s $14.7 million home in Montecito, California.
    According to the Institute for Government, one of the largest public costs for the royals is security. These arrangements aren’t publicly disclosed, but Forbes estimated in 2021 that such services for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex could cost up to $3 million per year.
    Forbes also confirmed that Harry was not a beneficiary of his great-grandmother the Queen Mother’s $100 million fortune.
    Aftermath: Non-Harry's book dish: posted by jenfullmoon at 6:15 PM on January 7, 2023 [12 favorites]


    asking to borrow lip gloss is super gross

    Meh. You can dispose of the top layer and then use your own applicator.
    posted by praemunire at 6:26 PM on January 7, 2023 [3 favorites]


    Re: lip gloss: "Kate, taken aback, went into her handbag and reluctantly pulled out a small tube,” the “Harry and Meghan” Netflix star says. “Meg squeezed some onto her finger and applied it to her lips. Kate grimaced.” (per link in post)
    posted by obloquy at 6:45 PM on January 7, 2023 [7 favorites]


    Still gross.
    posted by St. Peepsburg at 6:47 PM on January 7, 2023 [1 favorite]


    *rolls eyes*
    posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:59 PM on January 7, 2023 [16 favorites]


    *adjusts handbag*
    posted by clavdivs at 9:15 PM on January 7, 2023 [4 favorites]


    Re:lip gloss it was probably the fancy kiehls kind.

    To interpret such a reaction as a personal slight against oneself shows more than a hint of narcissism, as well as a lack of understanding of common social mores. There are maybe three people in the world I'd share chapstick with, and inlaws aren't amongst them.
    posted by lemur at 11:05 PM on January 7, 2023 [4 favorites]


    Red hair is a red herring; Harry resembles Prince Philip more than Charles ever did (big side by side photos of grandfather and grandson at links).
    posted by Iris Gambol at 11:21 PM on January 7, 2023 [5 favorites]


    Didn't realise how uptight do many mefites are. You are all welcome to borrow lip gloss or chapstick from me, or to have a taste of my drink, a glug out of my water bottle, etc, etc. It's such a weird thing to make any kind of fuss about, especially in light of what Markle actually did with they lip gloss (i.e. not getting the applicator anywhere near her mouth).
    posted by Dysk at 11:32 PM on January 7, 2023 [13 favorites]


    How about this: there are some people who wouldn't think twice about sharing their own lip gloss or asking someone else to do so, and there are some other people who would be quite uncomfortable with doing so. Neither group is inherently bad or wrong, but it may speak to an underlying personality difference, and the inability to understand that the opposite group is not having different boundaries In an attempt to personally affront you may lead to a personality clash.

    (Honestly, it's not a mile off from an Ask/Guess culture thing, either.)
    posted by eponym at 11:46 PM on January 7, 2023 [12 favorites]


    I mean, in re all this little stuff, a decent person would have thought, "hm, here is a new family member, they are probably going to find it difficult to deal with the media in general and I bet that as a Black American they are going to deal with some specific kinds of unpleasantness, I will go out of my way a little bit to try to make them feel welcome even if we're not exactly natural besties". I mean, if someone married into your family and you didn't really click with them but assumed that at least some people were going to be vaguely racist assholes to them, wouldn't you try to be as nice as possible? You don't need to be some kind of enormous hero to think, "marrying into my family should be a pleasant experience, not a source of misery".

    Also, if you're going to be Queen someday soon, you could just share your Kiehls with a smile and then get a new tube when you get home, or see if one of your lackeys was carrying backups for you. You could be gracious to your somewhat beleaguered sister in law like a nice person even if it involved putting up with a tiny, trivial moment of discomfort.

    One always has the option of just...sucking it up and being nice to someone.
    posted by Frowner at 11:54 PM on January 7, 2023 [51 favorites]


    People take genuine offence to being asked for lip gloss? I feel like this thread is in the twilight zone suddenly.
    posted by zymil at 12:22 AM on January 8, 2023 [21 favorites]


    The Ask v Guess comparison is apt I think - those of us who are team Guess very very regularly have to just suck it up and be polite to Ask people. If you kicked off (on any level) every time someone Asked at you as a Guesser, you wouldn't have a very functional life, especially social life. In this particular circumstance, team Nobody Touches My Gloss may have to just play along, accepting that they have to share the world with others.

    (Also everything that Frowner said.)
    posted by Dysk at 12:22 AM on January 8, 2023 [6 favorites]


    And more broadly, a lot of the "offenses" in general just seem rooted in incredibly minor cultural differences, and like, if you cannot accommodate or at least treat with kindness someone literally from a different culture on that kind of front, you're a horrible person, and won't be doing yourself any favours in the long run if you aren't Royal enough to insulate you from the longer term social consequences.
    posted by Dysk at 12:29 AM on January 8, 2023 [8 favorites]


    I honestly find it difficult to understand how people think the narcissists in this scenario aren't the people who, presumably, look forward to people kneeling in front of them as they wear jewels stolen from the British colonies and award various other terrible people stupid titles in return for giving vast sums of money to political parties or being loyal footsoldiers to the Tories. Or want lavish coronation ceremonies as their subjects line up for food banks. Or insist on exempting themselves from legislation if it'll interfere with making money from their estates.

    As for a job, I think that being a gadfly to the British royal family is a pretty good one that many of us from their former colonies will celebrate. I hope Harry keeps revealing all their awkward moments until they expire from shame myself.
    posted by lesbiassparrow at 2:24 AM on January 8, 2023 [17 favorites]


    As for the royals saving the UK from extremist governments, I think that ship sailed with 12 years of increasingly right wing Tory governments culminating with the current cabinet who could give the Freedom Caucus in the US a good run for their money on the rhetoric front.
    posted by lesbiassparrow at 2:31 AM on January 8, 2023 [12 favorites]


    Arguing to keep a monarchy because the rabble can't be trusted not to elect a lunatic is an argument for feudalism.

    In the case of the modern British monarchy, I would say it is an argument for bread and circuses, rather than feudalism.
    posted by fairmettle at 6:47 AM on January 8, 2023


    People take genuine offence to being asked for lip gloss? I feel like this thread is in the twilight zone suddenly.

    It seems like one of those small moments that says a lot about some of the people involved. (Like, as Frowner says, even if you think asking to borrow it is the most crude thing imaginable, there's still a polite way to handle it.) I don't use lip gloss but I've seen people sharing it a lot -- in at least some social settings, doing so is not a faux pas, but clearly in other settings and with other people, it must be.

    As someone who doesn't follow all the royal stuff closely, Ms Markle has always been the one person who seemed at a glance to be sympathetic and in a difficult position. The royals themselves, most especially both Harry and his brother (and all the hangers-on) are plainly all terrible people, and terrible people behaving terribly just isn't very surprising. At least Phillip has gotten somewhat sidelined, at long last.

    Reading the links and comments here is fascinating to see details I had only before seen headlines about.
    posted by Dip Flash at 6:47 AM on January 8, 2023 [4 favorites]


    Re: lip gloss - while I can see why people are suggesting this is an Ask/Guess situation, I wonder if there are instances (this being one) where Ask/Guess is really just serving as a euphemism for WASP/not-WASP. As someone who is not a WASP, but has on occasion moved (uncomfortably) through WASP spaces, I have a hunch that it does. Which isn't to say that non-WASPs are all happy to potentially swap spit, but if that is a boundary we have, we're generally apologetic about it "Oh sorry, I'm a bit of a germaphobe."

    For work I (a white American) spent a few months in the UK, and it was some of the more unpleasant culture shock I've experienced (and I've happily lived in cultures that on-paper, most people would probably imagine to be more 'shock worthy'). No doubt a big part of Meghan's experienced had to do with her race, but also, the English - particular posh English people - can be alarming cold.

    Another big part of this is clearly the level of narcissism in the royal family's reaction of shock to the fact that Meghan didn't come 100% prepared (i.e. knowing who everyone was, knowing all of the fashion rules, knowing how to curtsey, etc.) - they clearly found this "rude." While it's true there are some Americans who are obsessed with the royal family, most of us really don't care and frankly find it rather bizarre. To put it in numbers: 23 million Americans watched Kate and William's wedding, which might sound like a lot until you realize that at the time when there were roughly 309 million of us - so, 7% of Americans could be bothered to watch. Clearly one of Meghan's great sins was that she presumed 'meeting the family' would be much meeting anyone's family - i.e. normal people don't expect you to know who their uncles and nieces are until you're introduced. As she said in the docuseries, she assumed the private lives of the royals would be much more warm and casual than the public version, and was shocked to find that they kept up all of the decorum and rules even when nobody was watching. I totally get how she could be surprised.

    In London, I mostly spent my time going to the National Archives. In the locker area where you are required to drop off most of your items, there was a sign by a freelance ancestry researcher, and their tag-line to prospect clients on the flier was "Know your place!" which pretty much sums up all I found unpleasant about England (no offense to all the lovely English Mefites and various English people I did befriend - I'm not trying to paint with too broad a brush here).
    posted by coffeecat at 9:22 AM on January 8, 2023 [24 favorites]


    Ms Markle has always been the one person who seemed at a glance to be sympathetic and in a difficult position.

    See, to me it looks like she married the dimmest of all the royals specifically in order to be able to shit on the family repeatedly because it would be good press.
    posted by Phanx at 9:35 AM on January 8, 2023 [3 favorites]


    Another big part of this is clearly the level of narcissism in the royal family's reaction of shock to the fact that Meghan didn't come 100% prepared

    Grain of salt here, since Diana was burning everything down at the time, but I remember she'd talk about how the more established family members enjoyed her getting it wrong. Like they didn't really teach it, she just had to absorb the right behavior through small humiliations.
    posted by grandiloquiet at 9:36 AM on January 8, 2023 [14 favorites]


    See, to me it looks like she married the dimmest of all the royals specifically in order to be able to shit on the family repeatedly because it would be good press.
    Are you serious? That strikes me as a bizarre interpretation of literally anyone's behavior.
    posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:39 AM on January 8, 2023 [43 favorites]


    See, to me it looks like she married the dimmest of all the royals specifically in order to be able to shit on the family repeatedly because it would be good press.


    Yes, it's that evil bitch controlling the poor, dumb, hapless man isn't it? Kind of her to give Harry the writing credit.

    Do you all hear yourselves when you make these statements? I am genuinely embarrassed for some people here.

    Anyway, the lip gloss thing is on the weird and gross side but I wonder if it's a product of coming up in Hollywood. I know in theater sometimes makeup gets shared. I figure Hollywood is similar.
    posted by asteria at 9:56 AM on January 8, 2023 [16 favorites]


    tSee, to me it looks like she married the dimmest of all the royals specifically in order to be able to shit on the family repeatedly because it would be good press.

    Good press for what? It's not like the women of the royal family get to have careers beyond the 'opening random things in the name of whoever is at the top of the royal pile at the moment ' daily routine.
    posted by lesbiassparrow at 9:58 AM on January 8, 2023 [4 favorites]


    Honestly I do loathe them all. So if I thought she'd set.out to destroy the royals by becoming a TV actress and then marrying the one who wasn't going to be king, I'd be way more impressed than I am now.
    posted by lesbiassparrow at 10:00 AM on January 8, 2023 [8 favorites]


    I'm just struck by how being born into the British royal family but not being fully bought-in on the whole thing is a no-win situation. There's no way to stay in, not be complicit, have a happy life*, and not be torn apart by the media. And there's no way to leave, have your own private life, and not be torn apart by the media.

    Seriously, what would YOU do?

    *Not to mention anyone you marry will be subjected to all of it too.
    posted by mcduff at 10:19 AM on January 8, 2023 [7 favorites]


    For work I (a white American) spent a few months in the UK, and it was some of the more unpleasant culture shock I've experienced

    The same can be true in reverse. It is very famously jarring because while we both speak English and share much tv/film/music, so you'd think we'd be really similar our respective cultures have quite different attitudes to life.

    Every reaction I've read here, and in other online spaces suggests that everyone is seeing this book as a reconfirmation of what they have previously thought about Harry, Meghan and the rest of the BRF. I am no different.

    I don't think it's the end of the world if someone asks to borrow my lipgloss, but I might momentarily grimace as they used it. I think most of the examples cited involving Meghan and Kate are, like the lipgloss, really minor and just two people who have different styles and neither is better or worse than the other. Without actually knowing the both, who can say who bent over backwards the most and/or who should have bent further. Meghan more generally has had a particularly tough time for all the reasons outlined, and I can see why she doesn't want to live here. But that doesn't mean that the UK as a whole is a godawful place to live where no one could thrive. Harry is probably not exactly as the Palace have portrayed him to be for all these years. It's hard to care either way, I hope he has a good life.

    Joining the royal family is something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, but it is absolutely no surprise to me that someone who has exclusively lived in North America is going to have do more adjusting than the Brits around them if they are going to successfully enjoy living in the UK. This has been the experience of every single one of my American and Canadian friends and acquaintances. People living in the place they have always lived will always have less idea of which things that are normal for them are different elsewhere, even if they are very well travelled. Nobody really knows how weird their own family / culture / country is until they try and live somewhere else.
    posted by plonkee at 10:45 AM on January 8, 2023 [2 favorites]


    I'm just struck by how being born into the British royal family but not being fully bought-in on the whole thing is a no-win situation. There's no way to stay in, not be complicit, have a happy life*, and not be torn apart by the media. And there's no way to leave, have your own private life, and not be torn apart by the media.

    Seriously, what would YOU do?


    Probably what Princess Anne did. Find an outlet that was independent of the family that could be pursued without being accused of damaging the royal brand. In her case, that was high-level equestrianism. I'd probably pick classical music. I doubt that I'd ever get to be a top of the tree professional, but my skills on the oboe, viola. piano or whatever could be judged on their own merits.

    I think it's difficult if you don't have a hobby that you want to put that much work into.
    posted by plonkee at 10:52 AM on January 8, 2023 [6 favorites]


    To note, on the above, I entirely agree that you can't win with the media. Which is why I think you want something where you can more objectively measure your own progress and achievements, regardless of what the media say.
    posted by plonkee at 11:01 AM on January 8, 2023


    Prince Harry’s book could be ‘beginning of end’ for royals, warns Charles’s biographer.

    If the Harry dispute ends up bringing down the monarchy, I don't think the book is the beginning of the end even if it is a step on the road.
    posted by gentlyepigrams at 11:03 AM on January 8, 2023 [3 favorites]


    There's no way to stay in, not be complicit, have a happy life*, and not be torn apart by the media. And there's no way to leave, have your own private life, and not be torn apart by the media.

    "I wouldn't wish fame on my worst enemy." (David Bowie)
    posted by philip-random at 11:05 AM on January 8, 2023 [2 favorites]


    Find an outlet that was independent of the family that could be pursued without being accused of damaging the royal brand.
    In 2006, Harry co-founded Sentebale, a charity in Lesotho (and Botswana, as of 2016) for kids and teens who are HIV+.
    In 2014, he started the Invictus Games & Foundation.
    I think he'd decided on nonprofits/philanthropy, and lucked out in a partner who was equally enthusiastic. They were assets to the royal brand.
    posted by Iris Gambol at 12:19 PM on January 8, 2023 [14 favorites]


    You all share lipgloss and waterbottles with ppl outside your immediate family? Super gross. We're in a pandemic. Also, people with infants at home are typically very careful about pathogens. Also, we have no idea what actually transpired / why Kate acted the we she did because apparently Megan/Harry never discussed this supposedly pivotal event with Kate, and instead Harry chose to share it with the world.
    posted by lemur at 12:25 PM on January 8, 2023 [2 favorites]


    Would it make an iota of difference if instead of calling it lipgloss, if it was referred to as lip balm? The kind you squeeze out on your fingertip before applying it your lips?

    It wasn't a (lip gloss) vanity thing, it sounds more like a comfort/ climate issue.
    posted by porpoise at 1:12 PM on January 8, 2023 [4 favorites]


    Not everyone would be comfortable with sharing lip gloss (I wouldn't, but you're not supposed to share makeup in general), I do note this was before pandemic, Meghan tried to not touch the applicator, and this was apparently right before some big media event where she'd be judged out the wazoo.

    But frankly, lip gloss and hugging and the other petty things and cultural differences + BRF royal difficulty + there's no "princess school" even though really it sounds like there should be. Plus overall I tend to think that a lot of people/families DO NOT LIKE IT when someone marries in, period. I admit I'm biased because my two sides of the families hated each other and weren't too fond of me and my parents either, but I've seen this shit more than I do in-laws who welcome newbies and make them feel comfortable. I think making the plebes uncomfortable is probably part of the "fun" of being in the BRF. (Hence why so many divorces, right?) Clearly W&K didn't feel any kind of anything to make someone not feel shunned and probably everyone else but the Queen and Eugenie (and I guess Fergie) did the same. If you're the future Queen of England and you've lived your entire life since your late teens shooting towards that goal, that probably directs your behavior in a certain way too.

    Daily Beast is pretty anti-H&M, but this reported conversation about William grabbing Harry's shirt at the neck and yelling at him to be happy is also pretty disturbing.
    posted by jenfullmoon at 1:22 PM on January 8, 2023 [2 favorites]


    I'd put a fiver on Harry.
    posted by clavdivs at 1:29 PM on January 8, 2023


    It's probably in the book, but I can't decide if A. Harry didn't adequately prepare her for what being around the family would involve, or B. He tried to tell her everything she'd need to know but she thought he couldn't possibly be serious.
    posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:55 PM on January 8, 2023 [6 favorites]


    Maybe C, also in that he understood the media would be terrible but expected less sabotage from the family? I can't get over how badly the Palace bungled this as an institution; if they had kept it together for five years the Sussexes would've been less of a heatscore, and if they'd kept it together for a decade, the main story would be King Will, Queen Kate, and the teenaged heirs to the throne. I don't think the Palace staff and royal family would have needed to be much less awful to keep Harry and Meghan around. But there seemed to be a particular hostility to Meghan from the staffers, paired with spreading nasty stories about her in the press, added to the suggestions that she should continue her acting career to make them money...that suggests they were really just trying to get rid of Meghan and keep Harry.

    I haven't read the book, and I'm not arguing that Harry is bringing up some really petty stuff. This is probably where the "confirming your priors" stuff hits. Either you think Harry is being petty because of a fundamental character flaw, or you figure he's releasing something this negative because he's really, really mad. (And hurt -- but I don't think you do this sort of tell-all without thinking, on some level, of revenge. That's where his talk about reconciling with the family sounds pretty absurd; he's hurt and VERY MAD and probably means "reconcile with the family after they apologize and start behaving in a way they never will.")

    Anyway, if you're American and sick of hearing about the Sussexes it's pretty easy to ignore them? But it probably doesn't feel that way in the UK, so my condolences to anyone not enjoying the mess.
    posted by grandiloquiet at 2:45 PM on January 8, 2023 [15 favorites]


    I don't think it's the end of the world if someone asks to borrow my lipgloss, but I might momentarily grimace as they used it.

    Have you been in training to be in the media spotlight at formal events for the past, what is it, dozen-plus years, though? Even without that training, how about the home training that tells you to be kind and gracious and forbearing with new members of the family and strangers to the country? To this day, my brother thinks I lost a debate to my new sister-in-law the day I met her when in fact I just broke it off so as not to seem harsh and argumentative to, well, my new sister-in-law.

    (In my couple-ish years in England, primarily at Oxford, I met some of the nastiest, most provincially self-satisfied, most pointlessly exclusive people I have ever met. For a visiting Englishperson to have a similar experience--by which I mean observing or experiencing (for me, honestly, mostly the former, but that doesn't mean I didn't notice) such useless, ignorant haughtiness--they'd have to basically settle down in some horrible Florida evangelical upper-middle-class neighborhood, the kind that's 85% white where everyone's dad owns a dealership but no one's been further from home than a Caribbean cruise. I'm not saying there wouldn't be cultural clash at Harvard or Yale, there always is and often no one is to blame, exactly, but it wouldn't be like that. I adored Mycroft Holmes on the BBC Sherlock because he took the attitude so far it became perversely charming.)
    posted by praemunire at 4:50 PM on January 8, 2023 [11 favorites]


    I wonder if there are instances (this being one) where Ask/Guess is really just serving as a euphemism for WASP/not-WASP

    I think this is correct, though I'm also on team "Consent Matters For Lipgloss Too". It is kind and generous of you if you want to share your makeup, but you are not obligated to do so. But I think the hurt here is kind of coming from what was said above, that Meghan assumed that the royal family couldn't possibly be as cold behind closed doors and she expected it would be like marrying into anyone's family, that getting a sister in law would be like getting anyone's sister in law. And that just wasn't the case. Because you would expect a sister to share, in a normal family, but not in this kind of one where even family rarely hugs each other.
    posted by corb at 5:29 PM on January 8, 2023 [3 favorites]


    Meghan assumed that the royal family couldn't possibly be as cold behind closed doors...

    Living here, I've always assumed that they're odd behind closed doors, either in all the ways that are reported in gossipy magazines here, or in other ways that have yet to come into the public domain, or both. But there's no reason why Meghan should have had that kind of diffuse cultural assumption and I feel sorry for her having no idea that they are so different to what she's used to and was expecting.
    posted by plonkee at 5:47 PM on January 8, 2023 [3 favorites]


    I’ll always have a soft spot for Harry so it’s alarming him to see him descend into this reality tv style madness. Harry, bring them down but stay afloat please!
    posted by bigyellowtaxi at 7:23 PM on January 8, 2023 [2 favorites]


    "But there seemed to be a particular hostility to Meghan from the staffers"

    I mean, some of these people were still calling Prince Phillip "the fruit-box prince" and "that Greek" in his 90s. I think there's a tendency around any culturally-important institution for certain people who are tangential to it/serve it to become fanatically devoted to gatekeeping an imagined version of its purity. And I think the baseline assumption should have been that these functionaries were going to be utter assholes to a foreigner joining the family since Prince Phillip wasn't British enough after 90 years.

    I think Harry and Meghan were used and abused by both the royal family and by the tabloid press, and I've said so many times and at great length in these threads, so I won't repeat myself. But suffice to say I'm generally on Harry and Meghan's "side" in the press/gossip battles, and even so I have been cringing a bit at the following things:

    a) Meghan, you went to Northwestern. HOWWWWWW can you not be worldly enough to know that the British are way less huggy than Americans?

    b) Harry, you spent your entire life with these assholes; how could you not have adequately prepared Meghan for meeting Will and Kate and so on? Like, sounds like he prepped her for the Queen, but assumed that his explosive-tempered, famously self-important brother would be totes fine with a California girl who hugs on first meeting and doesn't curtsy. That is like ... a special level of denial, I guess.

    c) There is such a thing as TMI, and learning about your todger's frostbite was DEFINITELY OVER THE LINE.

    Generally, I'm interested in the institutional machinations and how famous people use the press to generate narratives, not so much in the actual gossip itself, so I haven't watched the Harry and Meghan Netflix thing yet, and I wasn't really planning on reading the book. I figured the internet would adequately recap the book, and I'm much more interested in how the story is packaged than in what the story is.

    But after this week of leaks? I AM DEFINITELY READING THE BOOK. Oliver Cromwell didn't go as hard at Charles I as Harry is going at Charles III. This is amazing. This is the most glorious gossip supernova of my lifetime. Light more things on fire, Harry!

    On the hair tangent, yeah, Judas has been traditionally said to be red-headed since the middle ages. Interestingly, St. Paul is attested as red-headed in extra-Biblical sources beginning in the first century. (When you see ancient Christian art with two dudes, the one who is slightly taller, has curly white hair, and three lines across his forehead, that's St. Peter; the shorter one who's balding with a red (or darker) fringe of straight hair is St. Paul. Even in really crude carvings on tombs or in graffitos, St. Peter gets curls and 3 forehead lines. I have now decoded for you approximately 50% of "men in Christian art who don't seem to be Jesus" up through the year 1200. My mnemonic, btw, is that St. Peter has three forehead lines because he's so friggin' annoyed by St. Paul's frenzied energy.) It is kind-of funny that anyone would act shocked like, "Red hair? In the British Royal Family?" since there have been, like, a lot of them.
    posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:53 PM on January 8, 2023 [18 favorites]


    Further on the hair tangent, I was all set to bring up 1 Samuel 16:12, which clearly states that David (who would become king a while later in the narrative) is described as a redhead - but the King James translation makes a ruddy mess of it and calls him "ruddy", so I guess it didn't make it into English-oriented biblical art.
    It's pretty clear in Hebrew, though! The word signifying the redness is אדמוני - and that word appears only one other time in the Hebrew bible, to describe Esau and specifically his hair, in Genesis 25:25.

    And David would have been a direct ancestor of Jesus, too, according to the NT. Grumble-grumble bible translations grumble.
    posted by Shunra at 8:15 PM on January 8, 2023 [7 favorites]


    I mean, some of these people were still calling Prince Phillip "the fruit-box prince" and "that Greek" in his 90s. ...And I think the baseline assumption should have been that these functionaries were going to be utter assholes to a foreigner joining the family since Prince Phillip wasn't British enough after 90 years.

    See, this makes my point on in-laws. Dude was in his 90's and he was still a freaking interloper/outsider even if he was royal, even if he converted to Englishness, even if he was older than the snobby staffers, blah de blah. I swear enough families wish they could just reproduce doing parthenogenesis instead of being forced to let some horrible outsider into the family so they can get grandbabies.

    I totally agree that (a) Meghan should have perhaps figured out that most Brits aren't huggy, (b) Harry should have done a better job of prepping (I can only presume W&K didn't give Chelsy and Cressida such cold treatment?), and (c) dude, all the todger jokes you will get for the rest of your life, you have brought upon yourself. Which is to say, don't think I would have told that. I guess we can say he's literally letting it ALL hang out except for Mr. Skin Color's identity (coughWilliamcough).

    I ordered the book the second I heard of its existence. Alas, I'm pretty sure my local bookstore will let me know it's come in circa Wednesday RIGHT after lunch or something so I can't run right over there.
    posted by jenfullmoon at 8:26 PM on January 8, 2023 [2 favorites]


    Maybe Harry presumed a standard of knowledge re British etiquette based on people raised as royalty /upper class/military. So he wouldn't have thought to mention some stuff that would be as natural to him as breathing. And of course Meg would find it hard to adapt because all of these customs are, well, foreign to her.

    Could she have tried harder? Probably. Would it have made any difference? Probably not.
    posted by pianissimo at 9:24 PM on January 8, 2023 [4 favorites]


    I mean, I assume Harry was aware at least at some level how big a part lack of preparation played in his mother's unhappy marriage, and it's always been said that Will and Kate waited as long as they did to avoid that same pitfall, but I'm leaning toward the idea that their situation was different enough that more preparation probably wouldn't have been sufficient.
    posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:17 PM on January 8, 2023 [1 favorite]


    I suppose as an American, it wasn't until seeing the docuseries that I really got just how relentless the paparazzi are today in the UK around the royal family. Yes, I knew they were bad, but I had never really understand the extent - perhaps because in the US there isn't really anything equivalent - our celebrities are mostly over-exposed by choice.

    I recently fell down a bit of a Deuxmoi rabbithole, and was struck by just how big the celebrity-gossip community is. It feels like a typical fandom in some ways—deep pockets of obscure lore, extreme emotional attachment to certain stances and opinions—but (1) even big fandoms never seem quite that big to me, and (2) these are people congregating around speculating on actual people's lives. I get Jason Sudeikis being abstract enough of a concept that you can treat him like a work of fiction, but still, there's a real actual human being at the center of this, and a few thousand people holding prolonged conversations about whether or not he's a sex pervert.

    Heck, we're living in a day and age where a hundred different people maintain YouTube channels to offer running commentary on new Pokemon software patches. So maybe it shouldn't have been surprising to me that celebrity culture, which everyone knows is a whole-ass industry, is overwhelmingly vast when you think of it in terms of sheer individuals. Maybe it's that it feels more contained when it's bound to a magazine like People or a channel like E!, reducing an audience of millions to one or two glossy products. But suddenly it made sense to me that paparazzi could operate in swarms, and be as intrusive and amoral as they are: there really is a market for that, which is disturbing to contemplate.

    All this is to say that my feelings about the Royal Family fandom, which is semi-common among even my relatively misanthropic friends, have moved a little more towards "disturbed" recently. Because it seems harmless enough, when it's just people I know being dorky about a thing whose aesthetics and history can both qualify as "dorky," or when it's family members looking for a thing to idly gossip about. But suddenly I think about that harmless pastime multiplied by a few hundred million people, and my mind goes blank with a very unprocessable horror. I think about how intrusive it feels to learn that just a couple of people I know have been gossiping about me—even when the gossip is relatively friendly—and then I imagine the same thing in quantities and qualities more intense than I will ever come close to experiencing, and suddenly all I can think of is a swarm of gnats stripping animal carcasses down to the bone.

    In the abstract, I think the British royal family is simultaneously a terrible symbol of imperialism and racism and classism, an emblemization of the worst of the West, and a culturally silly thing whose enthusiasts gravitate towards it without examining the subtext all too seriously. But I really struggle to leap from the abstract to the personal: being human is weird in ways that don't translate easily or sensibly, and the thought of my every thought and feeling and idle comment being seized upon, interpreted, judged, and repurposed for people's broader narratives about who I am and what I represent... I mean it doesn't seem like a real good time. So I stick to hoping that the individuals involved figure out ways of finding peace, whatever that means to them, and it stays there unless they actually try doing things that'll change the way the world works.

    That said, I love messy drama and Prince William seems like a prick, so I'm pro-Harry and Meghan in the vaguest way humanly possible, by which I mean I read this entire thread and still had to google whether it was spelled "Megan" just now.
    posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 10:52 PM on January 8, 2023 [19 favorites]


    a) Meghan, you went to Northwestern. HOWWWWWW can you not be worldly enough to know that the British are way less huggy than Americans?

    I suspect that, like a lot of people, she believes that her way of doing things is better. And Harry may well prefer it too. So even though she probably vaguely knew we aren't supposed to be huggy as a culture, she believed that W&K would want to be if they just experienced it. Because "who wouldn't love a hug?". This is entirely speculative from me, but I think it is a plausible explanation based on the fact that I am non-huggy for a Brit and I experience this kind of thing from well-meaning people. I still don't enjoy hugs from most.

    b) Harry, you spent your entire life with these assholes; how could you not have adequately prepared Meghan for meeting Will and Kate and so on? Like, sounds like he prepped her for the Queen, but assumed that his explosive-tempered, famously self-important brother would be totes fine with a California girl who hugs on first meeting and doesn't curtsy. That is like ... a special level of denial, I guess.

    I think it's obvious that Harry really wanted to marry and have children. That is absolutely a valid thing to want. Rumour has it that at least 2 of his girlfriends dumped him because they didn't want to be part of his family. The resulting assumption is that he lied by omission to try and ensure Meghan didn't leave him too. This is plausible, but so is the explanation that he just didn't realise Meghan wouldn't know various things. I don't think he really knows how things apply to people who are not him in any case. Of course, it could also be both. Neither explanation paints him in the best possible light and other explanations (he did it deliberately for kicks?) are worse.

    c) There is such a thing as TMI, and learning about your todger's frostbite was DEFINITELY OVER THE LINE.

    Agreed. If we're being charitable, we could blame the ghostwriter a bit (either for egging him on or not reining him in).
    posted by plonkee at 1:50 AM on January 9, 2023 [5 favorites]


    I find out so weird the way people are talking about British culture being very anti-hug. I've lived here in England for nearly two decades - my entire adult life, bar a few short interludes - and I find it to be a very huggy culture. (I cannot imagine what a more huggy culture looks like - do yous stop and hug several times during a conversation or something?) Hong Kong, where I grew up, and Denmark, where I'm from, both have much less tendency to hug, in my experience. I don't think I know anyone outside of work for whom a hug at the start and end of a visit isn't standard and expected, and it's definitely not at my insistence. At uni, I had a reputation for not wanting hugs because I didn't want to hug a total stranger I'd just met and had no social crossover with that one time.

    Maybe it's an age/generation thing? Harry is only a couple of years older than me. But the notion that Britain is a no-hug culture is utterly bizarre and alien to me.
    posted by Dysk at 3:39 AM on January 9, 2023 [8 favorites]


    I would not share lipgloss with my sisters-in-law. And we barely hug. (American who'd describe her relationship with in-laws as standoffish in a totally normal way).

    I also kind of assume that if you're attached to the royal family there has to be at least one staffer who can be immediately dispatched to find your own/an unopened tube of lipgloss.
    posted by TwoStride at 4:18 AM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]


    I think the hurt here is kind of coming from what was said above, that Meghan assumed that the royal family couldn't possibly be as cold behind closed doors and she expected it would be like marrying into anyone's family, that getting a sister in law would be like getting anyone's sister in law. And that just wasn't the case. Because you would expect a sister to share, in a normal family, but not in this kind of one where even family rarely hugs each other.

    It's funny because on the one hand you'd expect them to be warmer in truth than their public image, because most people are, and on the other hand you'd also expect them to be at least somewhat as gracious in reality as their facade is, because graciousness is supposed to be a central value to them and key to noblesse oblige and so forth. So I can see being caught off guard by the combination of them embodying the lousy parts of their image and eschewing the good parts. "You know how to act gracious, can you not at least extend that act to me?"
    posted by trig at 4:37 AM on January 9, 2023 [6 favorites]




    these are people congregating around speculating on actual people's lives. I get Jason Sudeikis being abstract enough of a concept that you can treat him like a work of fiction, but still, there's a real actual human being at the center of this,

    It's a reality TV soap opera, except supposedly these people are real and choosing their own dumb mistakes instead of it being written into the script. However, it's not like I'm ever going to meet anyone in this family and I hear about them on TV in the same way one watched General Hospital back in the day. Parasocial relationships: you know tons about them thanks to the media, but they will never know you. It's a sport. It's entertainment. It just happens to be about real (or "real" to me) people. Except they're not really "real" to me because I'm not gonna be running into Harry at Safeway this week.

    But then again, we'd probably treat them the same way if they were neighbors we knew well, because hot goss is hot goss.
    posted by jenfullmoon at 8:13 AM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]




    Wow, this keeps getting better and better (and by that I mean, worse and worse).

    He now claims that he never meant to paint the Royal Family as racist. Perhaps he should have made that clarification after the Oprah interview where Meghan heavily implies racism, or perhaps after his famously reticent brother issued the "we are not a racist family" disclaimer. But I guess that would have affected viewership of the Netflix special?

    Also, apparently Susan "but where are you really from" Hussey is not racist and Meghan loves her. I guess people are only racist if they're mean to Meghan?

    IMO the most despicable disclosure in all of this is his revealing that Charles travels with a teddy bear due to childhood abuse. That is not his story to tell.
    posted by sid at 10:46 AM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]


    Reminder: They're *Germans*.
    posted by KazamaSmokers at 11:34 AM on January 9, 2023


    Reminder: They're *Germans*.

    Which means what, exactly?
    posted by tuesdayschild at 12:39 PM on January 9, 2023 [5 favorites]


    because hot goss is hot goss.

    I am now imagining a brand of lip gloss called Hot Goss.
    posted by JanetLand at 1:04 PM on January 9, 2023 [11 favorites]


    Perhaps he should have made that clarification after the Oprah interview where Meghan heavily implies racism

    So he never said it there, either? Almost like he's made it a point in not saying it so what's the issue - that describing their actions towards Meghan makes them look racist?

    MO the most despicable disclosure in all of this is his revealing that Charles travels with a teddy bear due to childhood abuse.

    The use of "despicable" and "reprehensible" is so interesting. Not the part where Charles and Camilla sold out William and Harry or how the trauma and institutions warped both Harry and William or how Meghan was treated but Harry talking about his life, sharing a sympathetic story about his father who was also traumatized by the institution, and Harry describing what actually goes into maintaining an empire (ie war).
    posted by asteria at 1:29 PM on January 9, 2023 [18 favorites]


    Reminder: They're *Germans*

    So how many generations of pure British-born are you suggesting are necessary to be considered British? Because if the Windsors are still German it sure seems like it'd disqualify a LOT of the country.
    posted by Dysk at 1:46 PM on January 9, 2023 [9 favorites]


    Incidentally, it's amazing that—despite this story being about the Brits and despite the word being used in the post itself as slang for gossip—not one person has made a pun about tea in this entire goddamn thread.

    C'mon, people. This is MetaFilter. We ought to be throwing a proper Boston Tea Party over here ok maybe that one was a little bit forced
    posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 1:48 PM on January 9, 2023 [2 favorites]


    MeteaFilter
    posted by Lanark at 2:34 PM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]


    I recently heard a young person refer to Kermit as "the tea-drinking frog" and I instantly aged 20 years.
    posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:00 PM on January 9, 2023 [20 favorites]


    SHEGLAM's Hot Goss Plumping Lip Gloss Oh Em Gee beckons, JanetLand
    posted by Iris Gambol at 3:07 PM on January 9, 2023 [4 favorites]


    Jeez Louise, to me the tea-drinker is Lobel's Frog.
    posted by Iris Gambol at 3:11 PM on January 9, 2023 [3 favorites]


    Dang this thread got weird weird
    posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 4:03 PM on January 9, 2023 [3 favorites]


    SHEGLAM's Hot Goss Plumping Lip Gloss Oh Em Gee beckons, JanetLand

    Damn, somebody always gets there first.
    posted by JanetLand at 5:06 PM on January 9, 2023 [3 favorites]


    Dang this thread got weird weird

    That's what happens when I'm involved with literally anything!
    posted by jenfullmoon at 5:07 PM on January 9, 2023 [9 favorites]



    The use of "despicable" and "reprehensible" is so interesting.

    I think Harry explains folks' reactions very well, in his own words, when he describes the release of Diana's former butler's tell-all book:

    In his memoir Spare, Harry describes how he learned of the book when he was working as an unpaid farmhand in Australia aged 19 in 2003 after leaving Eton.

    He writes that he received a package from Buckingham Palace, which was full of memos from the Palace communications team about “a delicate matter”.

    “Mummy’s former butler had penned a tell-all which actually told nothing,” he said.

    “It was merely one man’s self-justifying, self-centring version of events.

    “My mother once called this butler a dear friend, trusted him implicitly. We did too. Now this.

    “He was milking her disappearance for money. It made my blood boil.”


    But I suppose it's not ok for the help to do it.
    posted by sid at 7:58 AM on January 10, 2023


    Weird you compare him to the butler and not Diana herself considering he, like his mother, was a royal. Did Diana not have a right to talk to the press about how Charles and the Palace treated her?
    posted by asteria at 8:23 AM on January 10, 2023 [5 favorites]


    But I suppose it's not ok for the help to do it.

    You understand the difference between a job and a life, right? That Harry didn't apply to have a dead mother?
    posted by Etrigan at 8:39 AM on January 10, 2023 [18 favorites]




    IMO the most despicable disclosure in all of this is his revealing that Charles travels with a teddy bear due to childhood abuse. That is not his story to tell.

    This has been widely known for years, actually. It's common knowledge in royal-watching circles that the teddy bears are always joined by Charles's favorite mattress, paintings, and toilet seat.
    posted by joyceanmachine at 11:00 AM on January 10, 2023 [8 favorites]


    it ain't easy being royal
    posted by philip-random at 11:03 AM on January 10, 2023


    toilet seat

    what
    posted by mittens at 11:07 AM on January 10, 2023 [3 favorites]


    His own toilet seat is far worse than a teddy bear. I make no judgements on needing a bear, sometimes everyone needs a bear.

    I just got my copy of Spare during my lunch hour! Huzzah! Now I can actually read it for myself!
    posted by jenfullmoon at 1:18 PM on January 10, 2023 [3 favorites]


    This will inevitably be followed by "Metafilter: sometimes everyone needs a bear," so I might as well say it myself :P
    posted by jenfullmoon at 1:18 PM on January 10, 2023 [3 favorites]


    Madonna also has a toilet seat rider.
    posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:26 PM on January 10, 2023 [2 favorites]


    I think the bear is actually kind of human and endearing. (And if a woman did that, I think people would be a lot less weirded out.) The toilet seat is weird, but maybe he has some kind of highly-specific toilet seat need. And truly, I don't want to know if it's because of royal hemorrhoids.
    posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 1:30 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


    Or he thinks his bottom is sacred and should not touch something that a plebeian rear has rested on.
    posted by lesbiassparrow at 1:42 PM on January 10, 2023 [2 favorites]


    I assume it's a germ thing.
    posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:53 PM on January 10, 2023


    I guess we can say he's literally letting it ALL hang out except for Mr. Skin Color's identity (coughWilliamcough)

    Nah, Camilla. That's the vote of a friend of mine who's Black and married into a modestly racist family: "of course it's the mother-in-law!" and I defer to her judgment.
    posted by praemunire at 2:03 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


    Eh, I remember learning years ago (way back in the 20th c., iirc) that installing fresh toilet seats was something that was done for QEII whenever she traveled, so the same being true for KCIII does not surprise me (though he wasn't yet monarch at the time of the writing of Spare, so it's still a little extra, I guess).

    Like many above, I thought Mr(s). Skin Color must have been Wills, but the new Camilla tea is so hot it's making me wonder about a lot of things!
    posted by obloquy at 2:14 PM on January 10, 2023


    I can understand why Madonna would want it--who wants to see your used toilet seat sold to perverts. But...even in the UK...there probably aren't any Charles III perverts.
    posted by praemunire at 2:54 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


    I had assumed that the skin color commenter was Charles, given his past comments about the infant Harry's hair color. But the more I hear about the others the less I rule any of them out.
    posted by The Underpants Monster at 2:58 PM on January 10, 2023


    Actually, the queen of fussy toilet seats was Mamie Eisenhower, who according to a library history book I no longer have around the house to cite, requested a pink toilet seat once upon a time.
    posted by jenfullmoon at 3:20 PM on January 10, 2023


    When you consider the enduring popularity of mid-century modern, I feel like that request actually holds up really well.
    posted by box at 5:37 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


    Per Tina Brown's The Palace Papers (Yahoo, April 22, 2022): The author spoke to more than 120 sources over the course of two years to write The Palace Papers, which promises to “irrevocably change how the world sees the British royal family”. She described how Charles would send a truck to his friends’ country houses the day before he was due to arrive to unload his necessities. These included his “orthopaedic bed, lavatory seat and Kleenex Velvet lavatory paper”, as well as landscapes of the Scottish Highlands, Brown said. [Brown wrote 2007's The Diana Chronicles.]

    Turlet seat, but also TP, bonny art, and his own bed (like a medieval king).
    posted by Iris Gambol at 5:39 PM on January 10, 2023 [4 favorites]


    More on the Kleenex Velvet lav paper
    posted by mmmbacon at 6:49 PM on January 10, 2023


    I thought this BBC article was fascinating. Though Harry has talked repeatedly of the Palace briefing, leaking and planting stories about him and Meghan in his many interviews, this is the only story I've seen that talks about his claim in the book that the reason he and Meghan left the Royal Office he shared with his brother and sister-in-law is because although the office was charged with defending and promoting them both in the media, they were, in fact, planting stories against Harry and Meghan.
    posted by Violet Blue at 11:00 PM on January 10, 2023 [5 favorites]


    The Colbert interview. "My words are not dangerous. But the spin of my words is dangerous."

    I'm reading and writing up a fairly detailed review of Spare in FanFare so you don't have to read it, but can find out everything you haven't already seen articles about. I note I'm almost through the end of section 2 and all things considered, most of the first two halves do not have The Juicy Bits everyone's writing about. I note the media has almost no interest in his writing up of his military work in section 2, for example. Media attacking Harry (and screwing him out of a military career, multiple times) continues to come up, as does his pa going along with the media attacks on him. (Though to be fair, when Charles tries to stand up for Harry, he's told to "sod off.") Willy and Pa are off-and-on sympathetic to Harry's various snafus. His relationships get screwed over once the press starts stalking anyone who might be a new girlfriend--some have bailed VERY quickly, and then the media wonders why he doesn't have a wife.

    I'm amazed William managed to get married, given how much drama Harry's had in dating, and he's not even the heir. Sounds like it was a love match from Harry's POV, but William did get drunk and didn't want Harry to be "best man" in case he said anything um, interesting in his speech (oh look, he did). Supposedly the "actual best men" would be stalked by the media if their names were out.

    It sounds like the whole "colonials and natives" thing was supposed to be ridiculous, and William and Kate were trying to come up with ridiculous costumes, and when Harry went to a divey shop and found two options, they thought the Nazi one was the most ridiculous, and Harry admits he wanted to give Kate a laugh. He notes that nobody noticed the costume during the actual party. He does make amends to the best of his ability after that one, goes to Germany, talks with a nice rabbi, etc. He was unaware that the P-word mentioned in a video he took was a taboo one since nobody had reacted to it poorly or well, mentioned it to him as being bad (he mentions unconscious bias).
    posted by jenfullmoon at 10:08 AM on January 11, 2023 [10 favorites]


    I usually enjoy the spectacle of the British Royals, but this is stuff that requires therapy and lots of it. I celebrated Meghan because she's talented, and the sight of her her beautiful Black self at the center of a Royal wedding was very much what the British Royalty needed. I have no doubt that race is a factor in all of this conflict.
    posted by theora55 at 10:27 AM on January 11, 2023 [4 favorites]


    Quotes from NYT recap of the Colbert interview. Harry points out that his wife was always going to leave, they were just surprised he left with them. Colbert asks Harry if the goal was to drive her out or crush her spirit, Harry eventually says "both" to that after some remarks about how it feels like group therapy now.

    Colbert also asks about the todger, and Harry explains that the next time he went to a pole, he got a "bleep" cushion (see the book review, I'll elaborate more later). "No one when I was a child could ever explain to me the Duke of Sussex was going to say the word "bleep" cushion to me, and it would all make sense!" Colbert laughs. Even Harry is all, this went from grief and trauma to my todger...

    I do love that the redhead gene won out in both kids. That's still adorable to me.
    posted by jenfullmoon at 10:57 AM on January 11, 2023 [5 favorites]


    Markle's got a redheaded dad and half-brother (if not now, they were when they were young), so the odds were good.
    posted by Iris Gambol at 11:11 AM on January 11, 2023 [5 favorites]


    Harry points out that his wife was always going to leave, they were just surprised he left with them.

    To add to this, it's pretty clear they thought Meghan was a gold-digger (and they're the ones that planted that idea in the tabloids that's still repeated to this day). And I say it's obvious because not giving them money to furnish their home, not giving them a clothing allowance, not allowing Meghan access to the jewels was all to send this little upstart gold-digger back to the states. In fact they told Meghan she could keep working, probably hoping she'd go back across the ocean to do so and the relationship would fall apart without much more effort on their part.

    But what they failed to realize is that not only did Meghan have her own money, homes, and career but she also genuinely loves Harry enough to put up with all this nonsense.

    Aside from that, the way Charles holds onto the purse-strings seems destined to blow up in his face. As the royals are expected to work (and some of them are notorious for slacking) it's not fair to think of it as him supporting them but him giving them a stipend for their work. As Andrew can no longer do appearances and he and his wife and other siblings are not getting younger they could have used Meghan and Harry to pick up the slack.

    His mother kept Margaret in the largest apartment and in the lap of luxury so she wouldn't want to leave but also as a return for her loyalty and service. She did the same for her non-heirs. And once they learned their lessons with Diana and Fergie, they provided them with money as well so they'd stay in line and support the family if not actively then with their silence. Charles seems to have forgetten all of that by not having funds for Harry and his family but somehow finding them for a new carriage and his coronation and Camilla's children and probably an offshore bank account or two.
    posted by asteria at 12:34 PM on January 11, 2023 [11 favorites]


    Charles seems to have forgetten all of that by not having funds for Harry and his family but somehow finding them for a new carriage and his coronation

    I think he's getting the taxpayer to entirely fund the coronation, which is in line with his desire not to part with money unless he has to.
    posted by lesbiassparrow at 12:48 PM on January 11, 2023 [4 favorites]


    So I read more of Spare during lunch, and it covered the "work shy" thing circa the mid 2010's (when Wills and Kate were reproducing). Harry says that his father appointed out whatever money they got to do engagements, and would limit how much he gave, so that had something to do with doing less engagements. Charles also Had Issues with Wills and Kate getting more attention than he did. Harry absolutely does note that Some People (no names cited) do put down things that only barely count as engagements, or are cramming in a lot at the end of the year to boost their tallies in the court circular.

    Note by comparison, this article about 2022's court circular results.
    posted by jenfullmoon at 1:18 PM on January 11, 2023 [4 favorites]


    Everybody forgets that Kate was constantly trashed as a commoner gold digger until they had a new villain in Meghan and then suddenly all the press are constantly salivating over Kate’s style (yawn) and “trim figure”.

    The Colbert interview was great. Harry comes across like a normal person; a millennial who went to therapy and is figuring himself out and now his family doesn’t get him anymore; he seems genuinely happy to be in California and that comment about whether the media was trying to drive Meghan out or break her spirit and then being surprised when he left too was really insightful.
    posted by St. Peepsburg at 4:59 PM on January 11, 2023 [11 favorites]


    Everybody forgets that Kate was constantly trashed as a commoner gold digger until they had a new villain in Meghan and then suddenly all the press are constantly salivating over Kate’s style (yawn) and “trim figure”.


    Yes, Kate was sacrificed on the altar for Camilla and Charles' rehabbing of their images and then the same was done to Meghan once Kate had done her duty of popping out an heir and falling in line. They probably consider it a just a hazing ritual and that Harry and Meghan should have endured or made their own deals with the British media for better press.
    posted by asteria at 5:21 PM on January 11, 2023 [3 favorites]


    Takeaways from Prince Harry's 'Spare' that didn't make headlines (CTV, Jan. 11, 2023) mentions Harry's first best friend, Henry van Straubenzee; he was killed at 18 in a car accident in 2002, 10 days before Christmas. They were schoolmates at Ludgrove. Here's Harry at 27, delivering an address at the annual carol concert for the Henry van Straubenzee Memorial Fund:
    Harry told the 800-strong congregation at St. Luke’s Church, Chelsea, “It’s never easy losing someone close to you” – and when it is family it is “even harder.”

    “I cannot imagine what it is like” to lose a child. He was like a “brother” to the prince, Harry added of the boy his pals called “Henners.”

    Praising his “love of life and sense of fun” and sometimes “inappropriate sense of humor,” Harry thanked the charity, which was set up by Henry’s parents Alex and Claire, for “keeping the memorial of my best friend alive. He would be hugely proud of what you have done in his legacy.”
    William, at the fund's launch in 2009: "Having lost someone so close, in similar circumstances, Harry and I understand how important it is to keep their memory alive. There is no finer way than that, which Alex and Claire have chosen. This is the first charity of which we have both become patrons and it couldn’t have been a better one, as Henry was such a close friend of ours and because we believe so strongly in the need to alleviate poverty and assist development in African countries." They remain joint patrons; Spare also recounts arguments with William over Harry's involvement in conservation work and other humanitarian endeavors in African countries.

    Henry van Straubenzee was bound for the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and stint in the Army, just like Harry; unlike Harry, he dreamed of being a teacher. His memorial fund benefits kids in Uganda by providing classrooms, supplies, teacher housing, and clean water.

    This is fine.
    posted by Iris Gambol at 6:06 PM on January 11, 2023 [1 favorite]


    "Prince Harry: In His Own Words" is on Hulu now, just found that.

    I did figure it was Henry von Straubenzee (what a last name), he just refers to him as "Henners" in the book all the time.
    posted by jenfullmoon at 6:11 PM on January 11, 2023


    " suddenly all the press are constantly salivating over Kate’s style (yawn) and “trim figure”."

    And her "English rose complexion," which, baaaaaaaaaarf. It's not even a dogwhistle, it's a foghorn.
    posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:58 PM on January 11, 2023 [6 favorites]


    And she "never put a foot wrong," a phrase that's repeated so many times in articles, along with "incandescent."
    posted by jenfullmoon at 7:20 PM on January 11, 2023 [3 favorites]


    > People take genuine offence to being asked for lip gloss?

    > “Meg squeezed some onto her finger and applied it to her lips. Kate grimaced.”
    >> Still gross. - posted by St. Peepsburg


    This whole thing reminds me of the time when I was 17 years old and staying for three months in my aunt's home (against my will, my parents had dumped me there for ~reasons~), and one time, my cousin (two years older than me) was asked to bring in the clean laundry from the line outside because it was about to rain, and my cousin made SUCH A FUSS about having to touch my bra which I had hung out there to dry. The face she made. The way she held my bra with just the tips of two fingernails. The way she violently shook her hand towards me from across the room so that the bra landed about two feet away from me on the floor.

    This cousin and I had always been good pals since we were little but this incident changed everything. We've barely said three words to each other after that. We're both in our forties! A few years ago, I straight up asked her why she'd had such a reaction to my bra, and she spat the word, "Disgusting," at me, almost under her breath, and walked away from the buffet to avoid me.

    I've been quite uninterested in everything to do with all of these folks, just a vague "yay" to Harry for leaving the toxic family I guess? But this anecdote just evoked a couple of decades' worth of barely repressed feelings. There's something really disturbing about people you think of as family finding you so viscerally disgusting. The shame I was made to feel that day stayed with me for years.

    IDK if I'm overreacting or if other people feel the same way about these things? But I feel strongly that we shouldn't normalize DISGUST as a reaction to normal, harmless contact with other human beings' lip gloss or clean bras. The pandemic might excuse a fear reaction, or anger, but not disgust. Disgust is not a morally neutral reaction. It's quite utterly dehumanizing. Someone squeezing a bit of your lip gloss out shouldn't be "gross".

    > really just serving as a euphemism for WASP/not-WASP

    Bingo.
    posted by MiraK at 9:14 PM on January 11, 2023 [14 favorites]


    Everybody forgets that Kate was constantly trashed as a commoner gold digger until they had a new villain in Meghan and then suddenly all the press are constantly salivating over Kate’s style (yawn) and “trim figure”.

    I must have been in some kind of blissful no-exposure-to-this-sort-of-thing bubble during that period, because I have no memory of a time when both the press and the majority of online commenters weren’t gushing over Kate and hailing her brand of frozen-faced, airbrushed blandness as the second coming of Grace Kelly and the Holy Morher rolled into one.

    I’ve always shrugged it off and it never really annoyed me, partly because it doesn’t affect me and partly because I figured as long as she was doing what was asked of her and she and her husband and kids were happy who was I to care? Just like I’d never buy a ticket to an Anne Hathaway movie, but she doesn’t need my ten dollars anyway. But that mental picture of her is changing the more details come out.
    posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:24 PM on January 11, 2023 [3 favorites]


    That's an interesting though, Underpants. Kate is soooo expected to present in a certain way. But William? He hasn't totally slobified but the double standards are stark.
    posted by porpoise at 11:40 PM on January 11, 2023 [1 favorite]




    >because I have no memory of a time when both the press and the majority of online commenters weren’t gushing over Kate and hailing her brand of frozen-faced, airbrushed blandness as the second coming of Grace Kelly and the Holy Morher rolled into one.

    That was around the wedding but before they married and weirdly, after they married, it was a common narrative.

    Also, to get back to the famous redheads and their portrayals, along with Judas, Mary Magdalene is also often presented as a ginger in medieval art.
    posted by asteria at 10:08 AM on January 12, 2023 [1 favorite]


    Yeah, I tried not to pay too much attention but I still saw how the British press dubbed her “Wait-y Katie” and suggested she was gritting her teeth and getting through Will’s flakiness so that she could snag the crown.
    posted by PussKillian at 10:27 AM on January 12, 2023 [2 favorites]


    And then there were the Tudor redheads. I suppose Henry VIII and Elizabeth I cancel each other out in terms of being remembered fondly or not fondly. (I once had an orange cat whose middle name was Henry, in honor of the old king and the young prince.) I had always assumed William Rufus had red hair, but apparently he just had a ruddy complexion.
    posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:03 AM on January 12, 2023 [1 favorite]


    So William and Harry rowed over whose ‘thing’ Africa is. Now tell me the colonial mindset is dead

    To me this is the biggest aspect that's pretty much been absent from the coverage. Maybe it's because there's no really new information here: of course these guys going off specifically to Africa for safaris and charities has a strong colonialist dimension. Or course if Harry meant nothing racist by dressing up as a Nazi or using ethnic slurs for South Asians, then clearly something is amiss with how he was brought up and educated. Of course he had no idea how systemic and ingrained racism could be. We all know the royal family is pretty racist and out of touch, and we all know or suspect that the same is true for most of their social class. There's nothing new.

    But Harry's own book and interviews shine a giant spotlight on it -- or would if it weren't dwarfed by the spotlight on lip gloss and so on.

    Why does anything about the royal family even matter? According to them and the people who defend the institution, it's because they represent the heart and soul and deep identity of Britain, because they're a stabilizing and unifying force. Or something. Supposedly they have been raised since birth to feel a deep sense of duty and responsibility towards their role. Supposedly they are uniquely placed to understand the stories and needs and pain of the British people. We're supposed to care about them not just because they're a walking rich celebrity reality show, but because they embody the most noble virtues of their country and direct those virtues towards the good of the people. Or something.

    And still it turns out that they can reach their twenties ignorant enough about the pain and damage and sheer fucked-up-edness of the Holocaust to treat it like a hilarious prop, ignorant enough about the pain and damage and sheer fucked-up-edness of colonialism to participate in "colonials and natives" parties, ignorant enough to be unaware of the significance of slurs that have been decried and denounced for decades, ignorant enough to not understand that racism is a pervasive factor in just about everything and that maybe they should pay attention to it. Somehow the life-long preparation they undergo for their roles doesn't include things like that. Endless training in protocol yes; in-depth learning about the world, not so much. And even worse, not only did Harry and his brother apparently not learn these things at home (i.e., not from their families and not from the entire royal training apparatus), but they didn't learn them at Eton either -- a school that's basically a pipeline for the most privileged into positions of power.

    We knew all of this, but still. The sheer ignorance and unsuitability of these people for their positions should be the headline, not their stupid pettiness and insecurities.
    posted by trig at 12:04 PM on January 12, 2023 [22 favorites]


    We're supposed to care about them not just because they're a walking rich celebrity reality show, but because they embody the most noble virtues of their country and direct those virtues towards the good of the people. Or something.

    Ever been to one of those pioneer village things where all the people who work there are in costume and they talk like it's ye olden tymes all the time, never breaking character? I wonder if that model could be used for the British Royal Family in the future... Sort of like a living museum. Turn them into revenue streams instead of cost centers.
    posted by some loser at 5:32 PM on January 12, 2023 [1 favorite]


    If there is one thing Windsor's dislike aside from Americans, it's taxes.

    They seem to evaded both and that's not right.
    posted by clavdivs at 6:29 PM on January 12, 2023 [1 favorite]


    I found out about this on Reddit, but the discussion here is far more thought provoking. Wish I'd come here first.

    Part of me recognises that if, or more accurately when I was going through a rift with my family, the last thing I wanted was people judging my choices and/or painting me as the antagonist. The other part is a trashgossip weasel. I'm not as dedicated to it as jenfullmoon and I'd like to consider myself above it but threads on this topic always pique my interest somehow.

    Harry wanting to leave the royal system is entirely understandable given his life inside it. I think Markle faced a lot of culture shock by coming to one of the most gatekept parts of UK culture, and that the Royal Family were once again behind the curve in accommodating newcomers.

    I'm still not completely convinced they need to keep writing about their situation in order to procure an income - with the connections Harry and Markle combined have I'm sure they could find something else, or take a few years of training or university before starting on a career. I'm also wondering why they didn't lower their living costs more if security is consuming so much money. Continuing to use the drama for profit is only going to cause them more emotional harm.
    posted by wandering zinnia at 6:58 PM on January 12, 2023 [3 favorites]


    Ever been to one of those pioneer village things where all the people who work there are in costume and they talk like it's ye olden tymes all the time, never breaking character?

    Y'know, I do think the royal family's primary job is as a tourist attraction and marketing these days. Faces on the tea towels and things like that. Do they actually do work or rule anything or is it just charity events all the time? I thought the prime minister ran the country...ish? That's why the fear that the general public won't love them any longer--then they're out of jobs.

    I found out about this on Reddit, but the discussion here is far more thought provoking. Wish I'd come here first.

    Woo hoo! Yeah, I looked at Reddit but most of it's pretty "stop whinging, Harry" there. Um, looks to me like he's got some good reason to have some airing of grievances.

    I'm also wondering why they didn't lower their living costs more if security is consuming so much money. Continuing to use the drama for profit is only going to cause them more emotional harm.

    Well, at some point--probably after this book--that'll be more or less played out. I think that was a selling point to get income at first, for sure. But they do seem to be branching out into other documentaries/books/podcast/charity, etc. As we say these days, different revenue streams.

    As for lowering cost of living: I think they probably need a mansion for security/keep the paps out and I read somewhere during all this that security for them for a year is $3 million. At the very least they have to pay for home security and people security. Having read about 300 or so pages of the book (sorry folks, the other 100+ needs to wait a few days, I went to go see Frozen tonight and I got another show tomorrow), Harry doesn't sound like he's a big shopper/spender. Meghan probably gets more fancy stuff than he does, but I somehow doubt they live super high on the hog Nic Cage style most of the time.
    posted by jenfullmoon at 11:13 PM on January 12, 2023 [2 favorites]


    Every now and then, the idea of a lottery / jury duty system for politics comes up. Instead of electing someone, they're randomly chosen from the general population.

    There is currently an active post on this very topic, Democracy By Lottery.
    posted by LooseFilter at 7:23 AM on January 13, 2023


    There's a GK Chesterton novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, where things are run nominally through a king who is picked by lot. I remember it being quite a lot of fun.
    posted by lesbiassparrow at 12:22 PM on January 13, 2023 [1 favorite]


    "still saw how the British press dubbed her “Wait-y Katie”

    A Harry tell-all is great, but the gossip loving part of me for sure wants a Kate tell-all, because at one point it did seem like she wanted all of this, and now it seems like she really probably doesn't anymore?

    The palace won't even let her have nice hair. She's constrained to a few boring, old-fashioned styles, and she is a lady with very nice hair!

    To my mind, she and Sophie Wessex are the royals who are BY FAR the best at their jobs, followed by Edward (but only in the last decade; he flirted with being a trashfite before settling on bland). (Sophie also seems like the smartest of that generation, by a lot.)
    posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:39 PM on January 13, 2023 [2 favorites]


    The gang at The Last Leg ran an old clip on their Youtube channel that I found weirdly....supportive?

    It was from the episode they did shortly after Harry and Megan first announced they were stepping down. As they were discussing it, Adam Hills mentioned that he had actually just met Harry himself; Harry was drawing the teams for the Rugby Disability League World Cup, and Adam was on one of those teams. His team had been invited to the palace to meet Harry; they realized that this was very likely the very last Palace Duty thing Harry was going to do.

    The thing was, though; this was also during the time that Adam Hills was sporting an elaborate beard. He'd grown a beard during the initial phase of lockdown, and after doing a couple of "zoom" shows with it, the guys on the show started joking that he should keep the beard "until Brexit got sorted out." And when Brexit got postponed, they took a poll to see how Adam should style his still-growing beard - and the popular vote decreed that he should style it like the character Geoff on a show called Byker Grove.

    It's....quite a look. And Harry was wildly amused by it. And now I'm thinking that maybe it was a welcome bright spot in the midst of some dark days.
    posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:51 PM on January 14, 2023


    My beloved has commemorated this publication in verse:

    My todger is striped like a badger
    The frostbite is making me scream
    Thank goodness for Mother and dear old Elizabeth
    Arden's superb Eight Hour Cream.

    posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 3:50 PM on January 14, 2023 [1 favorite]


    Interesting interview Harry did with a reporter. There's a recap of it over here (original article paywalled) and then the reporter put more on her Substack here.
    This is not about trying to collapse the monarchy, this is about trying to save them from themselves. And I know that I will get crucified by numerous people saying that.

    One of the themes across the interviews is: how can you say you want your brother and father back, surely writing a book is not the way of going about it? And my answer to that is: I’ve tried everything I can! It’s as if they don’t want reconciliation, because keeping us as the villains, and keeping the press focused on us, helps detract from everything else that’s going on within that family. That’s one part of it. But also, my technique here, at this point - because I do genuinely want my father and my brother back in my life as opposed to what it is now, which is, it couldn’t be worse - is that the more I can bring the relationship between the press and the palace to light, the higher the chance is of that ceasing completely, and therefore protecting other members of the family. Because again if it’s not us, it’s someone else. And I know I’m not going to make friends in that process. But I also don’t understand how so much of what has happened from one version, one side of this story, how me telling the other side, the truthful side, is so shocking and outrageous
    .
    posted by jenfullmoon at 12:42 PM on January 15, 2023 [3 favorites]


    Ooookay, found some other news this morning.

    Yesterday I read this fairly attitude-y Daily Beast Royalist column making threatening noises about having a reconciliation summit. "Prince Harry ‘Holding a Gun,’ as Royals Ponder Peace Summit Idea" (geez, a gun?) But today some media outlets are claiming peace talks will actually happen.

    In other news, Jeremy Clarkson has lost an Amazon gig and supposedly apologized to Meghan and Harry.
    posted by jenfullmoon at 11:06 AM on January 16, 2023 [1 favorite]


    I really enjoy watching Clarkson making an ass of himself. I’m disappointed that this will mean the end of the Grand Tour and Clarkson’s Farm.
    posted by interogative mood at 3:54 AM on January 17, 2023 [1 favorite]




    OK this made me change my mind. My mind was that I don't have much of a mind when it comes to royals, except that they are all rich and spoilt and most probably racist. But: Prince Harry Is Right, and It’s Not Just a Matter of Royal Gossip, a NYTimes Opinion by Zeynep Tufecki
    Among those in attendance at a Christmas lunch in mid-December were Camilla, Britain’s queen consort; Dame Judi Dench; Dame Maggie Smith; and some less luminous celebrities, including the acid-tongued columnist Jeremy Clarkson and the broadcaster and columnist Piers Morgan.

    Both Clarkson and Morgan have been among the foremost participants in the multiyear media evisceration of Meghan, a daughter-in-law of Camilla and King Charles.

    Clarkson has prior ties to Camilla. His farm was featured in an edition of Country Life magazine that she guest-edited. Just days after that Christmas lunch, he blasted Meghan when he wrote in his column in The Sun, “At night, I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.”

    The palace made no comment about that. Clarkson publicly apologized for the column after a fierce public outcry.

    As for Morgan, he has called Camilla “a class act.” More than a decade ago, when many in Britain were still resistant to her becoming a queen consort because of her adulterous affair with Charles, Morgan wrote in his Daily Mail column, “I can’t actually think of a single other woman in the world better suited, or more suitably experienced,” to be queen.

    Morgan quit his ITV morning show in a huff in March 2021 after being roundly condemned for saying that he did not believe Meghan’s claim to have been suicidal during her first pregnancy and that he “wouldn’t believe her if she read me a weather report.” It wasn’t his first such diatribe about her, and it wouldn’t be his last.

    But he said Camilla soon “demanded to know when I’d be back on television.”
    Just wow.
    posted by mumimor at 10:40 AM on January 26, 2023 [5 favorites]


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