Harry and Meghan need to get over themselves

Their six-part documentary will perhaps reveal further misdeeds by the unfeeling Firm and predatory media. The trailers certainly hint as much. Whether it will substantially add to the facts that are already known, is less clear. We know that the couple felt unsupported and there were briefings against them. We know that they allege racism. We know they left the royal family to avoid press intrusion and the impact on Meghan’s mental health (good on them).

We know this because they’ve said so, several times.

That the couple have legitimate gripes seems beyond question. Racism in the ranks is all too easy to imagine: lady-in-waiting Lady Susan Hussey’s treatment of a black woman at a Buckingham Palace reception last week underlined why.

And we can all keenly appreciate Harry’s fears for his family, given the awful circumstances of his mother’s death.

The royal family needs to be scrutinised, and Harry and Meghan have offered an insider view.

But do we really need to hear about it all yet again? The couple have already talked repeatedly about their hurt and trauma. And yet now the supposedly media-wary couple have put themselves at the heart of a “Netflix Global Event”, followed by Harry’s memoir in the new year, apparently going over the same ground. It will catapult them back into the media glare they said they wanted to escape. Perhaps there is a bombshell coming; we’ll see, but this rehashing of old complaints is prompting a lot of eyerolling, a lot of groans.

The Duke and Duchess present themselves as keepers of the truth, but they’ve not made a great start. The trailers use footage of media scrums to illustrate the press attention they have endured, but the clips used apparently include photographers at a Harry Potter premiere in 2011, five years before the couple met; photographers snapping Katie Price outside a Sussex magistrates court; and photographers pursuing Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen as he left home for prison. They show what intense press interest looks like; just not interest in the Sussexes. Could Netflix not find more footage relating to the couple themselves? If not, why not?

A frequently expressed suspicion about them is that the interviews, documentary and memoir are not so much about setting the record straight as monetising their past; that charismatic though they are, they’ve realised that without invoking their connection to the royal family, and their antagonism towards it, it’s much harder to make big bucks. The Netflix deal is said to be worth over £80m.

Even if they were doing it for the money, though, would it matter? Well, that depends on who or what gets damaged in the process. Whatever the couple’s motivations, the royal family must be bracing themselves.

To some of us, the concept of the monarchy is objectionable in principle – it’s the central pillar holding up the invidious British class system – so when Meghan Markle appeared on the scene, a biracial, divorced American woman with her own career, it seemed that it was finally modernising. She had a voice and wasn’t afraid to use it. What a positive change from the seen-but-rarely-heard model of royal women we’d got used to.

When they decided to leave, it was genuinely impressive. They were not just complaining about the damaged and damaging institution Harry had never asked to be part of, they were doing something about it.

I had perhaps an unrealistic idea of what they would do next. I think I imagined they’d disappear laughing into the sunset, while the other royals cut ribbons in the rain. Perhaps Harry would retrain as a carpenter and Meghan would go back to work in TV melodramas; they’d need to earn enough to fund their security but would otherwise retreat into a kind of blameless semi-obscurity. They’d enact a riches-to-rags journey of self-fulfilment – and we’d love them for it.

That was never going to happen of course. For all Harry and Meghan were meant to be the relatable ones, the couple were always members of an exclusive elite. Harry has never known anything else (not his fault). Of course they were going to live in a California mansion – a palace by most standards – because presumably that is their expectation. The Netflix deal will certainly help pay their mortgage.

But it brings problems. One is that the documentary comes off as navel-gazing and self-obsessed.

Another is that if they were victims of The Firm, then surely there are other casualties who remain trapped within it. The Sussexes’ scattergun attacks to date have failed to distinguish between the perps and the victims. There’s been speculation that stony-faced images on one trailer of Catherine, Princess of Wales, deliberately point up the poor relationship between the couples. But could Catherine not also have struggled, in private? Harry remarks on the “pain and suffering of women marrying into this institution”. Well then, where is the compassion for those still stuck in it?

The Sussexes received the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights’ Ripple of Hope award on Tuesday night. According to the organisation’s president, Kerry Kennedy, it was for their “courage” discussing mental illness and standing up to racism in the royal family. The decision was controversial: some thought it fair enough, others felt there were probably far more deserving candidates.

Prince William of course has his causes too, plugging away doggedly about climate change. The point is this: that the balance of good and bad is plainly not all in favour of the Sussexes.

In every family there comes a time to put aside animosity and move on. The Sussexes have aired their grievances time and again, and perhaps found it cathartic, but are they really going to let it dominate the rest of their lives? If so, they might find a diminishing audience.

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