Royal rift marks a tragic missed opportunity

Step back from the scrum around Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry and one thing is clear: the rift between Britain’s royal family and two of its most charismatic and crowd-pleasing members represents a vast missed opportunity.

The 2018 marriage of Harry and Meghan seemed to signal a renewal of the family’s mindset, its front-line representatives, and its broader popularity, not least among black Britons. Many of them saw the prince’s union with a mixed-race bride as a signal of hope and change. Together with Prince William, next in line to the throne after the heir Prince Charles, and William’s wife Kate, the newly-wed couple fleetingly formed a united quartet of fresh thinkers from a new generation.

For that spirit of renewal to disintegrate within three years into a “she-said, Royal-we-said” dispute over the inflammatory issues of racism and mental health — the latter recalling the agonies of William and Harry’s late mother, Princess Diana — is a personal and family tragedy. Yet this is an institutional, not constitutional, crisis. It is not too late to heed the warning and change how “the firm” functions.

Such crises have shaken the monarchy before, most recently after Diana’s death in 1997. Without action, they will do so again. Simmering concerns over Prince Andrew, tainted by association with the late Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and sex offender, could boil up anew. The tabloid press, which hyped the Meghan-and-Harry romance then poisoned it with careless bigotry, has an insatiable appetite for royal targets.

The doleful recurrence of scandal every few years suggests a structural problem. Repairing the fault lines is increasingly urgent. At a time of unsettling change in UK politics, the monarch still has a role to play as an anchor of national stability. But Queen Elizabeth, who turns 95 next month and almost single-handedly holds the firm together, is not immortal. While there is a solid base of traditionalist backers, support is split on generational lines. YouGov surveys show younger people tend to side with Harry and Meghan, their elders with the royal family.

The feudal nature of the monarchy, for all its weaknesses, contains the seeds of regeneration. As William and Kate’s children grow up they should supply new ideas and new faces for the press to obsess over. Meanwhile, the Queen’s gradualist strategy of evolution needs to accelerate, ignited by Markle’s allegations of ugly and inexcusable racism among family members. A carefully worded statement from Buckingham Palace on Tuesday night said it was taking “very seriously” the “concerning” race issues raised, but noted that “recollections may vary”.

With Harry and Meghan living a new life in California, the challenge of leading renewal now falls to Prince Charles, William and Kate. They will continue to form the core of working royals, which should be tightly defined. By committing himself and his successors to a set age of abdication, Charles could prevent the institution from ossifying. More minor royals should be allowed to pursue a different existence, as Harry and Meghan, slightly clumsily, attempted to do.

However dysfunctional the family, moreover, the officials, press advisers, human resources staff and others who make up the wider institution should be capable of bringing in new blood, applying pragmatic business knowhow, and rooting out unacceptable attitudes. If the firm fails to adapt, it will be condemned to repeat the same sad plotline of the Meghan-Harry fairy tale — messy defeat snatched from the jaws of victory — potentially with an even unhappier ending.