I’m writing this on the 12th anniversary of William and Kate’s wedding when I led the coverage of the day in an award-winning special issue of Grazia magazine, where I worked at the time.
It was a joyous, exciting, ‘proud-to-be-British’ day and one of the highlights of my career. A simpler time, back when ‘Brexit’, and indeed ‘Megxit’, were words that had not yet entered our everyday lexicon.
Twelve years ago, if you’d have even suggested that I would one day be writing this piece, I would not have believed you. But I am now clear that if there was a referendum tomorrow on whether we should abolish the monarchy, I know that unlike that fateful Brexit referendum in 2016, I would vote to leave.
This is a real about-turn for me; an ex-boyfriend, just 5 years ago, was a passionate republican and he and I used to get into arguments about the monarchy. In fact, I believe it was one of the reasons we ended, as we were just too different in our outlook.
Back then, I had for all my life just blindly accepted that the royals were part of the fabric of our lives as British citizens. I was proud of the fact that we had a royal family with all its history, glamour, pomp and pageantry and I felt they gave us massive kudos abroad.
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I loved the soap opera, drama, intrigue and the very human stories that come from the dysfunctional Windsor family. Indeed, I have been reporting on these stories for most of my journalistic career - something I now feel uneasy about - and I have (clang) met many of the members (Prince Harry swore like a trooper when we had drinks in 2011 and I once found myself dancing to The Pussycat Dolls “Don’t Cha" with a sweaty Prince William in a Chelsea nightclub in 2005.)
I come from a family of affirmed royalists; my mother has scrap books of press cuttings from Charles and Diana’s 1981 wedding and coronation bunting is currently on proud display outside her house; my cousin worked as the Duchess of York’s PA for a decade and two distant family members (long since deceased) were once chambermaids at Buckingham Palace.
But in the past few years, something inside of me has shifted and since last September and the death of Queen Elizabeth II, whose 70 years of duty I have a great respect for, I find a growing sense of anger that to have a monarchy in 2023 is just plain wrong.
Of course I know and do understand all the counter arguments for why the royal family are good: the millions of pounds they bring to the country in tourism; the balance of power, holding the government to account (although this was proven farcical when in August 2019 at the height of the Brexit crisis, PM Boris Johnson advised the Queen to suspend parliament, which was later proven to be unlawful by the Supreme Court.)
Their charity work is undeniably brilliant: The Princes Trust, the Duke of Edinburgh Award, The Invictus Games and the work Prince William is doing for the environment with his Earthshot Prize, really is impressive.
Also, despite this growing anger about the institution, I am fond of King Charles, I think he’s done a great job since his mother died in September and (controversially) I am also a fan of Camilla, who I believe has been put through the wringer over the years.
But this is not about the individuals, it’s much, much bigger than that and there are myriad reasons I feel this way. One: the public money spent on the monarchy - the coronation alone is reportedly going to cost the UK taxpayer up to £100 million in one of the worst cost of living crises in recent years.
(Indeed many question why we are even having a coronation, given that most other European countries have long since abolished them, the last one in Spain was in 1555 and Denmark, Sweden and Norway have all deemed them archaic and unnecessary since 1906.)
Then there’s the sexism that is still so entrenched in the institution which by its very existence is patriarchal. Yes, the Queen gave royal assent to the Succession To The Crown Act in 2013, which meant that both sons and daughters of any future UK monarch would have equal right to the throne which is great, but this is not backdated, meaning that Princess Anne is still behind her younger brothers, Andrew and Edward in the line of succession.
One of the reasons Camilla is being crowned ‘Queen Consort’ is because Queens are still regarded as inferior to Kings, hence why Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Prince Phillip was the Duke of Edinburgh, for fear he would outrank the Queen if he were ‘King Consort.’
Of course there’s the really unsavoury allegations of institutional racism that swirl around their past and present: their links to slavery and the alleged treatment of Meghan Markle.
I feel uneasy about the Commonwealth too and tend to agree with author and broadcaster Afua Hirsch, who on Meghan and Harry’s Netflix documentary said she believes it is ‘Empire 2.0’.
In the same vein, our public honours system, headed up by the monarchy, is utterly anachronistic in today’s world as it still - extraordinarily - harks back to the days of the British Empire - arguably our most problematic era in Britain’s history: an OBE is literally an ‘Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire’ - yet we no longer have a British Empire, so why hasn’t this been amended?
I also find it endlessly bizarre when celebrities and public figures who present themselves as paragons of social justice, preaching inclusivity and anti-racism, accept such honours.
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Then, there’s the actual concept of the monarchy and the divine birthright to such power and privilege and all the pomp and ceremony that comes with it. (Did anyone else find the 24/7 televised proceedings of all the archaic formalities in the days after the Queen’s death just baffling?)
It was while watching the first episode of Netflix’s, Harry and Meghan that one of the main issues I’d been grappling with was articulated by Archewell’s chief executive James Holt, who is also a former press secretary for the royal family.
"When you really put pressure on the notion that this one family has been born into the world, appointed by god to rule over the United Kingdom and other countries of the world, it's a difficult conversation to have,” Holt says on camera. I couldn’t agree more.
I find the Meghan and Harry situation really complex and I wish that it hadn’t become such a beacon of the furiously divisive culture wars we are living through, as I can see both sides.
I find the vitriol levelled at them totally disproportionate to say, the odious Prince Andrew, stripped of his royal titles following that disastrous 2019 Newsnight interview and then forced to pay out a reported £12 million in an out of court settlement to Virginia Giuffre, the woman who accuses him of assaulting her while she was being sex trafficked by his pal Jeffrey Epstein, but whom he claims to have never met. (Prince Andrew has always denied any wrongdoing.)
How Meghan and Harry get more flak is difficult to comprehend. Yet, I find how they’ve treated their respective families in public incredibly selfish and unkind.
Their sheer hypocrisy at times is staggering (private jets) - and how they can pocket millions of dollars from Netflix, the creators of The Crown - who have literally reinvented Harry’s family history and even plan to recreate his mother’s death in a car crash - and then complain about invasions of privacy and sue the media is beyond me.
Also, if you hate the royal family so much, why keep your titles? But there’s no escaping the fact that James Holt has got a valid point.
And this brings me to perhaps the most affecting reason I have abandoned my affection for the monarchy: the sheer cruelty of it to those unfortunate enough to have been born into it.
If there was one resounding takeaway from Harry’s candid and at times, painful memoir, Spare (and I am not talking about descriptions of his frostbitten todger) is how utterly trapped he was and his family still are.
Yes, they live in palaces and have unbridled privilege, power and wealth, but they also do not have the basic human right of freedom. And whatsmore, unlike celebrities, it is not their choice to lead these lives, it’s their birthright.
When Harry describes his former royal life as like living in The Truman Show and says, “My father and my brother, they are trapped. They don’t get to leave. And I have huge compassion for that.”
He is right. And it is not right. It is very clear from everything Harry has spewed in public since leaving the UK that this is a man with serious mental health issues, still wrestling with the grief of losing his mother at such a young age and having to endure the barbaric public manner in which he was forced to mourn her.
The way in which his personal life - and all their personal lives - has been relentlessly, rapaciously reported on by the media, myself included, as fair game because we pay for their existence does not sit well with me. They have no choice in this bizarre circus they have been born into.
I can’t be alone in thinking that when you see images of Kate and William’s young children uncomfortably carrying out their royal roles, being forced to wave to crowds of millions and shake hands with strangers, it feels like looking at young zoo animals.
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Omid Scobie, Harry and Meghan’s biographer, author of the international bestseller Finding Freedom has been analysing what the future holds for the monarchy for his next book, Endgame: Inside the Royal Family’s and the Monarchy’s Fight For Survival (to be published later this year) and he also feels that the public mood is changing towards the monarchy
“I feel like, since The Queen's death, we have entered a place in which I think people in the UK and across the Commonwealth feel a lot more comfortable having conversations about the relevancy and the purpose and the current status of the monarchy, in their lives and the society that they live in,” he tells me. I ask him if he thinks that Meghan and Harry have acted as a catalyst for this?
“Harry and Meghan became proxies within the culture war, they represented ‘woke snowflake culture’, he tells me. "So much of the public's problems with Harry and Meghan isn't really about them. It's about their issues with woke culture. But I think alongside that has also highlighted the royal family's issues with woke culture as well. And it hasn't necessarily put them on the right side of history in that. And I think that there's been not enough effort made on the institution's side, to position itself into a slightly, just slightly more neutral position that isn't quite so conservative or right-wing targeted.
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“Harry and Meghan coming together presented them with a plethora of new challenges and issues and discussions. And at every hurdle they failed. And these are those moments where the royal family is supposed to modernise."
Scobie agrees with me that the Queen’s length of time on the throne represented a bygone era, a time of mystique around the monarchy, that unfortunately no longer exists. (How can we have the same respect for poor old Charles when we know every lick and spit of his turbulent private life - Tampax-gate included - over the past 50 years?)
“The Queen was like the invisible shield around the entire family. She kept them all safe. And I think without her, who we all sort of universally loved and revered, and she was perhaps or definitely was more popular than the monarchy itself, it's left everyone a bit exposed,” he says.
Whether King Charles will inspire the same love and reverence both at home and abroad now that he has been officially crowned our monarch remains to be seen.
