I went to bed much later than I intended to last night because I was too wired after that wild World Cup match between England and Mexico. Everything about it was entertaining, from the dramatics on the pitch to what was happening before the game to Scotland hilariously entering the chat.

As we know now, Three Lions prevailed and will go on to play the most viral team of the tournament, thanks to their Viking row, Norway. But there’s a competing headline in England today and, of course, it’s related to the f-ckery of the British royal family. Not even the World Cup can curb the British tabloids’ obsession with Prince Harry and Meghan Sussex.

In brief: Harry will be in England to promote the Invictus Games taking place in Birmingham next summer. He was recently denied security, which was already a story that was preoccupying the media, and thus will not be travelling with Meghan and their children to London, though they may join him on the Birmingham leg of the trip.

Still, there was a chance that he would spend time with his father and stay at Buckingham Palace – and that’s where we find ourselves today because he apparently accepted the invitation only to have it rescinded and now everyone is fighting over their version of events. Harry is saying that he had let Buckingham Palace know that he was still figuring out his security arrangements before he could confirm that he’d stay at the palace. BP is saying that he missed the deadline and now they don’t have enough resources to accommodate him. Harry is calling bullsh-t on that because he’d made it clear what the timeline is. There are also reports that one of the reasons Harry can’t stay at BP is because of the ruling on his lawsuit against the publisher of the Daily Mail that is coming tomorrow and whatever, whatever, King Charles has to stay neutral. Which adds another layer of f-ckass to this mess because imagine having to stay “neutral” between your own child and a tabloid organisation that has done real harm, not only to your family but to so many other British families and to the integrity of journalism, period. In media and public relations terms, it’s like saying that the king has to stay neutral between his son and the mafia. 

But everything is toxic here. Even if we aren’t fixating on the finger-pointing and the specifics of this latest skirmish, once again the strained relationship between Harry and his royal family is exposing how weird (a generous description) it is to be a member of it in the first place. Not that we didn’t already know this but in these times of “relatability” and “authenticity”, where it’s more important than ever for the British monarchy to advance the illusion that they can empathise with actual citizens, the people who pay for their existence, and are there to support organisations and policies that would improve the lives of those they lord themselves over, examples like this only amplify how they continue to uphold structures and processes that make them that much more UN-relatable than ever.  

In plain language, if Harry wants to stay at his dad’s house, his family home, he has to write to his dad’s people who then decide by committee if he, his dad’s son, can sleep there. And once that committee has decided, they write back to Harry with the verdict. That verdict is then shared with the tabloids. So now all of us are up in the business of whether or not Harry can sleep at his dad’s.

This is “normal” for them. And yet more and more, over and over again, the descendants of the king are pantomiming in a show of effort to convince us that they have more in common with the commoners than ever before. Since f-cking when???

Will it be like this with Prince William’s kids? One day, if Prince George wants to drop in at Buck House, will he have to go through his dad’s team before he can enter the grounds?

The irony here, of course, is that Harry and Meghan’s estrangement from the British royals has made them closer to normal than the people they left behind. Still privileged, obviously, on their Montecito estate. But, like, nobody needs to pull out the quill and send a scroll over to the footman waiting on the king to inquire as to whether it might be possible to sleep over on a random Tuesday. And I am stressing on this because this is a family whose whole job it is to go out and talk to other families and share their stories when they only know how to be a family in title only and not in spirit. How much longer can they keep up this charade? 

Photo credits:  Anwar Hussein/PA Images/INSTARimages.com

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