Six years after Harry and Meghan left royal life, the British press still can’t. I believe its biggest challenge has nothing to do with geography.
I’m writing because I’m a little worried about you. I read your column on Monday and recognised the signs straight away: the restlessness, the circling back, the inability to let go. You’ve written a column urging two people to move on from 2020, and the column is entirely about 2020. I say this with love, but I think someone needs to hold up a mirror.
You cannot have it both ways
Your central complaint is that Harry and Meghan keep running from their past. Your other complaint, in the same column, is that they’ve stopped and come back. I’ve read it twice and I’m still not sure which direction you’d like them to go. When they lived in California, they were running. Now they live in Britain, they’re still running, just closer. At this rate the only way to satisfy you is to stand perfectly still in a location you haven’t named.
Then there’s Nottingham. You applaud their charity work, sincerely and at some length, and then in the next breath note the irony of them doing it in public. Alicia, people who aren’t royal do charity events all the time. They shake hands. Crowds occasionally smile. That’s not a royal walkabout; it’s an afternoon out. If a handshake in the East Midlands counts as recreating royal life, half the local councillors in England are pretenders to the throne.
Alicia must face an uncomfortable reality
You warn Harry that he can’t expect the monarchy to go back to how it was before he left. Nothing in your column suggests he expects that. You’ve built a position for him and then talked him out of it, which is efficient. It spares him the trouble of saying anything at all.
Reconciliation, you tell him, will take patience and uncomfortable conversations, not warm words. That’s sound advice. It might land better if the warm words weren’t the only thing Harry has publicly offered. As for the uncomfortable conversations, they appear to be taking place in your comments section, where readers are discussing his wife’s face, her age and worse. I’m not sure that conversation is going well.
The Express needs to find its own direction
On Meghan, you wonder whether she has any clear identity beyond being the Duchess of Sussex. You worry that the royal connection is the thread holding her public image together.
I’d gently point out where your column sits. Just above your first heading are two shopping links: cowboy boots inspired by Harriet Sperling, and Duchess Sophie’s suede boots, newly back in chocolate brown. If anything is held together by a royal connection, Alicia, it’s the Express’s royal section. Meghan, at least, has a jam.
It’s time to stop looking backwards
You close by urging the Sussexes to stop letting their departure from royal life define every chapter that follows. It’s good advice. It’s just hard to follow when the chapters are being written by other people, and when this particular chapter is a column about nothing but their departure from royal life.
You say the answer is simple: they need to decide what they want. As far as I can tell, they have. They want to live in Britain, do some charity work, raise their children and go on the odd holiday. Your own photo caption says they’ve popped down under for half term. That’s not a crisis of identity, Alicia. That’s a family.
So here is my brutal truth, offered in the same spirit as yours. You can write about Montecito, you can write about Nottingham, and you can even write about half term in Australia. But as a wise columnist once put it, sooner or later you have to “stop running and start living.” Harry and Meghan seem to be managing it. The question is whether the Express can.
