On Tuesday, May 16, timelines everywhere were flooded with the news that Harry Windsor and Meghan Markle had been involved in a high speed chase as they fled paparazzi soon after exiting an event in New York. The details involved reporters’ cars lurching onto curbs and running red lights in an attempt to get photographs of the couple, who were with Markle’s mother. At some point, they made it to a police precinct where they stayed briefly, and left it to take a yellow cab back to where they were staying. According to the couple’s private security detail, the event was a “near catastrophic car chase” and involved a “caravan” of photographers in cars and on bikes and mopeds who sometimes put pedestrians in danger.
Nearly 800 miles away and in a Chicago apartment, I furrowed my pretty little brow. None of this made sense, and the event description read like a mashup between The French Connection, The Bourne Identity and the latest in the Fast and Furious franchise (starring the always delightful Jason Momoa). Those scenes you see in the movies involve special permits and days, sometimes months, of intense planning and elaborate security and safety measures. It’s been much too long since I visited one of my favourite cities but I doubt that it has in the interim become so much less crowded that it might witness a two-hour car chase without limbs sliced off and blood spilling onto the streets. Social media timelines should have been engorged with gruesome pictures of the inevitable carnage.
None of this seemed possible. What was going on?
If you lived through the life and death of Diana Spencer, the details of this supposed car chase are bound to have brought back memories of a death that came after a disastrous series of events that also involved the paparazzi. Even if you weren’t alive then, you’ve probably absorbed the details—partly because Harry Windsor never fails to bring it up.
We can and should be deeply, deeply sceptical and suspicious about the entire Windsor clan and the Royal Family: a set of lying, fabulating, racist, monstrous beings who live off the profits of slavery and genocide while contributing little to the planet. But we can also acknowledge that Diana Spencer’s death was shocking and unexpected and that the sight of her two young surviving sons walking behind her casket, unable to shed tears all the while—because of protocol, because they were future possible kings, because “stiff upper lips” and a lot of other nonsense—remains a devastating one. The boys were 12 and 15 and they should have been shielded from public view, allowed to express their grief privately instead of somberly tightening and freezing their faces as the world watched their every move in those tailored dark suits. The images of that procession remain haunting and they still circulate, renewed by a global cultural memory now wrapped in the celebrity culture that Diana Spencer helped to create.
Spencer was an Influencer before the term was coined, and she was as much a creator as a victim of the paparazzi-fueled obsession with celebrity and with her in particular (she was bigger than the Kardashians will ever be). Hers is a complex legacy and history: as part of an arranged marriage, she was very deliberately chosen for her supposed virginity, unimpeachable lineage (the Spencers are older than the Windsors), and conventional English Rose prettiness. “Shy Di” at first presented herself as a breathlessly devoted ingénue, 19 to Charles’s 32. Without career aspirations, as is typical of women of her rarified class, she entered an international fairy tale that should have run along in humdrum, boring fashion, concerned with little more than popping out heirs and cutting ribbons while dressed in exquisite clothes and bedecked with diamonds from pillaged empires far and wide.
Instead, what followed over the next 15 years was tumultuous, strange, and new in terms of what had been widely expected of any member of the Royals, and it all took place in a media landscape that was swiftly changing and more mobile and elastic, hungry to find eyeballs as the internet began to take over the publishing world. Spencer and her estranged husband took their acrimony public, and part of her public relations campaign was to refashion her own role within the Windsors, as a global philanthropist and activist of sorts (she retained her title of Princess of Wales in the divorce, much to the family’s annoyance). All the while, she mastered the art of driving the paparazzi wild with desire for more pictures and stories, of always finding the perfect pose (recall that moment in front of the Taj Mahal) even as she made elaborate and public fusses about how much she hated the intrusions. It’s well known by now that she often tipped off photographers about where she would be and even fed them stories, in part because she knew that controlling them was in her interest but also because she knew how important it was to stay in the public eye. And, let us be blunt: no one does this without some level of hunger for publicity.
To be fair, some of what she did was important: her visits to people with HIV/AIDS and her deliberately hugging and touching them in front of cameras probably did make a difference in public perceptions of what was still stigmatised as an infectious plague. Her famous landmine walk may have been greatly responsible for the Ottawa Treaty, an effort to ban the weapons (it was passed three months after her death). Still, such work by celebrities can also end up erasing the work of unrecognised activists who toil and persist without public recognition of their efforts. If we have anything resembling the normalisation of medications for HIV/AIDS, it’s because countless and very, very angry queers persisted in demanding change. That Diana Spencer is connected to these issues speaks to her power as a celebrity, but celebrity culture does not bring about actual change by itself and it can even lull us into believing that we need famous names to have any effect on issues.
Diana Spencer’s complicated relationship with the press is partly what eventually caused her death: you can only feed the monster for so long before the monster feeds on you. Both her children have internalised their mother’s ploys with the press, William more successfully than Harry. Kate Middleton is what Diana Spencer was supposed to be, in the eyes of the Palace, after a long courtship of sorts that ensured that she had the stamina and resolve to stick it out (read: if she wants it so badly, she’ll wait, and wait, and wait). She has emerged as the stick-thin mother of three (an heir, a spare, and still another should disaster strike) with a perpetually smiling Stepford Wife face.
In contrast, Harry Windsor and Meghan Markle are now the outsiders, literally and figuratively, having left his home country and their privileges behind. While they’re not exactly struggling, they’re without the financial security net once guaranteed to them by being an official part of the Royal Family (often referred to as The Firm). Inheriting large sums of money is better than starting life anew with nothing but the two are now little more than titled freelancers, hustling for their keep. They’ve got various deals in the works, sure, with corporations like Netflix, and Markle even has a podcast (just like so many of us commoners) but as media corporations tumble and fall in all directions, it’s doubtful much of that will prove sustainable in the long run. What’s next: a Sussex Substack? And will there even be a Netflix or a Substack a year or two down the line?
The stench of desperation is beginning to make its presence felt as Windsor and Markle struggle to fit into a world that’s still obsessed with Royal Personages but where they find themselves the least interesting ones. They have, so far, relied on their Not-Them-ness to make waves, separating themselves from the rest of The Firm with allegations of all sorts that include racism. Spare, Harry’s memoir, made it to the bestseller list but how much more remains in the well? At the end of the day, the couple and their children are going to have to sustain public attention on the grounds of much more than, “We are the Ones Who Left, And Everyone Hates Us.” Their Netflix series was widely watched, yes, but that doesn’t mean it was well-liked: the public response was more akin to hate-watching than an expression of appreciation or sympathy for the couple, who have effectively been roundly booed in most quarters.
As the years go by and Harry and Meghan run out of options, they reveal themselves as two twits behaving like twats (neither one is particularly talented at anything but being public figures), and they may have to return to the cold and hard bosom of The Firm with a million concessions and elaborate hats in hand. It is a crudely exploitative and desperate move on Harry’s part, to imply that what happened on Tuesday night was similar to the true catastrophe that saw an end to a woman’s life. To be clear: Diana Spencer was both a creator and a product of her time, and we don’t need to place her on a pedestal and worship her as the Could-Have-Been queen when, really, we should work to end monarchies everywhere. Her sons have imbibed her lessons about how to be in the public eye and at least one of them doesn’t hesitate to exploit her memory, at every turn.1
And so, here they are, Harry and Meghan describing a brief encounter with the press as a two-hour catastrophe, via statements issued by a security firm that seems to also be handling the couple’s publicity (perhaps they’re cutting corners, like the rest of us). So far, the response has been ridicule and contempt (search Twitter for the funniest responses) rather than the overwhelming sympathy they must have expected.2 Even the cab driver who took them home from the police precinct has contradicted their version of events, and their demand that the photo agency Backgrid turn over copies of all images proved disastrous. Backgrid responded with a stinging letter of refusal, reminding Windsor’s lawyers, “Perhaps you should sit down with your client and advise them that his English rules of royal prerogative to demand that the citizenry hand over their property to the Crown were rejected by this country long ago. We stand by our founding fathers.”
That response is, of course, hilarious and true but it’s also a sign that the public and media are getting fed up with two people who can’t justify their outsized place in the public imagination with little more than grumbling about how terrible their lives are—as they loll around their 16-bedroom mansion in Montecito. Windsor and Markle have swarms of publicity agents to work on their behalf and very rich friends like Tyler Perry to bail them out if need be, but things may be reaching the tipping point here. Harry’s ability to draw on sympathy may be coming to an end.
Son, you lie.
See also: “Kate Middleton or, Abolish the Monarchy.“
“Her Royal Hymen: Kate Middleton Drops Top, Finds Modesty, Helps Brand Britain.”
This essay was updated on May 19 with a footnote quoting Sanaj Razi about Harry Windsor’s current lawsuit against the Daily Mail.
Image: John Mathew Smith.
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- Many thanks to Sanaz Raji who points out that it’s “worth mentioning …that Harry is in a protracted legal case against the Daily Mail along with other British celebs. I think this fictitious high speed car chase has everything to do with Harry seeking to force the RF/UK government to foot his security detail in the US more than just seeking attention.”
- Of course, it’s never okay for paparazzi to put anyone’s life in danger, but that does not appear to have been the case here.