The personal is political when resentment is baked into a monarchy whose instinct is to protect the heir at all costs, says Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff
The personal is political when resentment is baked into a monarchy whose instinct is to protect the heir at all costsPhotograph: James Veysey/Rex/ShutterstockPhotograph: James Veysey/Rex/Shutterstockhen my younger sister was very small, I once pushed her down the stairs. Fortunately, she was still small enough to bounce. But it was the beginning, not the end, of the fighting.
The fight was ostensibly about Harry’s wife, Meghan, and he writes angrily about his older brother calling her “difficult”, “rude” and “abrasive”, echoing the whispers beginning to circulate about her in parts of the press. But it seemingly escalated violently after Harry accused William of acting like an heir: the chosen one, around whom everything else seemingly revolves. There isn’t a sibling alive who won’t, on some level, recognise that feeling.
Like them, loathe them, or merely long to hear no more about them ever again, in recent weeks the Sussexes haveof genuine and awkward public interest. They held up an important mirror to the country by exploring the reaction, public and private, to a mixed-race royal marriage.
The details of the brothers’ alleged punch-up in a palace cottage are at once almost ridiculously trivial and heartbreakingly sad. They were so young when they lost their mother, but at least they still had each other, and now it seems they don’t even have that. Harry clearly aches still to be reconciled – in trailers for yet more promotional interviews to be screened this weekend, he talks of– but every revelation surely makes that less likely.
For William doesn’t come out of all this looking good, and since childhood Harry’s function in brutal dynastic terms has been to absorb criticism that might otherwise fall on his older brother. The goal of monarchy is its own survival, which means its instinct is generally to protect the heir at all costs, while the spare – the younger brother – inevitably becomes more disposable. Harry was born the understudy, the plan B, and even then only until his brother had children.
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