Isla Campbell on Harry and Meghan, the Ongoing Coverage, and Why the Story Has a Peculiar Gravitational Pull That Even Its Critics Cannot Escape
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
By Isla Campbell | Crown and Clown UK
I want to begin this piece with a declaration: I have written about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex more times than I can count without actually counting, and each time I sit down to write about them I tell myself that I will do it with the same equanimity that I would bring to covering, say, a policy development at the Department for Education — with professional distance, with an absence of personal investment, with the journalistic discipline that the subject deserves like any other subject deserves. I have not always succeeded. The Sussex story produces a specific journalistic gravity that is difficult to maintain equanimity against, because it is the story in which every person involved — the Duke, the Duchess, the King, the Princess of Wales, the British press, the American press, the British public, the American public, and the journalists writing about all of them — is simultaneously a participant and an observer and has strong feelings about what the other participants are doing wrong.
Where Things Actually Stand
The current position, as best as I can characterise it from the available public information and the reliable portions of the substantial unreliable information that exists: the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are living in Montecito, California, with their two children. They operate a charitable foundation, a media company whose projects have had variable commercial reception, and personal brands that are managed with varying degrees of transparency about the degree to which they are brands. Their relationship with the senior Royal Family remains — the word I keep reaching for is “complicated,” which is accurate and insufficient simultaneously. The Duke’s legal proceedings against British tabloids have concluded in some cases and continue in others. The Duchess has developed public activities that are more independent of the Sussex media narrative than her earlier public activities were.
None of this constitutes news in the traditional sense. All of it constitutes the ongoing accumulation of a story that generates extraordinary public interest for reasons that I have been attempting to understand fully for five years and have understood only partially. The partial understanding is this: the Sussex story operates as a carrier wave for multiple larger conversations that the British public and the global monarchy-watching public need to have and are using the Sussexes to conduct. Conversations about race and the British establishment. About the tabloid press and its relationship with the Royal Family. About modernity and tradition in public life. About what it means to leave an institution and what it means to stay. The Sussexes are having these conversations whether they choose to or not, because the story attached itself to them in 2017 and has not detached.
The Press Coverage and My Part In It
I am aware that by writing this column I am contributing to the coverage that I am simultaneously analysing. This is the specific recursive problem of being a journalist who covers the media coverage of public figures while also being part of the media coverage of public figures. The columns I write about the Sussexes appear in the same media environment that the Sussexes have criticised. This is not a reason not to write them — journalism requires engaging with its own contradictions rather than retreating from them — but it is a reason to write them carefully and to maintain the discipline of asking, about every sentence, whether what I am writing reflects what I actually know rather than what would be interesting to believe.
The British press’s coverage of the Duchess in particular has been, on specific documented occasions, wrong in ways that required corrections, and on other occasions — harder to adjudicate — unfair in ways that do not require corrections because the unfairness is in the framing and the selection and the tone rather than in a specific factual error that can be identified and corrected. This is the hardest part of press criticism to articulate and the easiest to dismiss as motivated reasoning by people who like the subject. I do not have a strong personal view about the Sussexes. I do have a strong professional view about whether the coverage has always been consistent with what a serious journalism outlet would produce. The answer is: not always. On both sides of the Sussex debate.
What Happens Next
I do not know what happens next in the Sussex story. Neither do you. Neither do they, probably, with full certainty. The story will continue to generate coverage as long as the public interest that generates the coverage exists, and the public interest shows no sign of diminishing to the level at which this column becomes unnecessary. The King will continue to manage the institutional aspects of the family situation with the specific combination of discretion and firmness that he has deployed since accession. The Prince and Princess of Wales will continue their own programme. The Sussexes will continue their own lives in California, with the specific complexity of people whose private choices are not private because their family connection to the monarchy has made them permanently public in ways that neither fully chose and neither can fully undo. This is the Sussex situation in 2026. It is the same situation as 2024 and 2025, in different details. According to the Royal Family’s website, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not listed among the working members of the Royal Family. Their lives continue regardless. The coverage continues regardless. I will write about it again. So will everyone else. This is where we are.
Isla Campbell covers royal affairs from Central London. Her homepage is at The London Prat.
For more royal and monarchy coverage, visit NewsThump.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
