![\"A](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/92c586d488cf321a06cb1454ddae815670a500e0\/0_9_3360_2016\/master\/3360.jpg?width=500&quality=85&fit=bounds&s=35f493fff098fc34932d78fc0e278cc9\")
The speed with which the palace distanced itself from the veteran lady-in-waiting\u00a0Lady Susan Hussey\u00a0suggests it does at least recognise how damaging all this is. King Charles has, to be fair, spent years thinking deeply about how to modernise the monarchy, appealing to younger Britons at home and dealing with the painful legacy of empire within the Commonwealth. But the Firm now appears to have hit that painful stage of corporate evolution when an organisation knows it needs to diversify, but is aghast to discover that means it actually has to change, rather than making a few token adjustments and blithely carrying on much as before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her defenders argue that 83-year-old Hussey\u2019s mistake was simply being born into an era where such comments were deemed perfectly acceptable. \u201cHer sin, if there was one, was being old,\u201d writes the journalist and family friend\u00a0Petronella Wyatt\u00a0in the Spectator. \u201cMost pensioners are unfamiliar with the wonders of woke etiquette.\u201d But Hussey was not most pensioners. She was a professional at work, whose role was to put every guest entering what can be an intimidatingly grand environment at their ease, and that requires the ability to move with the times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every guest invited to the palace is there because their work is deemed important to the nation, and the institution is responsible for ensuring they all go home with a magical story to tell their grandchildren. Diversifying the guest list is commendable \u2013 no doubt there weren\u2019t many Black women from Hackney on it when Hussey joined the court 60 years ago \u2013 but it isn\u2019t progress if it means people turning up only to be insulted. Which brings us, inevitably, back to Meghan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Six years after the Olympic opening ceremony beguiled liberal Britain into thinking we really were the relaxed, modern, richly multicultural country we saw on screen, the sight of the royal family embracing a mixed-race princess raised our hopes again. To watch that wedding at which a Black bishop\u00a0preached passionately\u00a0about poverty, hunger and war, while Prince Charles gamely stepped in for her absent father to walk Meghan up the aisle, was to feel the cobwebs blowing away. Barely two years later, however, the unhappy Sussexes had decamped to the US leaving a trail of shattered illusions behind them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Is the life they have now really the one they sought by leaving? Both seem faintly fragile still, and there are risks to the Faustian pact they have seemingly entered into with the media by mining their private lives for content. Netflix presumably isn\u2019t paying the big bucks just for a charming flip through the wedding album \u2013 a trailer shows Meghan apparently in tears \u2013 and nor are the publishers of Harry\u2019s\u00a0bleakly titled autobiography, Spare. No matter how much they think they are in control, Brand Sussex are content creators now and the pressure on them to keep revealing more and more of themselves to hold the attention of a restlessly scrolling audience will be relentless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But then, having had his life commodified for public consumption from the cradle, perhaps Harry is used to that. What this week has underlined, meanwhile, is that the royal family arguably needed Meghan more than she needed them. She and Harry were always a creaking Windsor brand\u2019s best hope of renewal, its way into the hearts of a young, diverse, emotionally literate and politically aware new generation of Britons who still haven\u2019t warmed in quite the same way to the\u00a0new Prince and Princess of Wales\u00a0and who recoil in horror from stories like this week\u2019s. After all the dust has settled, Meghan still has her Prince Charming. The Windsors, battling against a future of dwindling cultural relevance, are still searching for their happy ending.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
- \n
- Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If ever there were a love story for the Instagram age, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex\u2019s beautifully chronicled romance is the one. Here they are, in a series of pictures from their private album released to promote next week\u2019s six-part Netflix documentary on their relationship, sitting atop a Jeep on what looks like their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":28151,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_post_source_name":"","_post_source_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[11261,7603,9951,11974,8839,2971,6573,7355,5307,1248,1149,10507,7234,6245,2666,1291,2667,11954,9196,5455,746,12210,5950,3577,6560,7684,69,1971,9486,12298,9372,8394,6030,7874,8809,10634,6220,10742,9349,70,2812,7795,5316,5936,8804,11385,11973,9554,9431,2451,1246,965,2815,9952,3927,8130,6200,504,7385,8133,5501,10004,9247,8807,9847,6272,6584,6348,1254,5251,10943,5781,3954,5436,5273,5320,10415,36,594,12347,5140],"class_list":["post-28150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-accused","tag-activist","tag-age","tag-album","tag-beand","tag-bishop","tag-black","tag-black-woman","tag-britain","tag-camilla","tag-commonwealth","tag-court","tag-death","tag-domestic-violence","tag-duchess-meghan-prince-harry","tag-duchess-of-sussex","tag-duke-and-duchess-of-sussex","tag-engagement","tag-environment","tag-family","tag-feel","tag-female","tag-fulani","tag-future","tag-gay","tag-hackney","tag-harry","tag-holiday","tag-horror","tag-hunger","tag-influencer","tag-instagram","tag-journalist","tag-king-charles","tag-lady-susan-hussey","tag-lost","tag-love","tag-market","tag-married","tag-meghan","tag-meghan-markle","tag-mining","tag-monarchy","tag-netflix","tag-ngozi-fulani","tag-olympic","tag-one","tag-pensioners","tag-poverty","tag-pregnant","tag-prince-charles","tag-prince-harry","tag-princess-of-wales","tag-publishers","tag-queen","tag-queen-consort","tag-race","tag-racism","tag-romance","tag-royal-family","tag-sexy","tag-sin","tag-spare","tag-susan-hussey","tag-sussexes","tag-the-monarchy","tag-travel","tag-us","tag-wales","tag-war","tag-watch","tag-wedding","tag-will","tag-windsor","tag-woman","tag-women","tag-work","tag-world","tag-who","tag-writer","tag-young"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28150\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}