The Royal Family’s Kate Middleton Crisis

To outsiders, the British royal family can seem like a curio. They are gaudy waxworks who promote tourism and evoke the time when this country ruled a fifth of the globe. They signify the myth of British exceptionalism and embody a sensibility more rooted in the Blitz than the 21st century: patience, good manners, and repression (spun into health as a stiff upper lip). They are a strand of our national culture, like Miss Marple, Sherlock Holmes, and Earl Grey tea. They are remote and inhuman: near-fictional beings.

But the reality is crueler and more serious. That we in Britain obsess over the Windsors — rather than, say, the cost-of-living crisis, the wreckage of Brexit, or galloping child poverty — is typical of our semi-functioning politics. Like all fairy tales and fables, monarchy infantilizes us, and like a drug, it eats into real life, starting with the lives of the royals themselves. Princess Diana was a fairy-tale princess until she ended up dead. Now, with a swiftness that no one could have expected after the death of Elizabeth II in 2022, the monarchy is potentially fracturing.

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