Tuesday night saw Prince Harry’s first public appearance since his father’s coronation, and I’m here to unpack the resulting car-based, cat-and-mouse hullabaloo. After leaving the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York, Harry, Meghan Markle, and Markle’s mother Doria were pursued by 12 or so zealous photographers across Manhattan in a “near-catastrophic car chase.” To evade the paps in a “relentless pursuit, lasting over two hours,” the trio hopped from their SUV into a yellow taxi, an ordeal that left them understandably “extremely upset and shaken.”
Drama, for want of a better word, does appear to plague the Sussexes, and the incident reignites ancient kindling that’s been blazing through the Windsors, Mountbattens, and even the Spencers for decades. As you know, there’s always hullabaloo with Harry and Meghan, who seem to light up the internet with conflicting judgements every time they leave the house…or stay at home…or attend the coronation…or don’t. I vividly remember the hullabaloo over Meghan closing her own car door, the hullabaloo when she held her baby bump, and we’ll never know if she made Kate cry over dresses and tights or if the hullabaloo was vice-versa. Without googling, I’m trying to exemplify how much I know about this couple—especially Meghan—just off the top of my head. Because despite not having met the Sussexes, we’re all very involved in their business. Their lives are non-consensually thrust upon us, making us aware of their movements even if we’re impartial to them as former royals.
It’s impossible to tell how much they orchestrate all of this noise, how performative their outrage at the constant interest is, how secretly enlivening the scrutiny feels, how self-validating the microscopic attention on them actually is. How much do they perpetuate what they claim to find so corrosive? Are they the puppets or the puppeteers? The cats or the mice? The victims or the victors? Are they impulsive or strategic? It’s simplistic to take all their actions in bad faith, but impossible to ignore their own (justifiable) self-awareness.
Harry has a well-documented dislike of the press—in June, he’s expected to testify as part of his case against The Mirror, The Sunday Mirror, and The Sunday People in the U.K. Media intrusion has scuppered his attempts at a career, his attempts at autonomy. His school years were marred in (possibly press-concocted) drug controversy, his military career was cut short because of light leaks in the media blackout, and it would be remiss not to mention here the death of his mother, Princess Diana, who was similarly evading paparazzi when her car crashed. Though I find her death still feels sad and wasteful after so many years, I think it’s a push to imply—as some outlets have—that Tuesday night’s scenes are “eerily similar” to that fatal 1997 crash in Paris. The Sussexes using the phrase “near-catastrophic” deliberately parallels Diana’s actually catastrophic death in order to magnify the issue, but I don’t think their threat to life was comparable.