They hadn’t even told the queen. The decision of Prince Harry and his wife Meghan to withdraw from the monarchy threw the UK into turmoil on Thursday and was criticized by the press for its hypocrisy.
The shock is such that it has relegated to the background the historic vote of British MPs, who must give Thursday the green light to leave the United Kingdom from the European Union after three and a half years of heartbreak.
Rather than Brexit, it was the “Megxit” that dominated in the media in the aftermath of the announcement that caught everyone by surprise, until Queen Elizabeth II, 93, Harry’s grandmother, and Crown Prince Charles.
The couple want to gain their financial independence and settle for part of the year in North America, after having paid attention to their difficulties in experiencing the media pressure.
Difficult to swallow for the royal family, which considers the situation “complicated”. She hoped to be able to start 2020 under better auspices after Prince Andrew’s withdrawal from all of his public duties last year because of his ties to American pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Wax figures
Echoing the cracks cracking the monarchy, Madame Tussauds, the famous London museum of wax figures, announced that it would distance Harry and Meghan from other figures representing the hard core of the royal family “with immediate effect”.
For royal family expert Richard Fitzwilliams, interviewed by AFP, Harry and Meghan chose to “leave like rebels”, which underlines “how unhappy and stressed they are”.
More severe, the press evokes the “deep disappointment” of the sovereign and goes so far as to make a comparison with the shattering abdication, in 1936, of King Edward VIII to marry Wallis Simpson, a divorced American – like Meghan.
Harry and Meghan “withdraw from their obligations and parade,” said a specialist in royal affairs, the journalist and author Phil Dampier, quoted by the Telegraph.
Millionaires without seeming to
Above all, their desire for financial independence is perceived as hypocritical. The royal endowment, which Harry, 35, and Meghan, 38, intend to renounce, represents only 5% of their official expenses, the rest being financed by the private income of Prince Charles, father of Harry and heir to the throne .
Millionaires, they also said they wanted to keep the use of Frogmore’s cottage, on the grounds of Windsor Castle (west London), renovated to the tune of 2.4 million pounds at taxpayer expense, and benefit from a catch in charge of their security by the State. Without giving up their titles.
“They really want their cake and eat it too,” said Graham Smith, head of the “Republicans”, the British anti-monarchy movement.
The explosive announcement was made when Harry and Meghan had just returned from several weeks in Canada with their son Archie, born in May 2019, a year after their lavish marriage.
They had just previously opened in a documentary, in October, of their difficulties in the face of media exposure, attracting harsh criticism from the press by spreading themselves in this way during a trip to Africa.
Meghan compared to Diana
This crisis could tarnish the image of the royal family, for which Meghan had first been considered a breath of fresh air by the tabloids, who then turned against it, denouncing in vitriolic articles her alleged capricious behavior and l attacking on his conflictual relationship with his father or his luxurious lifestyle.
“One of their strengths (members of the royal family) is to present a united front and bring people together, and to do this they need to be united,” said specialist Victoria Murphy of the AFP.
“I think they’re going to put a lot of people on their backs. And it will upset the family, “said Paul Brown, a passerby interviewed by AFP outside Buckingham Palace.
Faced with this criticism, Harry filed a complaint in October against tabloids. He said he feared that his wife would be the victim of the same fate as her late mother Diana.
(Afp / nxp)
Created: 09.01.2020, 16h06
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