The issue is about change

I was in Wales when Winston Churchill died on Jan. 24, 1965, aged 90. I was then one of the scholars of Thomson Foundation which is now known as the Thomson-Reuters Foundation. I expected grief from my Welsh friends but I was ignored for being over enthusiastic when I told them I would go to London and attend the first state funeral for a non-royal family member since Lord Carson in 1935, and as of 2020 it remains the most recent state funeral in the United Kingdom. There is a background to this.

The English may think him a hero but the Welsh don’t. He was blamed for the cruelty to the miners in Wales. But coming from the Philippines, I only knew the greatness of the man who said “Never give up.”

I had just been watching Netflix’s “The Crown” when the Oprah interview with the Duke and Duchess Harry and Meghan broke out. It endangered the English monarchy because of what they said during the interview. I don’t see why it should be surprising. I am a republican and I have often wondered how long British monarchy would last. In The Crown Churchill was an ardent supporter and so were government officials and the public in general.

My impression is that the Oprah interview is just another step towards change and that the British royalty will soon pass and be subject to change in our finite world. All things change and the British monarchy is no exception, even if it has been an institution for hundreds of years.

But before that happens more events will hammer the monarchy until it changes. Here’s one report which gives clues to what it happening now and in the future.

“Four days after the Duke and Duchess of Sussex eviscerated the ‘the firm’ with the sharp blade of ‘their truth,’ Prince William had still not spoken to his brother. ‘But they just do not communicate in the way other families do,’ said one veteran royal watcher. ‘You wonder if anyone has rung Harry.’”

According to one report, the Queen plans to personally offer an olive branch to the couple. She said in a statement this week that the extraordinarily damaging allegations from the Sussexes – of racism and of emotional neglect that Meghan said had left her feeling suicidal – would be dealt with privately.

“That should be a holding statement,” said the royal historian and author Robert Lacey. “The next step is to say: yes, with regard to the personal family issues, we are working on that in private. But, we acknowledge there are issues of public accountability here.”

It’s not just the aftermath of the Oprah Winfrey interview, Lacey said. Allegations that Meghan bullied staff are also in play. “This is about how this major institution of state, funded by the taxpayer, is actually organized. They should acknowledge: we have questions about HR policy. We have questions about our diversity. And we are going to handle those now, openly, in the way that any government department would.

“This is an agency of the British government. It’s more than people or a family. It’s about an institution. If you look at Buckingham Palace’s website, at its HR pages, they go into ecstasy about their wonderful human resources policy, and what you can expect if you join, and how much they care for their staff. It sounds like any modern American corporation on paper. But in practice it’s just run in the old-fashioned way.”

The phrase “the firm” has come to apply to the royal family and the institution around it – the “men in grey suits,” as Diana, Princess of Wales coined it. The power behind the royals include Sir Edward Young, the Queen’s private secretary, and Clive Alderton, a former diplomat and Prince Charles’s private secretary at Clarence House.

Following the Sussexes’ claims of being marginalized within the institution, the spotlight is now on these figures as much as on the Queen, Charles and William – the latter making his thoughts clearly known when he told journalists: “We’re very much not a racist family.”

How could they have failed to harness the potential of the campaigning, feminist Hollywood celebrity that was Meghan Markle, Lacey questioned.

And now, it seems, according to another royal expert of longstanding, the narrative is set. “In a sense they have set the trajectory by not keeping the door ajar, not offering a way back in.”

The couple were stung by the way Buckingham Palace framed their permanent departure last month, especially with its statement that by stepping away from the work of the royal family “it is not possible to continue with the responsibilities and duties that come with a life of public service.”

It was badly worded, suggesting they could only do public service within the royal family, said Lacey. Yet Harry and Meghan had spent the last year trying to undertake public service. “That’s what the argument’s been all about,” said Lacey. “Those words seemed to misunderstand and misrepresent everything they had been trying to do in the best way.”

The couple’s response was pointed and terse: “We can all live a life of service. Service is universal.”

Friends of the Sussexes indicate they will have no more to say, that nothing was left unsaid. “I doubt there will be more, once you’ve had that level of interview,” said one who knows them.

They are “feeling free,” the actor Janina Gavankar, a close friend of Meghan, has said. She watched the Oprah interview. “Now they can get back to what they really were focused on,” she said of their humanitarian and environmental work through their Archewell charitable foundation.

Both are expected, throughout this month, to promote their International Women’s Day campaign, which aims to “unleash a groundswell of real acts of compassion for the women in your life and in your community,” their website states.

There is said to be relief – at having unburdened themselves, at getting it “over and done with” before they welcome their new daughter and become a family of four.

This crisis must jolt the institution towards change, said Lacey. Referring to the Queen’s words that “recollections may vary,” which implied questions over the couple’s account, that was pointless, he said.

“Harry and Meghan have created a new and disturbing truth, and one that the monarchy now has to live with,” he said.