Scobie also got a ringside seat on the casual racism bandied around the palace. Scobie details tabloid coverage quite carefully in his book, recalling “loaded terms like narcissistic, social climber, exotic DNA, and straight out of Compton … both to describe and to establish a narrative”.

This then triggered an onslaught of open racism and white supremacy on social media, contributing to Meghan’s distress, which the royals disdained to notice. The charge of racism, however, will not evaporate: it is not just the extraordinary crassness/white supremacist bouquet you can smell in that Archie remark the couple also suggest, in their Netflix documentary, that the royal family turned a deliberate blind eye to the press as it criticised Meghan in racialised terms that ran the gamut from coded to bleedin’ obvious. Yet the media response overall was a shrugging, “ah well, sure there are two sides to every story”, which reflected not so much a disapproval of dirty laundry in public as an unspoken agreement between the royals, preserving their reputation, and the press (mainly the tabloids), permanently ranged against Harry and Meghan for their audacity in challenging various newspapers in court. In Spare, there was a huge amount of fraternal unpleasantness that permanently lowered my own opinion of Prince William, and it wasn’t that high to begin with. Harry and Meghan have said many other things that they must have thought would put public opinion on their side: in the Oprah interview, they described the Firm as completely insensible to Meghan’s mental distress, unsympathetic, adamantine, concerned only about appearances. This allegation, along with more atmospheric charges of racism, has always been the smoking gun of the self-exiled pair.

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