The argument that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex “can’t claim to be private while insisting they’re public figures” is one of those very British positions that we Brits tend to repeat without examination … but which make us look like stupid tw*ts to the rest of the world. It’s delivered with the confidence of someone patiently explaining queueing etiquette to a tourist, and with the same faint air of moral superiority. The critics present it as a devastating contradiction: either you’re a public figure or you’re a private citizen. Choose one, dear. But the Daily Mail has helpfully demonstrated that this isn’t a real dilemma at all. It’s a rhetorical trap, and a rather flimsy one at that.
Because while commentators were busy mocking the Sussexes for supposedly “insisting” on their public‑figure status, the Fail was busy putting their children’s school arrangements on its front page. Not their charity work or their public statements or their business ventures. Their children’s school arrangements. If this is what Britain calls “private citizen” treatment, then perhaps it’s us that can’t speak the language properly.
The Palace-Press-Troll complex insists Harry and Meghan are “just private citizens now,” then behaves as though they’re national property whose daily movements must be catalogued in minute detail. It’s not the couple demanding publicity, it’s the media deciding that their private family circumstances are front‑page news. The school story is particularly revealing because it was nothing at all to do with their public lives. It was a practical matter: security assessments, transport routes, and the safety of two children. This wasn’t a PR moment, it was a safeguarding moment. Yet the tabloids treated it as though the Sussexes had personally requested a national referendum on their educational choices.
The Palace-Press machine says, “You can’t claim to be private while insisting you’re public figures,” and then the press responds by treating them and their children as public figures. I take my hat off to them for the circularity of the argument. The press makes them news, then criticises them for knowing that they are news.
Britain has always struggled with the idea that public figures might want private lives. It’s not entirely our fault - the monarchy itself is built on the fantasy that royals are both symbolic and human, both accessible and untouchable, both public and private. And we’ve had a thousand years of royal propaganda teaching us not to question establishment narratives - or examine them too closely. Look, if we can queue to see the Bayeux Tapestry, which tells the story of William the Conqueror’s Norman invasion and defeat of England’s last Anglo-Saxon king at Hastings, and then cheerfully bend the knee to his descendants who still occupy the English throne … while simultaneously despising foreigners (including the French) and waving the cross of a saint who wasn’t even English as a declaration that England is “for the English”, then our hypocrisy over the Sussexes isn’t much of a surprise.
Harry and Meghan are public figures because the media made them public figures. They’re private citizens because they’re entitled to privacy. These two truths can coexist without contradiction … except in the minds of people who truly believe that a man who befriends paedophiles, charges the NHS to park ambulances during a pandemic and briefs that the (more popular) mother of his children was “unstable” and “sick”, is our “better”.
The Sussexes don’t have to choose between publicity and privacy in the way the establishment pretends. They can be public figures (because they are) while still wanting their children’s private lives protected. They can be visible without being available, known without being owned. And they can be covered by the press without being consumed by it.