Harry and Meghan's Privacy Paradox
The couple express the contradictory and confused reality of the way people talk about privacy today
This is first in a four part long read on the rise and fall of private life told through royal privacy scandals.
With their demands for privacy whilst courting media attention for their private troubles, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are far from being the most sympathetic privacy campaigners. I am “not going to take lectures on privacy” from Prince Harry, grumped the journalist Piers Morgan. Amid allegations of phone hacking while he was editor of the Daily Mirror newspaper, Morgan accused the Prince of being “the biggest invader of privacy in royal history.” He listed the 400-odd page Spare, the best-selling memoir in which Harry reveals intimate details about his life, including losing his virginity to an older woman in a field, text messages from the Princess of Wales, and recent private conversations with his brother and his father at his grandfather’s funeral, to back his point.
Morgan could also have pointed to the couples’ appearance on Oprah with Meghan and Harry, a 2021 television programme in which Harry and Meghan sat down with the queen of confessional TV for a revealing interview about their acrimonious split from the Royal Family. Or Harry and Meghan, the Netflix reality TV series about their ‘complex journey’ billed as ‘unprecedented and in-depth’. There is also the time when Meghan wrote about her tragic miscarriage in the Opinion pages of the New York Times. The ‘path to healing’, she offered readers, begins with asking each other three simple words: ‘Are you Ok?’
Such was the unlimited appetite for publicity by this rich and powerful couple whilst demanding they be left alone, Meghan and Harry became the inspiration for a South Park episode titled ‘The World-Wide Privacy Tour.’ The cartoon royal couple call on the media to respect their privacy while demanding to be the center of attention. "We just want to be normal people – all this attention is so hard," the cartoon Canadian princess tells a talk show host. The prince then announces his decision to leave the royal family and Canada behind to embark on a worldwide tour.
Speaking for many frustrated journalists Rupert Bell, the TalkTV royal correspondent, exclaimed: “If Prince Harry Really Wants His Privacy, Then He Must Shut Up!” Harry is the “Prince of Hypocrisy” , according to media commentator Dan Wootton, highlighting the apparent discrepancy between his words and actions.
However, focusing solely on the charge of hypocrisy of these two celebrities fails to capture the larger picture. The contradictory views on privacy held by the royal couple are not uncommon; they mirror the confused reality of how many people perceive and discuss privacy today.
Privacy is a changeable concept that means different things at different times. It is neither natural nor static but morphs with political, social, and cultural forces. At times, it has been seen as frightening and risky. Such as when the early seventeenth-century writer of social conduct books, Richard Brathwait, warned that privacy was a perilous state, to be avoided and feared: ‘Task yourselves then privately, lest privacy become your enemy,’ he cautioned:
‘Be you in your chambers or private closets, be you retired from the eyes of men, think how the eyes of God are on you. Do not say, the walls encompass me, darkness o’ershadows me, the curtain of night secures me . . . do nothing privately which you would not do publicly.’
By the Victorian era, however, this perception had flipped over: privacy became a sacred value. The ‘right to be let alone’ - the title of the most famous article in the history of privacy, written in 1890 by two Bostonian lawyers in pursuit of privacy laws, was the guiding spirit of the age. There were multiple panics about privacy in the UK, France and America that reflected the esteem it in which it was held, including a scandal over Prince Albert and Queen Victoria’s private etchings. By then, privacy and the private sphere became a sacred value, to be protected and guarded at all costs.
Today, the notion of privacy has once again transformed. Privacy is no longer about the right to be left alone and the defence of the private sphere. Instead, privacy revolves around controlling personal information in an era where authenticity is highly prized over the public persona. The emphasis has shifted from ‘the right to be let alone’ to ‘recognise me.’ We live in times when people are much more open about their feelings, private behaviour and troubles. This change has occurred as the private sphere has become regarded with suspicion and a site of revolution.
Understanding why and how people talk about privacy in the way they do today, has to go beyond the cynical accusations of hypocrisy.
Harry and Meghan are not outliers, though perhaps at times they are imperious and audacious in demanding attention and privacy. Understanding the way people talk about privacy today, requires delving deeper than cynical accusations of hypocrisy. It needs to take into account shifting conception of privacy and and the changing nature of the public/private divide. And as it happens, royal privacy scandals can help to do just that: at every turning point in the changing fortunes of privacy, there has been a royal privacy scandal.
In this four-part long read, I will chart the rise and fall of private life through royal privacy controversies, taking in the scandal of Prince Albert's private etchings; Princess Margaret's not so Private Affair; and the Defeat of Private Life. Each royal privacy controversy tells us something important about the relationship between public and private, the concept and condition of privacy—and why it matters.
First up, here, is the scandal of Prince Albert's private etchings.