The recent Oprah interview with Harry and Meghan sent a thunderbolt strike to the girding of British royal order. Longstanding TV personality (and harsh critic of Meghan Markle) Piers Morgan was quickly dispatched from the airwaves and an expedited reckoning of the Black Lives Matter movement suddenly arrived in the UK. Like many major power structures, there are pillars of support from financial and business endowments (the Firm) and historical/cultural precedents with a storied lineage that glorifies and anoints the British royal family as being close to Gods walking on earth. Beyond the tangible power of accrued treasure and land holdings, it’s the pillar of mass psychology that seems ready to threaten royal legitimacy.
When a country’s core identity is connected to the Crown, there’s going to be cognitive dissonance (and pushback) among citizens with any challenge to that identity. Historically a large chunk of British rule was exercised through disrupting local economies and then reworking them to their own structure (sending cotton to England to be processed and woven into garments to be resold back to colonized countries). Projected power was derived from superior weaponry/logistics, but also from an aura of royal lineage bolstered by elitism and racism. There is some irony that at the height of British Empire in 1913 it controlled 25% of the world’s land surface area and then in 2016 UK citizens voted for the Brexit referendum, essentially pulling up the drawbridge connecting them to the dynamic EU ecosystem. The UK is retracting into itself at a time when most of the world continues to link up… and the monarchy’s aura appears to be fading.
“Power perceived is power achieved.” -Unknown