As this research comes to an end, new royal representations continue to emerge. In their statement on 8 January 2020 announcing they were ‘stepping back’ from the Firm, Harry and Meghan said they wanted to ‘carve out a progressive new role within this institution’ and ‘work to become financially independent, while continuing to fully support Her Majesty The Queen’.1 In so doing, they proposed a new model for ‘working’ royals, simultaneously inside and outside of the institution. In the Guardian, the historian Kate Williams called it a ‘flexi-royal plan’, reflecting the model of the so-called ‘bicycle’ monarchies in Europe (named due to their performances of ‘ordinariness’, such as riding bicycles), such as Prince Constantijn, the King of the Netherlands’ brother, who is a lawyer.2
According to the media, after multiple negotiations with the Firm, many of Harry and Meghan's proposals for this new ‘working model’ were rejected.3 Before their resignation, trademark applications were filed for the brand ‘Sussex Royal’, including branded goods such as toiletries, sporting goods and alcohol. Post-resignation, Harry and Meghan were allegedly banned from using ‘Sussex Royal’, with the Express reporting that ‘the Queen's most senior officials say it is no longer tenable to use the term Royal as a money-making machine’.4 Later in 2020, the couple trademarked a new name, Archewell, named after their son Archie. At the time of writing, Harry and Meghan's ‘post-royal’ life saw them move first to Vancouver Island, Canada, and then to Los Angeles, USA. The global outbreak of COVID-19 has presumably delayed their plans to fully launch Archewell, but they have undertaken some activities, including Meghan's narration of the Disney documentary Elephant and a new podcast series, Archewell Audio, and in February 2020 the couple completed their first paid event speaking at a summit for the investment bank J.P. Morgan, which was fined £7 billion in 2013 and 2014 for manipulating foreign exchange markets.5 In June 2020, Tatler revealed that the couple have signed with Harry Walker, a high-profile agency in the USA for speaking engagements.6 Their official website retains a section called ‘serving the monarchy’, where they state ‘The Duke and Duchess of Sussex deeply believe in the role of The Monarchy, and their commitment to Her Majesty The Queen is unwavering’.7 This draws on discourses of royal servitude, duty and ‘work’ (see Chapter 5).
Harry and Meghan's emerging roles as ‘post-royals’ reveals ongoing tensions in the Firm. I argued in Chapter 2 that the balance between visibility and invisibility is carefully choreographed, across a now more diffuse media system, to reproduce monarchy's power. Harry and Meghan's resignation temporarily disturbed this balance. Indeed, I argue that it temporarily made visible those institutional infrastructures and relations that are usually kept invisible. Such visibility makes their resignation useful for us to draw together the various threads of this book.
Harry and Meghan's resignation prompted a series of media and public debates about the commercialisation of the British monarchy. In the majority, it seems to be Meghan who is blamed (couched in racist and sexist language, see Chapter 7) for exposing the Firm to the ‘vulgar world’ of corporate capitalism. In the Daily Mail, the commentator Max Hastings criticised the ‘vulgar Hollywoodising of the young royals’ due to Meghan's introduction, and the media consultant Sara Flanagan said in the Guardian ‘before Meghan was a royal, she was an influencer … what will be new is these hurdles they're going to have to get over as far as being royal, and not being seen to cheapen the royal brand’ (‘influencers’ are popular social media users who undertake paid sponsorship deals with companies to advertise products to their followers). 8 The commentator Rob Shuter told the Express:
You cannot forget that Meghan is not new to this, she has been working in Hollywood for years and she understands the power of the press and photography particularly. While other members of the Royal Family are happy to let their PR people make all these decisions, Meghan is not.9
Likewise, in the Sun, the journalist Emily Andrews claimed that ‘Maverick Meghan Markle is the “new Diana” with PR tactics … defying stuffy palace bigwigs’, directly contrasting the ‘stuffy’ Buckingham Palace staff with Meghan's celebrity credence.10
These discourses seem to assume that the Firm is inexperienced in media relations, and Meghan is ‘outwitting’ them. In fact, Running the Family Firm has argued that the Firm has adapted to changing media landscapes (Chapter 2), and has staff highly experienced in media production and distribution (Chapter 1). The royals and their staff know precisely ‘the power of the press and photography’, and have made full use of it. I have foregrounded the role of media representations in constructing the British monarchy, and I used the classic work of Stuart Hall to argue that media culture is a key site through which class power is exercised under growing conditions of social inequality. I proposed that media culture produces consent for monarchical power, through both spectacular visibility at state occasions and more everyday representations of the Firm as a successful family, constituted by royal figures who each contribute characteristics to appropriately stage the royal story. The media are central to monarchy's survival. The supposition that Meghan is ‘outwitting’ them ultimately helps to conceal the stage production, because it obscures the Firm's backstage relations and makes royal representations appear happenstance, authentic and natural, in comparison to Meghan's strategy.
Similarly, discussions of Meghan ‘cheapen[ing] the royal brand’ seem to assume that the Firm is not otherwise ‘commercial’ or involved in corporate capital reproduction. Indeed, the Guardian noted ‘the gulf between regal precedent and the current influencer economy’.11 Like reality television stars, ‘influencers’ are associated with taxonomies of low-level celebrity – popularly known as the ‘Z-list’.12 The very point of influencers is that they reveal the transactional commodification relations in celebrity cultures: they are branding. Associating the Firm with such an explicit form of self-promotion and commodification precisely counteracts the careful balance of visibility and invisibility. But in light of the argument in Running the Family Firm, we might ask, is the Firm ultimately involved in the same process? As I demonstrated in Chapter 6, the @kensingtonroyal Instagram account is run as ‘the Cambridge family photo album’, and the content does not hugely differ from typical influencers in its aesthetic (although royal posts are not sponsored). Equally, I revealed in Chapter 1 that the Firm has many corporate investments, interests and contacts, from produce brands such as Duchy Originals, and sponsorship deals for its charitable initiatives with corporations such as HSBC, BAE Systems and Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd. Individual royals have even been involved in sponsorship deals, such as Zara Phillips for Rolex, and Peter Phillips for Jersey Milk. Historically, the Firm has connections with corporations such as the East India Company, involved in global colonisation projects. To single out Harry and Meghan for commercialising the Firm is to conceal a whole set of corporate connections that contribute towards reproducing the British monarchy.
Critique of royal commercial activities seems to depend on the type of activity, and how this is culturally considered. Whilst Duchy Originals is veiled in a veneer of heritage culture and authenticity, other deals are depicted as unsolicited. In 1950, Marion Crawford, who was the Queen and Princess Margaret's former nanny, published a book entitled The Little Princesses about her time with the royals. According to Pimlott, she was ostracised from the Firm and left her grace-and-favour home in Nottingham Cottage at Kensington Palace because they allegedly disproved of her capitalising on her royal connections.13 In 2020, the Crown launched a legal case against Prince Charles's former butler Grant Harrold, who had trademarked the business name ‘The Royal Butler’. The Crown's lawyers claimed that the name was ‘misleading’ people into believing he was ‘a representative’ of the monarchy.14 Elsewhere, Prince Andrew's ex-wife Sarah Ferguson has been consistently mocked for her corporate deals since leaving the Firm. The Guardian published a ridiculing piece about her ‘flogging blenders on QVC’ and ‘doing ghastly, vulgar things that are causing silent conniptions in private corners of Buck House’.15 The slang ‘flogging’ connotes cheapness and dishonesty, loading Fergie with classed connotations as she is depicted outside of the more respectable Firm.
Likewise, Harry and Meghan are depicted as capitalising on their royal connection for personal profit. In the Daily Mail, the journalist Robert Hardman contrasted the Queen's values with Harry and Meghan's attempt to trademark Sussex Royal:
It might have sounded just fine and dandy to the team of super-slick US rights agents, intellectual property lawyers and digital marketing experts flocking to advise the couple on their new modus operandi. But it was never going to meet with the approval of the ultimate arbiter on all things royal – the Queen. … So they [Harry and Meghan] can hardly object when the Queen and her officials, representing an institution which has been protecting its own brand for centuries, lay down what is very well-established law to protect their own ‘intellectual property’.16
Although Hardman recognises the monarchy as a ‘brand’, it is juxtaposed with ‘US-based’ corporate marketing experts. The implication is that monarchy is superior to such institutions, and that to suggest otherwise is to fundamentally misunderstand this hierarchy. It also situates corporate capital as ‘out there’ in the USA, while Britain remains steeped in tradition and ‘respectable’ forms of ‘old wealth’. Like the ‘nabobs’ of the British Empire tainting the ‘respectable’ British economy with their global ‘new money’ (see Chapter 1), Harry and Meghan are seen as the vulgar ‘others’ tainting a stately institution (and, by extension, Britain) with their international, corporate connections. In so doing, the idea that there is some superior sort of monarchical capital is being maintained.
To describe Harry and Meghan as significantly moving away from the ‘working model’ of the Firm is to misunderstand what the Firm is. Running the Family Firm argues that the Firm operates precisely through capitalist logics, invested in reproducing its own wealth and power, using many of the same tactics as global corporations. Even reports of Harry and Meghan receiving payment for speaking engagements does not wholly differ from speeches they gave in the Firm, except the ‘payment’ received in the monarchy is not directly monetary but acts as a tool to produce consent for monarchical power – and hence, indirectly, reproduces wealth. This is a form of what Annette Weiner terms ‘keeping-while-giving’, where monarchy's wealth is hoarded and symbolic gestures are offered as replacements.17 Now Harry and Meghan are outside of this royal moral economy, I suggest they are just seen as ‘keeping’.
I use the term ‘post-royals’ in the title of this chapter to draw attention to these contradictions. Semantically, ‘post’ is ‘used to signal a “breaking with” the past’ or ‘a linear time progression’.18 Scholars of post-feminism and post-racialism have argued that a linear timeline is false, and in fact the terms hold together the past and the present.19 Likewise, Harry and Meghan are not straightforwardly ‘post-royal’. They continue to benefit from the capital – economic, cultural, social, symbolic – that royalty provides. Their attempt to trademark ‘Sussex Royal’ demonstrates this explicitly, but the global media interest in the couple stems from their position as former royals. Moreover, they cannot be described as post-royal because the Firm relies on almost identical logics. The couple's attempts to capitalise on their brand continues attempts to (re)produce wealth and power using discourses of royalty. The publicising of Harry and Meghan's commercial endeavours merely draws attention to them, in a way that the Firm has, for the most part, seemed to avoid. Rather than being straightforwardly commercial, I have argued that the Firm's wealth is mediated through a series of moralising economies. Royal wealth accumulation is moralised through ideas of philanthropy, social responsibility and value (Chapter 1); the Firm's investment in territory, enclosure and kinship is moralised through the monarch as symbolising national identity and belonging (Chapter 3); Charles's property empire, the Duchy of Cornwall, is moralised through narratives of history and heritage (Chapter 4); Harry's contribution to the military-industrial complex is moralised through representations of the national soldier (Chapter 5); the monarchy's reliance on traditional gendered roles is moralised through idealised representations of the heterosexual, nuclear family (Chapter 6); and histories of colonialist exploitation are moralised through notions of post-racialism and diversity (Chapter 7). Likewise, logics of exchange mean the royals appear to ‘give back’ through social responsibility and public service. Any payments Harry and Meghan receive for philanthropic speeches are more tangible than the Firm's indirect profiting, making this logic harder to maintain.
More broadly, I argue that the monarchy's corporate connections are moralised through representations of the family: the Family Firm. In Harry and Meghan stepping away from ‘the family’, their part in the Firm seemed to be exposed, because it lost those moralising relations. In representations of Meghan as a so-called ‘bad influence’, attention is deflected on to the couple who become the scapegoats for royal wealth accumulation and capital profit. Again, the Firm as an institution seems to evade responsibility.
Following their resignation announcement in January 2020, Harry and Meghan detailed a new ‘media relations policy’ on their website sussexroyal.com, aiming to encourage ‘diverse and open access to their work’.20 They intimate dissatisfaction with how the media–monarchy relationship has historically run. Their statements repeatedly imply tradition: they say they will prioritise ‘young, up-and-coming journalists’, presumably instead of more established ones who would traditionally cover royal events; ‘give greater access to their cause-driven activities, widening the spectrum of news coverage’, suggesting that current royal news production is narrow; prioritise ‘credible media outlets’, implying that some are not; and ‘no longer participate in the Royal Rota system’, which is the main organisational structure for mediating royal events (see Chapter 2). They detail specific problems with Royal Correspondents, a key gatekeeper for royal news, by claiming that ‘Britain's Royal Correspondents are regarded internationally as credible sources … this misconception propels coverage that is often carried by other outlets around the world, amplifying frequent misreporting’.21
Running the Family Firm has detailed the changing nature of the media–monarchy relationship. It has found mutual agreements in place between the Firm's Communications Offices and the British media. From co-organising the mediation of royal events (Chapter 2) to ‘pressure cooker agreements’ for images of royal children (Chapter 2), banning publications from publishing unsolicited paparazzi photographs (Chapter 5 and 6), using an ‘embedded journalism’ model on royal tours and activities (Chapters 1 and 5) and limiting interviews with key royal figures (Chapters 3 and 6), there are both tacit and official protocols in place to dictate when, how, who and how much access the British media get. Releasing strategic and choreographed representations means that, to some extent, the Firm has control over its public image (even if it cannot control how audiences respond to those representations).
Harry and Meghan seem to criticise the very system that has developed to uphold the monarchy. Their statement says they ‘believe in a free, strong, and open media industry’, but then claim that all Royal Rota journalists are portraying them unfairly, and that all Royal Correspondents lack credibility. In April 2020, they wrote another letter to the editors of four UK tabloids, the Sun, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, to say they would stop engaging with them, following Meghan's ongoing legal case against the Daily Mail for publishing her letter to her father.22 Whilst, as we have seen, a lot of royal media coverage has been racist and sexist towards Meghan (Chapter 7), homogenising media outlets works to shut down legitimate criticism which holds the couple to account over issues of, for example, using private jets to travel to climate-change summits.23 Being inside the Firm offers the couple a level of control: there are existing agreements in place about access and privacy. Being outside of the Firm, as they are now, means this protection no longer exists.
In vocalising their issues with media coverage, Harry and Meghan draw attention to the agreements in place between the media and the monarchy. Running the Family Firm has argued how royal representations are regularly concealed and/or limited in circulation if they do not work in favour of the Firm, from the 1969 Royal Family documentary deemed ‘too intimate’ (Chapter 2) to unsolicited photographs of Harry in Afghanistan (Chapter 5) and paparazzi photographs of the Cambridges (Chapter 6). Indeed, despite criticising the media–monarchy system, Harry and Meghan's use of social media (primarily Instagram) to make announcements does not wholly differ from other royal uses of social media to release strategic mediations (Chapter 6). Attempts to close down royal representations are well worn. Yet, Harry and Meghan make these battles visible because they have resigned. Similarly, Diana's media ‘transgressions’, from setting up paparazzi photographs of herself and her children to undertaking a celebrity ‘confessional’ on Panorama, were seen to taint the monarchy's majesty, even though contemporary royals have done similar posed photoshoots (Chapter 6) and ‘confessional’ interviews (Chapter 5). The aforementioned quotation from the Sun describing Meghan as the ‘new Diana’ because of her media work repurposes those same narratives which ensured Diana's estrangement from the Firm, but with added stereotypes of the ‘angry Black woman’ (Chapter 7).24
Rather than the popular response which seems to scapegoat Harry and Meghan for making ‘controversial’ decisions about media access, this book proposes that their exit can throw a more critical spotlight on the invisible (media) relations that secure monarchy's economic power, and the extent to which the monarchy is held appropriately to account in the British media.
Aforementioned commentary accusing Meghan of triggering the ‘vulgar Hollywoodising of the young royals’ speaks to the merging of royal and celebrity cultures.25 Running the Family Firm describes how some royals have been represented as celebrities, from Princess Margaret in gossip magazines and Diana as a paparazzi favourite (Chapter 2) to Harry's affable media persona (Chapter 5) and Kate as a ‘fashion icon’ (Chapter 6). However, Meghan is the first major royal with a high-profile media career prior to joining the Firm. Her established celebrity persona made visible the relations of royalty and celebrity. Celebrity Studies scholars have described various taxonomies of celebrity, whereby they are classified on the basis of what made them famous, the work they do, their gender, race or sexuality and so on.26 As I will show, Meghan's previous celebrity career is classified very differently from that of the royals.
Running the Family Firm has told a story about access versus closure: a balance the Firm has been seeking to strike for hundreds of years. In Meghan, these struggles take another turn, as her previous celebrity status draws attention to the differences and similarities between royal news coverage and celebrity news coverage in terms of how these are staged, produced and disseminated. Upon joining the Firm, Meghan's personal social media accounts and her lifestyle blog, The Tig, were all closed down, and her social media presence was run by a communications team, initially that of Kensington Palace.27 This is a curtailing of freedoms and individual voice that I argue makes visible how the royal figures are small parts of a much larger operation – and how they serve the institution. Although each is an individual – and indeed I have demonstrated how they each offer a different moral narrative for the royal stage – their ‘real’ personalities are entirely irrelevant. Part of the appeal of celebrity cultures is the possibility of gaining access to an ‘authentic’, ‘real’ celebrity self, and how authenticity and media representation are held in tension.28 For the Firm, access to the ‘authentic’ royals is both impossible and irrelevant. For example, royal trips abroad do not promote individual royals, rather they ‘work’ for the Firm, and indeed often on behalf of Britain itself as ambassadors.
A Marxist reading of the Firm is that it is a production company, where what the Firm produces is representations. Thousands of people work for the Firm, but where do royal figures sit in this infrastructure? In work on the Hollywood star system, the film scholar Richard Dyer argues that ‘stars are involved in making themselves into commodities; they are both labour and the thing that labour produces’.29 That is, the representations they produce of themselves are the value of their commodity: they are the labour force and the capital to be bought and sold.30 Royal figures could be described similarly for the work they do to reproduce the Firm. But there is a form of servitude at the core of monarchy, in that royal figures are born into their royal role. They are again both similar to, and much more than, their celebrity counterparts. These relations indicate why it is problematic to represent the Firm as a ‘family’. A ‘family’ implies a private space. The Firm is a public operation, and its members’ activities are of public interest because they are invested in conceptions of the British state. The closure of royal media representations is, then, problematic because it closes down the possibility of public critique and institutional responsibility. Invisibility works to the Firm's advantage.
On the other hand, Meghan's celebrity status makes visible the similarities between royal and celebrity cultures. As a trained actor Meghan draws attention to how all royal figures are acting, whether ‘trained’ or otherwise. The Duchess of Sussex is merely another ‘role’, even though Meghan's former acting career is disparaged in some media and public commentary. Her role as a ‘suitcase girl’ on the gameshow Deal or No Deal in 2006 has been subjected to particular ridicule. The Daily Mail's article entitled ‘From Cases to Castles’ referred to her ‘thigh-skimming mini dresses’ and ‘rather tacky diamante embellishments’ on Deal or No Deal, with the implication being this was inappropriate for a royal.31 This is a classed judgement resting on the monarchy being hierarchically superior. It also threatens the distance the monarchy needs to maintain between itself and its public – it is what I described in Chapter 2 as ‘context collapse’.32 Meghan challenges the careful balance of in/visibility precisely through the mechanisms that the Firm uses to preserve it. Media and public commentary tries to downgrade Meghan's celebrity, and she is constantly made too accessible, from her father revealing their personal correspondence to her body being exposed in televised sex scenes, which were then uploaded to the pornographic website Pornhub by users.33 Such accessibility to Meghan is so stark against the Firm's staged version of media representation. I argue that Meghan is ‘othered’ in these discourses, and positioned outside of the more ‘respectable’ Firm.
Meghan's former career also reveals the Firm's connections to global elites. Harry and Meghan's wedding guest list included people from a variety of elite professions, including the tennis player Serena Williams, human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, actor George Clooney, activist and presenter Oprah Winfrey, former Prime Minister Sir John Major and Prince Seeiso of Lesotho.34 The couple have a well-documented friendship with Barack and Michelle Obama (Chapter 5), and upon moving to Los Angeles lived in the mansion of Tyler Perry, an American actor and producer.35 I have argued that the Firm has a variety of connections to international elites that are largely secret (Chapter 1), yet Harry and Meghan make these relationships visible. Their lifestyle has also been described as lavish and ostentatious.36 Their use of private jets, in particular, attracted public and media criticism for being hypocritical when they do philanthropic work around climate change.37 Yet, royal travel arrangements have long been expensive and extravagant (see Chapter 1), and Charles has long lectured on climate change (see Chapter 4).
Similarly, Harry and Meghan's claim that their post-royal life would see them ‘become financially independent’ drew rare media attention to monarchy's funding. Following media and public criticism, the couple agreed to pay back the £2.4 million spent on renovating Frogmore Cottage, which was adapted as their official royal residence using public funds from the Sovereign Grant.38 Yet, it was only because they left the monarchy that their receipt of public funding generated more widespread attention, because they were no longer offering royal ‘value’. Running the Family Firm has aimed to demonstrate that much broader questions should be asked about monarchical wealth and the cultural relations that sustain it. I have complicated the concept of ‘value’, particularly capitalist logics of ‘value for money’, because monarchy is not a process of exchange among equals. Rather, I propose that monarchical privileges are entrenched in past actions informing present propriety, whereby the Firm continues to benefit from histories of constitutional development, class privilege and colonialism. For example, Charles built his ‘model village’ Poundbury because he owns the Duchy of Cornwall, land passed down for nearly seven hundred years (Chapter 4). As the documentary Prince Charles: Inside the Duchy of Cornwall exclaimed, ‘the Duke has turned an ancient institution into a business empire that last year made over £21 million in profit’.39 We can see similar issues at play in the Guardian's discovery that the parliamentary procedure of the ‘Queen's consent’ had been used for the monarchy to lobby the government to alter bills and laws which will affect their private and personal assets or interests.40 The Firm puts ‘old’ forms of capital to work, and exploits its historical privileges at the same time as concealing them, in the age of financial capital.
Running the Family Firm has told a story of capital in the Firm, and how the Firm adapts itself to shifting socio-political periods. Analysing the British monarchy requires radical contextualisation. Whilst at the height of the British Empire the monarchy made use of imperialist forms of capital, in the 2010s–2020s it merges with forms of neoliberal and financial capital. From adapting feudal forms of rentier capitalism into property empires, to disaster capital and the military-industrial complex, ‘philanthrocapitalism’, promotion on social media and diversity capital, the Firm is constantly changing in order to stay the same. New royal figures in the form of spouses and children offer new spaces for capital reproduction, devising new characters and new styles of symbolic power for the royal stage. Across historical periods the Firm puts on a new costume or erects a new stage set to continue with wealth and power accumulation. The Firm excels at incorporating new representations into its corporate body, and the royal family continually absorbs new figures to take on new forms. Indeed, Running the Family Firm is a complex and continual process.
There is not a singular royal narrative, and the analysis in this book demonstrates that sometimes each new form is merely reactive: a response to crisis, or a shift in socio-political context. Sometimes, this shape-shifting is achieved to various degrees of success. The fly-on-the-wall documentary Royal Family proved a step too far in royal visibility, and was quickly redacted. Meghan's racialised, gendered and classed body meant that she was too symbolically loaded to be ‘fully absorbed’ as a royal figure. Other shapes have been more successful, for example the rehabilitation of Harry's ‘laddism’ into a ‘soldier masculinity’ and later an emotionally literature masculinity, or the problematic royal ‘sexual scandals’ of the 1990s resolved through Kate and William's heteronormative, nuclear familialism. Responsive shape shifting partly explains why representations of the Firm are so contradictory, and indeed the contradictions of royal representations are as revealing as the repetitions. Harry and Meghan may have resigned from the Firm and noted the Commonwealth's imperialist origins, yet they still proclaim to serve the monarchy and (at the time of writing) Harry remains President of the Queen's Commonwealth Trust.41 Kensington Palace might use its Instagram account as a ‘family photo album’, yet the intimacy of royal representations is closely monitored. The Queen might be represented as an elderly grandmother, yet her position upholds the British constitution. It might be a Family Firm, yet the Firm is invested in international wealth accumulation. It is the act of exposing the contradictions that reveals the power held therein.
One key conclusion of Running the Family Firm is that the very invisibility of the Firm's social and economic power is its power, and invisibility, visibility and power intersect. As Walter Bagehot argued, ‘we must not let in daylight upon magic’.42 The relations between the corporate, economic, state and symbolic power of monarchy described in this book are not widely known to the British public, despite most people recognising individual royal figures; the Queen's image is the most reproduced in the world.43 Spectacular royal events provide a theatrical masquerade, whereby they are so visible they disguise what is invisible. This is partly why finding a language for the analysis in Running the Family Firm – of revealing versus concealing, visibility versus invisibility, access versus closure – has been so difficult. It is a complex process of cultural politics that unpacks the representations of monarchy we normally see, to reveal what these representations are doing to maintain the things we do not see. I have not claimed that every representation of the royal family is ‘true’, but that does not matter, as the effect of these representations on the public imagination has already taken place. The royal figures chosen for analysis in Running the Family Firm are also notable. Why is there no chapter on William, the future king? William has always operated under a veil of secrecy: we know very little about him, and he has been sheltered from the ‘scandals’ of his younger brother. This is perhaps the very point. As the future king, it is more powerful for him to be invisible. Harry does the ‘celebrity work’, while William preserves his sovereign power. The fact that there are limited stories on William is the analysis.
Whilst Running the Family Firm has illustrated how extensive media representations of the British monarchy are, these representations are largely ubiquitous, woven into the very fabric of Britain with a global reach, and seem to be mostly taken for granted. In the Preface, I described how responses to critical analysis of monarchy have claimed that society has ‘more important problems’ to worry about. I rebutted this by saying that these so-called ‘more important problems’ are not detached from the institution of monarchy. In an analysis of the French Empire, the anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler uses the term ‘aphasia’ to describe how problematic histories are often collectively forgotten through purposeful action: ‘it is not a matter of ignorance or absence. Aphasia is a dismembering, a difficulty speaking, a difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things.’ 44 There is a targeted effort to disassociate France's history from histories of colonial conquest and profit. Likewise, aphasia is at work in media representations depicting the British monarchy as ubiquitous (as a family, or as an emblem of national identity, for example), because it draws attention away from issues of inequality and power and produces consent for its continuation. Running the Family Firm has drawn out the cultural, social, political and economic functions of monarchy in relation to these representations, to expose what is being taken for granted.
The central story of Running the Family Firm is inequality. The British monarchy invites us to think about wider issues of class, power, inequality, media culture, wealth, capital(ism), ideology, democracy, warfare, national identity, citizenship, belonging, land, gender, race, (post)colonialism and (post)imperialism. After completing this research, I am left wondering where it ends. My intention was for you, the reader, to finish with a deeper understanding of the ‘backstage’ of monarchical power, where the stage curtain of the ‘frontstage’ representations has been lifted. I have mapped out the strands through which we see monarchy connected to infrastructures which perpetuate inequalities. Yet, Running the Family Firm has (purposefully) barely touched on Prince Andrew, a man visibly connected to global elites known to exploit their wealth and privilege by trafficking and abusing young women, and then offer little remorse for the victims on the BBC, a public-funded media institution.45 Likewise, it has not detailed the monarchy's relationship to other aristocratic families, and how other forms of ‘old wealth’ support and uphold each other in their adaptation to financial capital (through, for example, personal relationships, business deals, in/direct marketing). I aim to explore some of these in future research, but the point here is that it is impossible to provide a comprehensive account of monarchy, media and capital, simply because its reach is so extensive. And, indeed, this is exactly why monarchy is an extremely ‘important problem’ in Britain.
I have argued that we cannot talk about inequalities in Britain, historically and in the present, without talking about the monarchy. If we are ever to resist the global forces of inequality and dismantle the systems perpetuating them, we must address monarchical power. Global inequalities will never be addressed while monarchy exists.