Daniela Elser: Queen’s speech conveys a message about Harry and Meghan

After a dramatic year for the Royal Family, the Queen’s annual Christmas speech contained a tough message for Harry and Meghan.

When it comes to adjectives that perfectly sum up the Queen, “inscrutable” is one of my favorites.

For a woman whose expression and word are meticulously crafted and written, for whom every public appearance is rigorously choreographed, she reveals very, very little.

Conversely, however, the 94-year-old monarch has also become impressively adept at being able to convey crowds using things as seemingly simple as her choice of clasp to the position of her old Launer bag, after having improvised for a long time. a kind of real traffic light.

Take the selection of familiar images that appear on your desktop during your Christmas message.

Those elegant, framed shots of your closest and sometimes dearest ones aren’t haphazardly thrown on the antique desk behind the one you sit at the last minute by a harassed BBC aide before filming begins.

Rather, I suppose, a group of pinstripe courtiers and the monarch spend time debating and planning what exact shots to use with a solemnity and focus generally reserved for missile strikes and their selection of Ascot hats.

Every year when the Queen’s broadcast airs, her choice of the photographs that appear next to her are scrutinized and analyzed with obsessive rigor and read as a clear sign of which members of her extended clan are for or against. .

And boy, this year’s selection, or the lack of it, seems to say a lot.

There, alongside Her Majesty, resplendent in purple and with Courtauld Thomson’s scallop brooch (a personally meaningful piece left to her by her mother) was just a rather small framed family keepsake, namely a surprisingly personal image and casual of her husband, the prince. Felipe. (Generally, we see three to four previously released official images of various Windsors, with no blurred Kodak image in between, with even more shots on the side tables.)

What was marked about this year’s outing was what wasn’t there, that is, pictures of his wider family, including Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

Not once in his speech of just under five minutes did he once mention the tumultuous and historic events his own family had experienced this year, including the resignation of his grandson and his wife and the diagnosis of COVID on both Prince Charles and Prince William.

Furthermore, the video footage that was played in parts of the speech showed only the high-level members left participating in events this year (the poor old Duke of Glouscter and the Duke of Kent still working hard on His Majesty’s behalf. somehow they were forgotten) that Harry and Meghan recorded three months of this year as official representatives of their grandmother. (I’m not sure if this particular move was prudent or just a bit petty.)

The message, intended or not, seems straightforward: The Sussexes have been removed from the official royal narrative.

There is a particular sting in this situation given that on the long and winding road to Megxit, the Queen’s speech in 2019 was reportedly a significant moment. That year, His Majesty recorded his annual address saying that the year had been “quite eventful” surrounded by images of Philip, the Cambridge family, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall and his father, King George VI.

For Harry and Meghan, at that stage 7500 km apart in Canada enjoying a supposed sabbatical from royal working life, the fact that the nonagenarian sovereign did not include his family was supposedly interpreted as a reprimand. (So ​​was the published official image of the queen with princes Carlos, Guillermo and Jorge).

In the biography Finding Freedom, authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand write about the moment: “Harry felt that he and Meghan had been marginalized by the institution for a long time and were not a fundamental part of its future. Look beyond the family.

photos shown during the queen’s speech on Christmas Day… Notably absent was a photo of Harry, Meghan and their new baby, Archie. Palace sources insisted the photos were chosen to represent the direct line of succession, but for Harry and Meghan, it was yet another sign that they needed [sic] consider your own way. “

What yesterday’s speech brings us. For the past 12 months, stories about the breakup between Harry and his family have generally dominated the real news. Time and time again, there have been reports describing the relationships between the royal renegade and his father and brother as fractured.

If the Queen had chosen this year to include, say, an adorable photo of the Sussexes and their 18-month-old son Archie on her desk, it would have been a powerful and symbolic olive branch and an incredibly strong signal to both the Duke and Duchess. and the world that His Majesty still held family in high regard.

Such a simple, yet profound gesture would surely have helped heal the gap.

She clearly chose not to.

It’s an omission that, given Harry and Meghan’s alleged prior sensitivity to such slights, seems unlikely to be overlooked.

(Notably, Her Majesty submitted a selection of photographs from Kate’s acclaimed Hold Still photo exhibition as part of the broadcast. In the Queen’s Silent Patois, this was a huge statement of approval and a sign that she is holding Kate. in very high regard, also known as the royal equivalent of a large gold star.)

As 2020 draws to a close, a landmark year in which the palace has been hit by a series of public relations crises and family problems, it would appear that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been cleanly, if not brutally, extirpated. , from the palace perspective, the unspoken message is that the royal family has moved on and is solely focused on moving forward with the HRH-dom business. Sussex, who?

However, with Harry and Meghan gearing up for a hugely successful year, with the launch of their new charity company Archwewell, not to mention their megabucks deals with Netflix and Spotify, that might not be so simple given that we’re about to see Brand Sussex really unleashed.

I suppose in 2021, it will be impossible for anyone, including the palace, to ignore Harry and Meghan as clearly as the Queen just did in her speech. Hang on to the people in your Philips Treacy hats; I think it will be a wild and exciting journey.

Daniela Elser is a real expert and writer with over 15 years of experience working with several of Australia’s leading media titles.