'Simply not enough': Hidden problem in viral Harry and Meghan video

COMMENT

Where were you on September 26, 2018? It is a date that will live on in royal infamy thanks to the moment when newly made HRH Meghan Duchess of Sussex ... closed her own car door.

Here's the story: She was going to the opening of an exhibition at the Royal Academy and when she hopped out of her chauffeured car, she simply did what most of us manage to do every day without causing an international sensation in the form of simply shutting the door behind her.

The episode sent segments of the British press into paroxysms of shock, arguing that act breached protocol. Others pointed out that there were in fact safety implications and the reason members of the royal family leave all that pesky door-closing to their bodyguards is for security reasons.

Now, a new video doing the rounds on social media is highlighting just how often the Sussexes' contravene tradition and, portentous drum roll please, touch in public, namely the Duke helping his wife with her hair.

At first glance the supercut is seriously lovely. There is something so intimate and tender about the way he helps her in such a mundane yet thoughtful fashion as she was going about the business of being royal in public. It is impossible not to watch it and not feel a gentle, warm tug of the ol' heart strings.

However, this very reaction is problematic. How is the sheer fact that two members of the royal family physically interact regularly in public so notable?

Harry and Meghan have always been a far more tactile Windsor duo than we have ever seen before. Cast your mind back to when they announced their engagement way back in November, 2017. They fronted a bank of photographers in Kensington Palace's Sunken Garden holding onto each other like it would have been a wrench to not be in permanent bodily contact.

It was loving and dare I say kinda sexy and made William and Kate the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's rigidly posed engagement press call in 2010 seem bloodless and antiseptic in comparison.

Over the months and years since then Harry and Meghan have continued to have the temerity (clearly I'm being facetious) to keep holding hands during official outings.

A video of Prince Harry fixing Meghan Markle's hair has gone viral. Photo / Getty Images

In fact, I'm struggling to think of one royal jaunt they have gone on together where they didn't roll up looking like two loved-up teenagers who may or may not just been caught snogging in the back of the Range Rover.

The very fact that all of this is notable is a growing issue. The royal family has assiduously worked to recast itself as a truly modern institution over the last decade or so. All of the royal courts (Buckingham Palace, Kensington Palace and Clarence House) have social media staff dutifully posting about whatever their respective primaries are getting up to.

Likewise there has been a concerted shift from simply rolling up at events to shake hands and open the occasional regional leisure centre to engaging with far more substantive and contemporaneously important issues like mental health and the environment, all of which is to be thoroughly commended.

And yet there are expectations, whether they are propagated by a certain monarchist pearl-clutching set or actual royal quarters I'm not sure, that are so archaic they are nearly amusing. To start with, women crossing their legs in public. Poor Meghan found herself on the receiving end of several rounds worth of public censure for having not gone for the "Duchess slant" during events and instead crossed her legs.

Ditto the time she appeared in public with the Queen AND DID NOT WEAR A HAT. I know, I have to sit down to write such a shocking sentence. Didn't the woman know that joining the Windsors required a hot and cold running stream of $2000 Philip Treacy hats?

When William and Kate attended Princess Eugenie's 2018 nuptials and she was spied by the cameras briefly touching her husband of nearly a decade's leg, such a simple if not banal gesture made headlines.

And that's the problem. The royal family is continually working to demonstrate their relevance to a capricious nation not entirely sold on their worth however simply mastering the power of a hashtag here and there is simply not enough.

Their modernising push desperately needs to go further. Image matters to the The Firm and what could be better for their brand, after having spent the last two decades of the last century being synonymous with infidelity and rancorous divorces, than showing their younger members adore one another?

Let them hold hands, close doors and just seem a bit more ... natural. Real even. An occasional whiff of normality won't let the daylight in on the magic of royalty, rather it would make them seem wonderfully human.

They need to jettison any lingering Victorian hangovers about propriety and let us wholeheartedly buy into the Cinderella fantasy of it all. Love sells and it's time they got in the business of peddling more than commemorative china.

Daniela Elser is a royal expert and writer with more than 15 years experience working with a number of Australia's leading media titles.