The relationship between the British public and the British royal family is immensely complex, which makes it accident-prone. It is going through another bad patch at present, as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex – Meghan and Harry to the tabloid press – aired their differences with kith and kin in an extended television interview with Oprah Winfrey. Few families would escape public scrutiny without embarrassment, but an ordinary family’s row would be nobody’s business but their own. The troubled internal dynamics of this particular family is a source of fascination not just in Britain but around the globe. It has become the world’s favourite soap opera.

If it is British royalty’s duty to set a good Christian example of how to conduct family disputes, it is failing. But maybe it is bound to fail. The public’s expectation is that members of the royal family should meet two irreconcilable demands at once – to be both ordinary and yet extraordinary. Thus Meghan Markle, on marrying Prince Harry, wanted to be free to shape their life together as they felt fit – her version of ordinary. She did not calculate that she was marrying into an extraordinary elitist institution that would make numerous demands of its own. There are invisible hierarchies within a royal dynasty that are guarded by often archaic protocols, such as who curtsies to whom (among the women) or who goes first in a procession (among the men). Failing to follow the rules was regarded by some courtiers as virtually lèse-majesté.