Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are brave to challenge the royal status quo – but their plan will surely fail

The Sussexes’ experiment with trying to navigate some middle way between the monarchy and being private citizens is admirable, but is it actually possible?

If the British royal family has evolved into little more than a soap opera, then the scriptwriters could hardly have come up with a more dramatic storyline. Without warning – seemingly to anyone – the characters known as their royal highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have quit, announcing they are to “step back” from the royal role.

Viewers could almost hear the EastEnders-style “doof-doof” as the news broke. The Sussexes, indeed, seem to be producing a spin-off series with the working title “The Sussexes”, billed as “a progressive new role within this institution”. They’ve even set up a new-age website to help new viewers follow events – sussexroyal.com.

Despite the storm of publicity for the new Harry and Meghan show, and a good deal of gossip about it masquerading as analysis, a number of important questions remain – issues of real substance around the institution of the British monarchy and its future. Is the monarchy, for example, now going to allow its more peripheral branches to become semi-privatised? That would be both the logical conclusion of the Sussexes’ plans, but also of Prince Charles’s own well-known desire to slim down the operation to the “core” family – which is to say himself, his wife and the Cambridges.

One of the consequences of the extraordinary fertility of the British royals is that there is now an extraordinary number of these vaguely recognisable figures with Shakespearean titles, but with little for them to do except dress up and attend receptions. There are the Gloucesters, the Kents, the Wessexes, the Yorks and the Snowdons, to name just a few of the 86-plus descendants of Queen Victoria.

There is no case for many of these figures to receive much, if any, state funding or indeed any financial support from quasi-state sources such as the Duchess of Cornwall, wrongly ascribed to be the private property of the royal family. (For if the family lost its constitutional status, almost all of these ancient lands and properties would revert to the British republic, rather than to the individuals concerned.) A constitutional monarchy is, on balance, more likely to be popular with the people than a British republic – but it needs reform. The hangers-on should, in other words, be privatised, evicted from the grace-and-favour homes, and asked to make their own way in the world. It seems only fair in the age of universal credit and food banks.

Sensing perhaps that this was to be their medium-term fate, but also with an increasing resentment about the media and other aspects of their lives, the Sussexes have decided to pioneer this new model – but strictly on their own terms. It is not entirely clear, though, what these new terms amount to.

What Meghan Markle and Prince Harry seem to want to create is a new business model in which the pair, and their children, will be a new type of semi-royal – a hybrid between the traditional conception of the public and ceremonial role; and a second, more purely private one. If that is to work at all, then the British taxpayer is entitled to expect that their private activities – even if devoted to charity and worthy causes – will indeed be privately financed. They should not expect the British state to subsidise their lifestyle, however virtuous they may be.

Or, at least, if the state is, for example, to be asked to provide security, transport, PR support, civil service time, diplomatic, military support or hospitality for some substantial Sussex-sponsored events, such as the Invictus Games, then the state also needs to have a say in how the money is spent. (In which case the Sussexes would not be entirely independent after all.) The Canadian public may feel the same way.

It is worth emphasising that there is no such thing as “private wealth” so far as the British monarchy is concerned – which includes the vast wealth and income of the Duchy of Cornwall, whence Prince Harry and the rest of the family of the Prince of Wales sustain their lifestyle. They do so because of their public role; if that goes, then so should the money.

Yet where will they get it? The Sussexes should not rent out their royal status to, say, “greenwash” corporate images, go on the after-dinner speaking circuit, appear on I’m a Celebrity... Get Me out of Here!, The Chase Christmas Celebrity Edition or otherwise demean what is left of the dignity of the House of Windsor. Yes, they are free to do so – they are not medieval serfs – but they might not expect to be addressed as “your royal highness” while they tackle some especially grim bushtucker trial.

The Sussexes’ experiment with trying to navigate some middle way between royal celebrity and being private citizens is brave, but it may not work. In the end, they may find that all concerned are happier with what might be called a “clean Megxit” or “hard Megxit”. They could, with some luck and goodwill, manage to renounce all titles, sever all their financial and ceremonial links with British royalty, while preserving and strengthening their purely private family bonds.

The British monarchy has, in recent years, been stripped of almost all of its remaining constitutional prerogatives. Even in the reign of the Queen’s grandfather, there was some important political influence to be exerted, but the Netflix series The Crown shows how much even that had evaporated by the last decades of the 20th century. The parliamentary prorogation crisis last year confirmed how little role there is left beyond the purely ceremonial. After the separations, divorces and scandals of the 1980s and 1990s, the royal family also lost much of its former pretensions to setting “an example” of standards of personal behaviour – with Prince Andrew being the latest to fall from grace. Harry and Meghan may have concluded, to borrow a phrase, that the British monarchy has lost an empire, and is yet to find a role.