Harry and Meghan’s departure isn’t the disaster you think it is – in fact, the monarchy has never been stronger

It doesn’t matter what position the Duke and Duchess of Sussex take in society, the occupancy of the throne is set in stone

This is the last demographic a columnist should ever represent. The job of the columnist being forever to have or pretend to have strong opinions, it verges on career suicide.

But regarding the latest House of Windsor plot twist, I speak for the apathetically bemused who comprehend little about it, and couldn’t care less.

That’s virtually everyone under 40, and a decent proportion of the more elderly. To them (us), what a newspaper calls “the abdication crisis” is a mystery without intrigue.

Only two elements are easily understood. 1) There is no abdication. And 2) It’s not a crisis.

One appreciates how the obvious template might confuse. The last time a prince fell for an exotic American divorcee, it was a crisis and it did cause an abdication.

But that was then, when as king-emperor Edward VIII had something to abdicate from.

The crisis constituted a clear existential threat to the institution – or so it seemed then. With hindsight, the real danger lay in a Nazi-sympathising cretin remaining on the throne at the outbreak of war.

Under his replacement, the Queen’s father George VI, the institution survived. Despite the occasional wobble, it has by and large been stable ever since, although never more so than now.

A recently published photo – the one cited in some quarters, due to his exclusion, as a catalyst for Harry’s flight – endorses this. It features the Queen, her eldest son Prince Charles, his eldest son Prince William, and his eldest son Prince George.

For the first time since Victoria, four generations of the sovereign are simultaneously alive. The occupancy of the throne is set in stone for the next 70, 80 or 90 years. No monarchy anywhere has been as secure as this one today.

So if this is neither an abdication nor a crisis, what is it? A younger son reacting against the randomness of succession by primogeniture? A casually racist establishment, uncomfortably allied to a vicious tabloid culture, alienating a person of colour?

Is it a tale of a rapacious young couple wanting the wealth and status without the duty – or a fragile young couple craving the freedom to raise a family in peace?

Perhaps it’s a smattering of the above, and perhaps it’s none of them. You’d have to know the protagonists to hazard an opinion – and the only person willing to go on the record who does is Tom Bradby of ITV.

Bradby isn’t the first TV personality to feature as a go-between in Windsor ructions. Jimmy Savile was an “honest broker” (splendid judges of character, those royals) between Harry’s warring parents.

But where Savile kept unwontedly schtum, Bradby is a semi-official mouthpiece for Harry and Meghan ​– a curious stance in a trade that expects impartiality even from those who read out loud from an autocue.

Richard Baker, Kenneth Kendall and others of the old school were content to recite the news. Bradby seems unusually eager to make it.

Writing in The Sunday Times, he hints darkly that the fault lies with “the family” for failing to welcome Meghan warmly at the time of her wedding. He has the decency to observe “the family’s” claims that they tried to play nice, and that “Harry and particularly his wife come across as extremely difficult”.

But the gist of the piece, for which one assumes the Sussexes had copy approval, is that they’re mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore.

The blackmail threat is barely veiled. If “the family” fails to give them satisfaction (cash, police protection, not confiscating their HRHs, whatever), Harry and Meghan are ready to go nuclear.

“I have some idea of what might be aired in a full, no-holds-barred, sit-down interview,” reveals this Martin Bashir manqué, “and I don’t think it would be pretty.”

Those last eight words may be imagined in the New Joisey brogue of Tony Soprano. Bradby’s article is the highest-profile mafia-esque shakedown since Trump rang the Ukrainian president about the Bidens. If “the family” don’t pay up, it’s gonna get very ugly very quick. Capisce?

The counterthreat from the Palace concerns “punitive” taxes on Harry – not a clue what that means; do they intend to retroactively rewrite the entire tax code? – if he scarpers permanently to the New World.

So is this more about money than anything else? Is it primarily about racism, media bullying, entitlement denied, or psychological scars rooted in both Sussexes’ childhoods? Or is it just another massively screwed-up clan playing out its latest psychodrama in the global gaze before the eruption subsides, and it limps on towards the next one?

Buried somewhere in the mess may be a gleaming metaphor about a Britain that favours a hostile environment for the darker-skinned, and takes the deepest umbrage when one of them accepts the advice on vans by going home; about a country at war with itself, and visibly falling apart.

Perhaps the solution lies there. Maybe at Monday’s grand royal summit, presented to us as a historic gathering equivalent to Yalta or Breton Woods, Her Maj could keep H’n’M on board by promising them the throne of Scotland when it finally leaves the union.

But ultimately it’s irrelevant whether H’n’M end up as the William and Mary of the Scots, or as private citizens in the Hollywood Hills.

When a constitutional monarchy has no constitutional purpose – when its figurehead can’t prevent a rogue prime minister from illegally closing her parliament – it must have an alternative raison d’etre.

The function of ours is to distract loyal subjects from what actually matters in their lives, by mirroring their familial ructions on a more lavish scale.

On that basis, the non-abdication non-crisis won’t weaken the monarchy one iota. If anything – whisper this in the presence of naive republicans – it will strengthen it.