Opinion | Why ‘royal confessionals’ like Meghan and Harry’s Oprah interview threaten the British monarchy

Royal confessionals have a long history. Marion Crawford, who wrote a book in 1950 about her time as nanny to the queen and her sister Margaret, was allegedly ostracised for selling her story without permission. Wallis Simpson, the American socialite for whom Edward VIII abdicated the throne in 1936, wrote a memoir The Heart Has its Reasons. In it, she sarcastically recalled the queen mother’s “justly famous charm” as a thinly-veiled critique.

Princess Diana’s BBC One Panorama interview in 1995 is perhaps the most iconic royal confessional. Diana told interviewer Martin Bashir about royal adultery, palace plots against her, and her deteriorating mental and physical health. Her infamous quote, “well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded,” referring to Prince Charles’s affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, is still remembered almost 26 years later. Sir Richard Eyre, a former director of the National Theatre, claimed that the queen called Diana’s decision to tell-all “frightful”.

Common across all these examples is that it is women who use the royal confessional to reveal their experiences.

The “confessional” is often used in celebrity cultures to manufacture intimacies with audiences. Celebrities disclose something personal and reveal their “authentic” selves. However, as sociology and media scholars Helen Wood, Beverley Skeggs and Nancy Thumin note, elite, white, male celebrity confessions tend to be treated with gravitas. But women’s confessionals – particularly black women or those associated with “low culture professions”, such as celebrities – are all too often treated as inappropriate, oversharing and narcissistic.