I’m not defending Harry and Meghan. But I think they deserve some credit, for they have put the British character under the spotlight as never before in our times.

Of course, it’s mainly Meghan who has done this. Through being boldly herself, she has raised the question of who we are. How are we different from the Californian culture she belongs to, which is the dominant form of western culture? In some ways it’s obvious – we have a monarchy for a start. But she has exposed a lot of the underlying stuff that makes us different. And she forces us to ask: can we affirm this stuff? Can we defend it? Do we like who we are?

It seems that Meghan was not really aware of marrying into a different culture from her own. In a way, the weirdness and magic of monarchy obscured the issue of national cultural difference. She assumed British culture was much the same as her own Californian culture; that it was a quaint, old-fashioned version of it, with some dusty cobwebs that she was well placed to clear away. She was mistaken. Our culture is different from that of California. By marrying into its emblematic family, she was expected to adapt to it. But it seems no one explained this to her.

Imagine if Meghan had married into the monarchy of Thailand or Jordan. The situation would have been clearer: the incomer has to adapt, to learn new behaviour, to demonstrate meek respect for the new culture. If the women wear headscarves you wear a headscarf. You don’t turn up as a Californian and ‘do you’. The problem is that in Britain the cultural differences are less visible. You could say that ruling-class British women wear invisible headscarves.

This was largely the reason for the negative press Meghan got. She was treated with suspicion, not because she was mixed-race, but because she was deemed to be unsympathetic to some of our core traditions.

What traditions? Well, I suppose we’re talking about one big vague psychological tradition. Reticence, irony, self-deprecation, wry acceptance of what remains of the class system, acceptance of difficulty and mystery and muddle, suspicion of simple clarity and emotional frankness, noblesse oblige, awkward reverence for tradition, even when it’s irrational and problematic – stuff like that.

These sort of attitudes are especially prevalent among those at the upper end of the social scale. For example, conspicuous consumption is tolerated if you’re recently rich, but not if you’re in any sort of position of authority. Members of the royal family are expected to uphold this code, to embody it. Taking a private jet to a baby shower is OK for a footballer’s wife, not for a duchess.

Meghan seems to have assumed that this psychological tradition was something that we Brits felt burdened by, wanted to be free of. Surely we Brits sought to be more like her – egalitarian, relaxed, frank, free from class hang-ups, good at hugging strangers? She was partly right: we do feel a bit burdened by our ironic traditionalism, our class hang-ups and so on. And we are uncomfortably aware that there is snobbery, sexism and racism mixed in with our inherited way of being. 

But she was mostly wrong. She didn’t understand that, despite the difficult baggage, we value this way of being, we see great worth in understatement, evasion, outward modesty and so on. She didn’t understand she was expected to resemble a posh young Brit, and to edge away from the Hollywood version of celebrity, in favour of the self-effacing royal version of celebrity. She was expected to be quiet about race, like a Tory minister, proving that we are all good sorts nowadays. 

To put it bluntly, she didn’t understand that we have a distinctive national culture, and that the royal family is expected to embody it, or large aspects of it. Why would she? It’s a notion that is at odds with the universalism of California: everyone is the same, and wants the same things – success, justice, self-realisation. 

Meghan has become the clearest mirror that the British psyche has had for a generation or two. By assuming that we were essentially the same as her, under some quaint Disney differences, and then painfully learning otherwise, she shows us who we are. We are not Californians with superficial hang-ups we are trying to ditch. Our hang-ups go all the way down! Brits have a distinctive tradition of moral culture, a mix of good and bad, as complex as our history and our weather and our poets; it contains lots of subtle moral sensitivity and nobility but also residual class prejudice and sexism and racism. Her painful brush with this tradition prompts us to reflect on this. And it prompts us to ask: is there any virtue in our difference? Do we like who we are?