Dynasties: Tanya Gold Fall of the House of Windsor The crisis behind the tabloid sensation surrounding Princess Catherine.

TO OUTSIDERS, the British royal family can seem like a curio. 

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They are gaudy waxworks who promote tourism and evoke the time when this country ruled a fifth of the globe. They signify the myth of British exceptionalism and embody a sensibility more rooted in the Blitz than the 21st century: patience, good manners, and repression (spun into health as a stiff upper lip). They are a strand of our national culture, like Miss Marple, Sherlock Holmes, and Earl Grey tea. They are remote and inhuman: near-fictional beings.

But the reality is crueler and more serious. That we in Britain obsess over the Windsors-rather than, say, the cost-of-living crisis, the wreckage of Brexit, or galloping child poverty-is typical of our semi-functioning politics. Like all fairy tales and fables, monarchy infantilizes us, and like a drug, it eats into real life, starting with the lives of the royals themselves. Princess Diana was a fairy-tale princess until she ended up dead. Now, with a swiftness that no one could have expected after the death of Elizabeth II in 2022, the monarchy is potentially fracturing.

Unreliable leadership has become a commonplace in Britain-four prime ministers gone since 2016, and a fifth, Rishi Sunak, likely on his way out later this year-but the royal family is for the first time in living memory also proving unstable. Prince Andrew, the king's brother, was exiled from Buckingham Palace for sexual predation. Prince Harry exiled himself with testimony about racism toward his wife, Meghan. Now, 18 months into his reign, King Charles III is sick with an unnamed cancer and has all but withdrawn from public life. Catherine, the Princess of Wales (née Kate Middleton), is also sick, sparking a transatlantic tabloid frenzy that has put intense scrutiny on her marriage to Charles's successor, Prince William, of a kind reminiscent of the trauma that cracked the marriage of Charles and Diana. The lurid headlines suggest the matter is frivolous; rather, they mask a crisis.