Emotional and financial extravagance go hand-in-hand. And the Sussexes are experts in both

Nearly eighteen months after their wedding, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have courted a reputation for two quite different things.

One is a preoccupation with not just mental health, clearly a very commendable cause. The other, more controversially, is the importance of openly expressing one’s emotions, even in public.

Only last week, in a TV documentary aired on both sides of the Atlantic, Meghan Markle condemned the British stiff upper lip ‘as internally very damaging’. Prince Harry has openly talked

about his own ‘hurt’, ‘pain’ and ‘suffering’. Earlier this month he fought back tears during a speech about fatherhood while also revealing, in a misty-eyed interview, that everything he

does reminds him of his mother.

On a very different note, the Sussexes also have a penchant for lavish spending, at the expense of the taxpayer. This became most abundantly clear in the summer, when it was revealed that

the cost of renovating their new residence, Frogmore Cottage, was a staggering £2.4 million. And there is no shortage of other examples: Meghan’s maternity wardrobe of half a million pounds,

a ‘baby shower’ trip to New York that cost £330,000, and a £56,000 dress for her engagement photos. Their well-known taste for private jets is not only very damaging to the environment but

hugely expensive to whoever is paying the bill.

But although at first sight wholly disparate, these two traits are in fact closely connected. Both are examples of ‘extravagance’ – one emotional, the other financial – at the expense of

self-control. If someone is emotionally extravagant enough to display their feelings in a way that the Sussexes so clearly champion – a ‘loose upper lip’ – then the chances are that they

will be equally self-absorbed and unrestrained in other ways, not least when spending other people’s money.

In other words, extravagance, like ‘freedom’, is indivisible: the (relative) freedom to express one’s feelings can’t be divorced from the freedom to express anything else, good or bad. What

a contrast with the attitude of Her Majesty the Queen, who is the epitome of the British ‘stiff upper lip’ and who at the same time is notoriously frugal in her spending: when travelling to

Sandringham, for example, the Queen travels first-class on the Thameslink public train to King’s Lynn, costing around £50 for each ticket.

In this context, it is worth considering a bit more what this ‘stiff upper lip’ actually means. It does not, or need not, mean that ‘all emotions should be repressed’: people are not

machines. Instead, the idea is that emotions should be expressed in the right way at the right time. Some emotions (happiness and joy being obvious examples) can be shown in public, but

others (grief and pain, for example) should be hidden from public view and revealed only in private to those, perhaps close family or trained counsellors, who can listen and help. But not

showing them in public does not mean they don’t exist, any more than a public expression of sentiment is necessarily genuine and heartfelt.

This approach sufficed for those who endured real hardship, not least in two world wars and in the highly adverse conditions of Empire, and has evolved (with a bit of assistance from the

Victorians, who appear to have invented stories, such as Sir Francis Drake’s ‘last game of bowls’ as the Armada came into view) for a good reason. The expression of sentiment is above all an

egocentric act, an indulgence that comes at the expense of others. We can’t think about other people or indeed anything else at all, including the interests of the nation that the Royal

Family embody and represent, if we are wrapped up in ourselves. In public, our sense of responsibility – ‘duty’ to use an old-fashioned word so embodied by the myth of Nelson and so beloved

by Winston Churchill – matters more than an act of self-indulgence that quickly spirals out of control and which is infectious to others.

There is also another reason why this approach is so important: thinking of other people and responsibilities first, at the expense of emotional egocentricity, also helps our own mental

health. Most of us know that helping others can be deeply therapeutic, curing us of our own woes, as Princess Diana herself once pointed out. Unhappy as a child and in marriage, she found

relief by becoming so closely involved in charitable causes.

In other words, this traditional approach has much going for it, and it is therefore one that the Sussexes, and other Royals, could and should champion if they want to balance their duties

with their own emphasis on their and our psychological wellbeing. The clear challenge is finding a modernised version of our traditional emotional repression that they can comfortably

champion and emulate. Perhaps, instead of claiming that ‘you have got to feel happy’, as Meghan did in her interview last week, she and her husband could now use a different catchphrase –

that ‘thoughtfulness for others is good for our mental health’.

But until and unless they take this more nuanced approach, expect more headlines about lavish spending and emotional outbursts that reveal what is so right about a traditional stiff upper

lip.

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