The royals: an apology. In recent years it has been persuasively argued that younger members of the royals are more empathetic than their sourer, or weirder elders. And thus, as well as nicer, they are better qualified to connect with their subjects, and, in the long term, protect the family fortunes from, say, its members’ regrettable weakness for paedophiles, at home and abroad.

That William speaks well about mental health and Kate reaches out from Kensington Palace/Anmer Hall with her hints on rustic playtimes, have both, for example, been accepted, even by the generally royal-averse, as welcome attempts at improvement. Recently, when the duchess disclosed, to fellow “mum guilt” sufferers, that she knows their pain, I found I had fallen into the habit of not laughing at would-be uplifting statements that may be hardly less inherently comical than, say, Prince Charles’s longstanding ambition to “heal the dismembered landscape and the poisoned soul”.

Its occasional Marie-Antoinetteishness aside, maybe the Cambridges’ performed relatability really did signal the family’s acquisition, as widely advertised, of an emotional intelligence that will ultimately overturn its reputation for coldness, feuding, successive betrayals, and an HRH-stripping vengefulness towards family misfits, like Diana?

As of last week, it seems clear that this was an utter misapprehension.

Courtesy of their hilarious double act in Westminster Abbey, it seems much more likely that William and Catherine are already, as inheritance edges closer, about as emotionally literate as Prince Philip, as careless of their status as Prince Andrew, and as supremely forgiving to outcasts as the late Queen Mother. With a few differences. The old Queen could at least cite, as the justification for a lifelong grudge, her conviction that Wallis Simpson had devastated her own family life and ruined her husband’s health. All Meghan Markle appears to have done to deserve a comparable level of visible ostracism from Kate and William is to conclude – admittedly rather late, and with scant notice – that a lifetime dedicated to trailing mutely in their wake would be unbearable. As a result, one hears the left-behind royals may now have to open more things and meet more subjects than usual.

You can see why this might seem, as well as a nuisance, a rather pointed commentary on the ghastly, state-maintained life that Kate Middleton wanted for herself. But even so. It’s not as if Meghan taught Kate’s kids to Nazi salute. And even minus their pretensions to leadership in talking/reaching out, blanking rarely-seen family members in a church, in public, isn’t the most civilised example from the Cambridges, future leaders of the family that, according to its own website, symbolically unifies the nation. Some viciously divorced civilians do better than this every week. Moreover, beaming impartially at friends and enemies is not even, unlike the Cambridges, a vital part of their day job.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kate bestows her dazzling smile on Xi Jinping Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

Kate, in particular, has previously demonstrated huge professionalism in this respect, bestowing the same, dazzling smile on Narenda Modi, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping as she does, crouching down in the curious way that royals consider essential in all child-encounters, on an innocent tot. Whatever crime Meghan and Harry have committed to be denied the same favour, it presumably strikes the Cambridges as worse than – to pick at random, from the above guests’ specialities – sexual predation, brutal dictatorship and tolerating extreme violence against women and girls.

In the Abbey scene, surely the finest among the multiple glories of Harry and Meghan’s season one finale, we see a seated Meghan, smiling and waving like a pro at the approaching, then suddenly unsmiling Cambridges, who turn their backs, converse with everyone but them, then fall – William going, unsuccessfully, for dignified composure, Kate pursing into an unforgiving little face that would have discomfited the chattiest of tyrants – to ignoring them for the rest of the ceremony. Meghan, meanwhile, radiates artless goodwill.

Her showy, green, caped outfit has already been acclaimed – along with its companion blue, and red pieces – as a superlatively choreographed, Diana-beating exercise in revenge dressing, but nothing confirmed the triumph that was the Sussexes’ peerlessly executed exit better than the antics of his family. An intended official humiliation – with the Sussexes ostentatiously excluded from a royal parade – concluded as a disastrous face-off: Eloi 1; Morlocks nil.

By this time all but Meghan’s most dementedly racist persecutors must have spotted that, although well advised to swerve the oppressive littleness of much royal life, she is at the same time, given her ability to turn a secondary school visit into a touching national moment, its finest practitioner. All the family had to do was, for an hour or so, endure.

When Hilary Mantel’s 2013 essay on royal wives, Royal Bodies, prompted accusations that she’d disrespected Kate (presumably, she wrote, the young woman was expected to “breed in some manners”), the fuss obscured kindlier-sounding passages where she considered tawdry reminders for royals – the just-out-of-sight stacked chairs, canapé detritus from a reception – that their entire purpose is for show. “You see,” Mantel wrote, “that your life is a charade, that the scenery is cardboard, that the paint is peeling, the red carpet fraying, and if you linger you will notice the oily devotion fade from the faces of your subjects, and you will see their retreating backs as they turn up their collars and button their coats and walk away into real life.”

Maybe it took a professional actress to insist, as seems to be the Sussexes’ plan, on a charade-life balance. It probably wasn’t their intention to appear in the Abbey – as at the Albert Hall, or spotlit under an umbrella – anything other than defiantly, hireably, fabulous. That their proximity was enough, however, to make at least two royal masks slip, perhaps exposes the misery, as well as the cultivated pettiness, of those left behind in captivity.

• Catherine Bennett is an Observer colummnist