Don't be fooled by a fawning documentary – Meghan Markle has done nothing to modernise the monarchy

ITV's ‘Queen of the World’ is trying to convince us that the Queen, by welcoming a woman who looks like many of her Commonwealth subjects, is promoting equality. It could not be further from the truth

Even before it aired last Tuesday, Queen of the World, a documentary about the Queen as head of the Commonwealth, was making headlines, and for reasons ITV were unlikely to have anticipated. What titillated viewers was not its misty-eyed montage of the Queen’s two-thirds of a century rule over one-third of the world’s population. It was Meghan Markle shutting her own car door.

The gesture was unambiguous: not a reflex but a reminder of humble origins, not an accident but an assertion of autonomy. Unable to comprehend how anything royal could be without meaning, the British public filed two seconds of screen-filler under “Royal Family's radical new addition makes her own rules.” (See also: Michael Curry, hugs and of course, trousers.)

The idea of a divorced black American modernising the monarchy by shaking up centuries-old protocol is regurgitated across the documentary’s two parts – including by the Duchess herself, who tells a conservator that she intended her wedding veil, embroidered with wildflowers from each of the 53 Commonwealth countries, to represent “the spirit of inclusivity”. The included seem to buy it: Benjamin Fraser, guest at a Commonwealth garden party at Marlborough House, comments between canapes that Meghan's ascent to royalty is a sign of “serious movement taking place in this country”.

What Queen of the World is trying to tell us is that the Queen, by welcoming a woman who looks like many of her Commonwealth subjects, is realising her father’s founding dream of “creating a free association of equal nations out of the [ruthlessly unequal] British Empire”. Besides breathless vox pops, it does this by punctuating archive footage of the Queen cruising the Caribbean with contemporary stories of social mobility within the Queen’s “family of nations”-- examples of the kind of “serious movement” of which Meghan Markle is both the index and the means.

One such story is Irene’s, who still remembers the Queen's visit to Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1961. “We were given flags and told to line the streets,” she tells her daughter Ufemia. “We’d never traveled before, and here was someone coming all the way from England.” Later, civil war would present to Irene the opportunity to return the Queen’s visit by seeking refuge in Britain. Her hope was to create a better future for her family: “Back home we have this saying: we want our children to go higher than us.” Now, with Ufemia about to exhibit at a Commonwealth fashion show hosted by the Duchess of Cambridge and Countess of Wessex at Buckingham Palace, Irene's wish appears to have been granted.

Yet while the documentary depicts many Commonwealth denizens getting closer to the royal family – its second part is a glorified handshake circus – it's unclear that they're going any higher. Take another of Queen of the World’s case studies, the Commonwealth Scholars. The scholarship, which sees a group of men and women plucked from archipelagic anonymity to join the royal household for two weeks, aims to parade the royal family’s newfound liberalism, its desire to foster social mobility among its furthest-flung subjects. But besides the appalling optics of an old white woman inspecting rows of black house help – or even of young white women inspecting rows of black fashion designers – the scenes leave viewers in no doubt about who’s boss. The Commonwealth are being “included”, but on highly unequal terms.

Back at Buckingham Palace and after a thrilling run-in with the Duchess of Cambridge, Ufemia visibly jumps for joy. Right on cue, the show's hashtag flashes on screen. The visual pun on Ufemia as #QueenOfTheWorld clearly references Britain’s first biracial princess, the person Elizabeth, a Tongan recipient of the Queen’s Young Leader Award, surely has in mind when, after a private reception with Her Majesty, she declaims: “Whatever you can dream, you can achieve.”

The potent symbolism of a young mixed race California girl perched on the railings outside Buckingham Palace, and years later exiting Windsor Castle in bright white Givenchy with a prince on her arm, should escape nobody. Yet the idea that Markle’s royalty is anything more than purely symbolic – that it will materially level British and, by extension, Commonwealth society – is naive.

Queen of the World served an important reminder – and not that Meghan Markle retains use of her own arms. What it inadvertently tells us is that however many Trinidadians join the household, Sierra Leoneans exhibit at the palace, African Americans marry princes, the Windsors remain a profoundly hierarchical and inherently conservative family; for all its surface-level movement, in other words, the bedrock of royalty stands firm. As Commonwealth secretary-general Patricia Scotland puts it: “If you ask anyone in the world, “Who is the Queen?”, there is actually only one, and that’s Queen Elizabeth II.” There always has been, and always will be, only room for one queen of this world.