Meghan and Harry

by Lady Colin Cambell

  Royalty is not known for its surprises, its predictability and reassuring lack of Eureka moments being two of the features its supporters find so welcome in this age of hype and unpredictability. Glamorous to a fault, but in the estimation of her critics in too Tinseltown a way as opposed to the regality royalists require, Meghan was yet again in a black dress, this time a sleek, elegant, one-shoulder figure hugger from the award winning couturiere’s foreign atelier.

  Her demeanour was pure Hollywood, that purveyor of glamour where bighearted immediacy cannot be bested though, to contrarians, it is a centre of artifice where everyone smilingly walks over the carcasses of their discards as they project apparently sincere hearts of gold along with equally real white veneers. Meghan could not have been more gracious or indeed loving towards Clare Waight Keller. As her friends have often said, she is a truly loving human being who never fails to give expression to her loving nature, though her critics decried her displays of affection with the jaundiced comment that they wished she could summon up something approximate for her father or the members of her husband’s family with whom she was now known to be on cool terms.

  In reality, both sides had a point. Meghan had been declaring behind the scenes that she felt hemmed in by royal protocol. She thought it was ‘nonsense’, ‘cold’, ‘stiff’, and ‘inhibiting’. She wanted to be free to indulge the love she felt for people. She believed in ‘hugs’ and thought nothing was better at letting someone feel welcome than enveloping them in a huge embrace. She did not wish to be limited by dictats of how she should behave. Whether it was a friend, lover or stranger, if she wanted to show love to someone, she should be able to do it. She had made it clear that she would not be allowing ‘all that royal protocol nonsense’ to stand in the way of demonstrating how loving she was. Whether in private or in public did not matter, nor did whether she was functioning in an official or a personal capacity. Her heart was too big, her light too bright, for either to be hidden under a bushel. So she enveloped Clare Waight Keller in the most massive bear hug, all the better with which to let the critical world know that they were meanies and her display of affection signified a warmer heart and truer nature than they possessed.

  Behind the scenes, Meghan had been greatly taken aback by the adverse reactions she had been generating. Like most actresses, she thrives on public acclaim and approval. The slightest criticism disconcerts her, so the level of hostility she had been receiving had rattled her to the very core of her being. Her response was to continue holding her course, projecting the image of the warm and wonderful woman she was, while also letting her friends leak stories to the press about how down-to-earth she was. Proof of this now surfaced in accounts of how she functioned as her own stylist despite being the worldwide style icon she had become, how she did her own makeup up to a professional standard even when she did not have her favourite make-up artist on hand, and how she often did her hair as well.

  While such information added to her lustre with her fans, with her critics it was beside the point. They did not care about such superficialities; they were more concerned with the profundities. And, following Meghan’s appearance at the Royal Albert Hall, they had alighted upon a profundity of great importance. The Daily Express summarised this phenomenon best when it howled, Pregnant Meghan Markle shows off PROMINENT baby bump at Fashion Awards.

  When Meghan had stepped out onto the stage to present the award, the hall exploding in cheers, what people noticed more than the award this latest royal was handing to the designer, or the hug she enveloped her with, or even how loving she was, was the dramatic way in which her pregnancy had progressed. In four short weeks, she had gone from flat as a pancake to what one journalist described as ‘the size of most women at seven months’.

  Nor was Meghan content to let the immense and unexpected development speak for itself. It should have been obvious that she was so thrilled to be pregnant that she was mesmerised by the life within her. Being the sort of personality who must convey what she is feeling not only in word but indeed, before and after handing over the award, she clutched her belly. And continued clutching it. And clutched it some more. And some more still, her hands rooted to the bump in a display of such delight at the happy condition she found herself in, that she had to draw the whole world’s attention to it. There was something so frankly exultant about the display that it was akin to sharing a secret of which one is inordinately proud with the whole world.

  Not everyone accepted such an ostentatious display in such a flattering light. To her critics, Meghan was simply confirming that she was actressy, attention-seeking, attention-demanding, and attention-creating. One fashionista told me that she had never seen such a ‘palaver’ before, and questioned whether Meghan was afraid that people would miss that she was pregnant if she didn’t clutch her belly like a lizard clinging to a tree, or did she fear it would jump off her body if she didn’t hang onto it? Some people unkindly asked whether she was so proud of having royal seed growing in her womb that she had to draw constant attention to her condition? Or was she so full of herself and her own importance that she had to remind everyone that she was now a duchess and on the way to being the mother of a royal baby?

  Counterbalancing this viewpoint were those who defended Meghan’s conduct. There was much speculation that someone as new wave as her might believe that the foetus flourishes better when its mother communicates with it from outside the womb. Let Meghan do what she pleased, was their message. Leave her alone. So what if she wants to clutch her belly. She’s not harming anyone.

  Nevertheless, the turn the pregnancy had taken opened up other questions. How many months gone was she? Because the due date was being kept secret at the insistence of the couple, in defiance of accepted royal practice, there was speculation that she might be approaching her seventh month and the baby would arrive in March. This at least explained the Vesuvian explosion that had erupted abdominally.

  The anomaly inherent in all of this was too good for Meghan’s growing band of detractors to ignore. The belly clutching and the sudden growth of the bump fed right into their incredulity. They quickly leapt to the conclusion that she wasn’t pregnant at all.

  The internet now came alive with speculation. While all reasonable people accept that it is a forum where conspiracy theories proliferate and crazies have their say without anyone taking them too seriously, events such as the Arab Spring have also shown that it can be a platform for the dissemination of factual information that established circles, including the press, can and do suppress. All political institutions, including royal ones, monitor the internet. Their survival depends on it. Some groundswells can wash them away unless they are careful.

  Underlying the more bizarre speculations, however, was a message that Meghan might well have profited from, had she cared to listen to it. This was that too many people didn’t believe that she was what she was projecting. She did not ring true to them. She did not convince them. Despite the decades she had spent acting up a storm, they were simply not buying her act. Since much of royal life is about getting the tone and content right, of projecting the appropriate image and doing so in a believable and constructive way, Meghan would have been well advised to have listened to some of the criticism.

  Beneath this, there was another issue. Royalty doesn’t act; it is. The message being delivered was that she should stop projecting and start being. She should be more like the Queen, or Princess Anne, or the Prince of Wales, or Camilla, and less like Princess Michael of Kent, whose affectations and pretentiousness had made her a mockery which her detractors asserted Meghan was quickly matching and now in danger of exceeding.

  In fairness to both sides, Meghan is an actress and actresses act. Asking someone whose whole life has been about performance to unlearn the art of projection is a tad optimistic. This, of course, is one of the reasons why Prince Philip did not think Harry should marry Meghan. He foresaw the problems she would have as she went about her royal duties, not only in terms of ex
ecuting them behaviourally but also in the discomfiture she would endure as her performance was rated. With rating inevitably comes slating, which no one as thin-skinned as Meghan would find tolerable. The Queen and Prince Philip had been friendly with Princess Grace of Monaco. They knew the struggles she had had before she was taken seriously. And how, once she had settled into the role of ruling princess and been accepted in it, she had chafed against its restrictions. Moreover, Grace had taken the whole business of royalty far more seriously than Meghan did. She had been highly motivated to fit in, and had made the sacrifices even when she was tempted to do otherwise. But that hadn’t made them any the easier to bear. By the time of her untimely death, she had taken to poetry readings as a means of satisfying the undying yearning to be on stage. Would Meghan have the motivation to do something similar, or would the actress within her prevent her from adjusting to royal demeanour while also propelling her to make a hash of a role which, with a bit of willingness on her part, she might be able to master successfully, to the benefit of herself, the monarchy, and her ethnicity?

  Although the public will have thought nothing about the struggles of an actress adjusting to a role that requires the absolute opposite of projection, Meghan’s actressy demeanour was turning out to be both a plus and a minus. Being a more polished and dramatic performer than any of the other royals, she wowed where they did not. But this, for many, was a part of the problem. Only time would provide a solution, for, until people got used to her and realised that her actressiness might not be a sign of insincerity but merely the manifestation of an innately dramatic personality, they would continue to look askance. In the meantime, they would be faulting her on the grounds that she was a little too conscious of what she was doing, that she deliberately projected just that little bit more than they were used to with the other royals. In reality, there was an exact corollary between Meghan when she was starting out as an actress and Meghan when she started out as a duchess. In both situations, her eagerness to project what she believed the role required was so excessive that she did not strike the right note. It was for that reason that she took so long to achieve success as an actress, and it was the same reason why she got some people’s backs up.

  Putting the admiration of fans to one side, public figures are most convincing when they are not focused on their performance, nor on conveying any message except authenticity. When a public figure is so busy enacting an underlying message that onlookers are made to feel they are being railroaded into sidings not of their own choosing, they rebel against the celebrity’s message and come to their own, oftentimes entirely opposite, conclusions. They feel that they are being manipulated, and they do not like it. This, of course, is the failing of all hams. This is why the Queen has declared that she will not act. This is why royalty and aristocracy are brought up from the cradle never to simulate, but to be authentic, even to be perceived as inadequate rather than false. To avoid anything that will smack of manipulativeness. To be forthright or at least bland rather than hypocritical. Even to be considered rude rather than insincere. To avoid pretending, but to behave properly and authentically.

  Meghan’s projections by now were proving to be her undoing, for too many people who wished to be convinced by her but were not. These projections, ringing the hollow note they did, now added fuel to the fire where her expanding bump was concerned. The result was that she, and by extension the monarchy, became involved in one of the most distasteful stories since 1688.

  Not being a conspiracy theorist, I was prepared to consider that Meghan’s conduct as she drew attention to what she called ‘the bump’ owed more to her actressiness than to anything else. However, the word had spread on the internet amongst an uncomfortably large number of contributors that she was attempting to con the world into believing that she was pregnant when she was not. While it was possible to discount some of the contributors as crazies, or something even more odious, like racists, there were just too many people piling in, some quite sane-sounding, for the problem to be dismissed out of hand. Plainly, there was a problem, and it needed to be addressed respectfully and, if possible, learnt from.

  According to the doubters, Meghan had got too big too quickly. She had then continued to grow at a pace that was more in keeping with a woman having triplets than one who was having one child or even twins.

  Soon, I had journalists approaching me every time I attended an event in public. Then they started ringing me up. Did I know what was going on? What was the inside story on how the palace was coping with the deluge of internet stories about the bump being a prosthesis? The palace was stonewalling them, as it ought to have been doing.

  The speculations being fed to Fleet Street for Meghan’s conduct would have been entertaining, had the matter not been so serious. A Mail journalist told me that there was a persistent rumour that ‘the reason she’s always clutching the bump is because she needs to keep it in place.’ This journalist also said that there were stories circulating about the bump slipping; about photographers having taken pictures of Meghan when the bump had slipped; about the bump being sometimes too high, sometimes too low, other times just right.

  Although all segments of the mainstream press, from the respectable broadsheets to the most downmarket tabloids, avoided reporting on these stories, their very existence was an embarrassment to the monarchy as well as a concern that these rumours might gain further traction. Also embarrassing and of growing concern was Meghan’s increasingly flamboyant conduct as she answered criticism of her belly clutching by clutching her belly ever more resolutely.

  This was not the sort of story people who wanted Meghan to succeed cared to see. It was at best distasteful and more realistically damaging, not only to her status but to the aspirations her supporters had for her. Aside from the occasional woke journalist, the only other category of individual in society who seemed to commend her rebellious flamboyance as she met criticism with further ostentation was minor celebrities who were pregnant. I attended several premieres where some virtual unknown would encircle her unborn child in front of the cameras. None, however, did what Meghan did. Only she kept her hands firmly planted on her protuberance after the flashes had faded. Although there were simple explanations, ranging from rebelliousness to New Age Communication, which could explain away Meghan’s determination, as far as many of the people who came into contact with her were concerned, the belly-clutching really was too much. The chief ground for criticism was that ladies simply do not clutch their bellies, pregnant or otherwise. No one except the New-Agers were buying the line that Meghan was soothing the baby, and as the pregnancy progressed and the bump grew apace while her hands continued to hover over it, the criticism grew louder because there has always been a generally accepted viewpoint that modest women simply don’t clutch their pregnant bellies. Doing so draws undue attention to a fact which all societies have traditionally treated with respect and circumspection, irrespective of class or colour, whether one is in the US, Canada, Britain, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Far East, the Sub-Continent, South and Central America, the Caribbean or the Antipodes.

  Another consideration from the point of view of Meghan’s critics was the fact that, until fairly recently, pregnant royal women were so discreet that they did not draw attention to their condition or even say they were pregnant. Some might allude to being enceinte, while in the aristocracy women might ‘breed’, but they would not ‘make a spectacle of themselves’ by wearing clothes that accentuated their condition, nor would they flaunt their pregnancy the way Meghan was flaunting hers.

  Once more, people in certain circles began to query why Harry was letting this groundswell of criticism grow. He knew what was acceptable behaviour to the British, and what was not. Pregnancy is a fact of life, but one which has personal connotations. Like all bodily functions of a personal nature, it is treated with finesse irrespective of class, colour or creed. Just as how British men do not advertise their private parts through their clothing, nor do they sc
ratch or make adjustments except out of view, nor does anyone go around belching and farting as if the public arena is a private lavatory, pregnant women do not draw undue attention to their condition. While it is acceptable for a pregnant woman to fleetingly pass her hand over her bump occasionally, accentuating it the way Meghan was doing was exceptional, and her conduct was not only exciting comment amongst all classes of people, but doing so without merit.

  This was not a good scenario where Meghan and Harry were concerned. However, rather than respond to the sensitivities of those whose feathers they were ruffling, they dismissed them out of hand by refusing to alter conduct which a too large percentage of the population found objectionable. Their attitude was: Meghan can do what she wants. If you don’t like it, lump it. However, some of those sensitivities were not stylistic, but went to deeper fundaments within all societies, civilised or otherwise. Pregnancy touches upon many invisible strands and, as Harry and Meghan’s roles within British national life were as representatives of the very people whom she was offending, they were in effect abnegating their responsibilities and coming across, whether thinkingly or otherwise, as arrogant and uncaring.

  What also lost Meghan and Harry admirers was that, as the bump got bigger and bigger, her dresses got tighter and tighter. Possibly this too was an issue they did not understand the significance of, living as they were doing in a mutually admiring bubble where Meghan could do no wrong and Harry backed her up uncritically at every turn. However, skintight clothes on pregnant women are a breach of the code of ladylike conduct by which vast swathes of the British public, irrespective of class or colour, live. Just as how modesty forbade the extreme public displays of affection to which Meghan and Harry were prone until they ceased being invited to dinner parties, so too did the wearing of extremely tight clothes when pregnant except in the confines of one’s own bedroom and bathroom. The question to be answered was: Why was a royal duchess wearing thin, stretchy fabric pulled tight over her bump, her belly button displayed for all to see, in defiance of all accepted custom in her adopted country? To show how wide a spectrum of objection there was, a black West Indian said, ’It’s not seemly;’ a duchess said, ‘This is exhibitionism run riot;’ while a young Nigerian woman put it slightly differently, ‘I would be stoned back home if I went out in public dressed like that.’