Meghan and Harry

by Lady Colin Cambell

  What made Harry and Meghan’s actions so fearsome was that they seemed to be mindless of the consequences to anyone’s interests but their own.

  Ian Murray, the Executive Director of the Society of Editors, which aims to protect media freedom, responded by explaining, ‘Although the Duke and Duchess say they support a free press and all it stands for there is no escaping their actions here amount to censorship. By appearing to dictate which media they will work with and which they will ignore they, no doubt unintentionally, give succour to the rich and powerful everywhere to use their example as an excuse to attack the media when it suits them.’

  While Mr Murray might have thought their ploy unintentional, I had no doubt, having researched how aggressively, indeed abusively, Sunshine Sachs approaches any segment of the media which does not fall down at the feet of its glorious clients and lick the soles of their dirty shoes as if they were gods to be worshipped, that Harry, Meghan and their media advisors had set out, very intentionally, to give succour to the rich and powerful everywhere to bash the media. As Martin Niemoller, the anti-Nazi pastor pointed out to the German people in the 1930s prior to being imprisoned at Sachsenhausen and Dachau Concentration Camps, ‘First they came for the Communists, but I did not speak out, because I was not a Communist……Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.’

  Meghan and Harry’s unique attempt to reshape the way the British press works had taken no account of the fact that the British press is an integral part of British national life, and scrutiny is an acceptable part of the package. As Prince Philip has put it, ‘It’s the role of the press to be intrusive. It’s a fact of life and one we accept.’ As members of the Royal Family, albeit semi-detached ones residing abroad, both Harry and Meghan have a duty to respect and abide by the protocols and customs of the country over which his grandmother reigns and of which his father and brother will one day be king. There are already elaborate protocols, safeguards and laws in place, some quite recent, but others going back decades, sometimes centuries, protecting the rights of those who write in the press, and those about whom the press write. All British newspapers are obliged to refer to an individual about whom they are writing for his or her comments. This right cuts both ways, protecting not only the subject of an article but also the publication publishing the piece.

  Because the American media were being fed stories that Meghan had been victimised because of her race and class, there was considerably more sympathy for her and for Harry on that side of the Atlantic than there would ever have been, had they known that the facts were being misconstrued to protect the Sussex brand.

  I for one found it depressing that clever operators could so subvert the narrative and misrepresent the reality to the detriment of a whole nation. But the world had changed out of all recognition because of the coronavirus pandemic. Things that had seemed significant pre-lockdown simply became irrelevant post. Inevitably, Harry and Meghan were affected along with everyone else. While the other members of the Royal Family endeared themselves to the British public with sensible, down-to-earth and relevant demeanour, Harry and Meghan were finding it difficult to strike the right note from their temporary accommodation in California.

  As the pandemic raged and people started dying in their thousands, as hospitals filled up and the Prime Minister Boris Johnson was struck down and nearly died, surviving only after being taken into intensive care at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London, and chaos reigned worldwide as to what was the best course of action for fighting and avoiding the virus, Harry and Meghan’s postings did nothing to enhance their reputations. They advised people, who had been told weeks before that they should wash their hands, to do that, then grandly informed the world that they would be providing updates as to the best and most accurate information. Since the consensus was that not even the experts knew what they were dealing with, Harry and Meghan found themselves being mocked for laying claim to a level of expertise they could not possibly possess. Then their website was closed down and they had to rely on friendly journalists and postings from their supporters. By this time, they were coming across as irrelevant and out-of-step, and those of us who wished them well hoped they’d go to ground until the crisis was over.

  Fortunately, they did go quiet, but it was for only a few days before they surfaced, offering their support and encouragement to a variety of people. Their professionally paced and heavily curated contributions were obviously conceived with their advisors to keep their profiles up with drip-feeding. Each of them contacted someone who was then proud to share the experience with a wider public. Since it was unlikely that any of these people would have been violating the couple’s privacy, the conclusion had to be that Harry, Meghan and Sunshine Sachs were providing encouragement behind the scenes. This was borne out when the executive director of Project Angel Food, a charity Doria Ragland likes, informed Instagram, ‘In honour of the Easter holiday, the duke and duchess spent Sunday morning volunteering with Project Angel Food. And on Wednesday they quietly continued delivering meals to relieve our overworked drivers. It was their way to thank volunteers, chefs and staff who have been working tirelessly since the Covid-19 crisis began. We’re completely honoured.’ This was much more the sort of tone Harry and Meghan wanted than what they had been getting from the British media, and sure enough, the American press not only covered the story with the positivity that is such a feature of their press, but even managed to obtain photographs of Meghan in her face mask and Harry in his bandana delivering the meals. People magazine, whose coverage of them is akin to what it was with his mother when she was alive, not only faithfully reported upon those activities, but also managed to obtain the couple’s uncomplaining approval when it ran a story, with photographs, about them taking their dogs for a walk. Plainly, Harry and Meghan were, Kardashian-style, keeping themselves in the news by curating their profiles as and when it suited them. But this did not help their cause in Britain, for people questioned why Harry and Meghan would consider it acceptable for American publications to photograph them walking their dogs but complain, as they did, when the British press did the same and provided equally inoffensive coverage.

  Looking behind what was happening to Harry and Meghan’s motives and aims, they seem to have believed that they had embarked upon a win/win scenario in their battle with the tabloids. If they beat the four newspaper companies into submission, they would have achieved their goal of micromanaging their publicity, but if they failed, they would have made themselves even more famous and warrior-like than they were already were. On the theory that there is no such thing as bad publicity, they would therefore have won even if they should lose.

  Although both their actions support that hypothesis, Meghan appears to be the driving force behind the ploy. The lawsuit she brought against the Mail on Sunday for breach of privacy, data and copyright demonstrated her determination to face down her adversaries even though she has cast her father in the role as one of them. If the matter goes to trial, it promises to be a humdinger. It will be the number one show in town: town being the whole of the world. If the name of the game is keeping her profile high, Meghan succeeds no matter the outcome.

  As things stand, the evidence Meghan has submitted is a double-edged sword. It confirms her father’s claims that she never once responded to his numerous attempts to contact her following her wedding; that she cut him out of her life with a decisiveness which would have resonated with Harry, not only because he displays the identical characteristic of dropping people when they displease him irrespective of how long or close the relationship was, but because it was also a feature of his late mother’s modus operandi. And he seems to have adopted it questioningly.

  Possibly Meghan has given up caring what anyone thinks of her except for Harry and her supporters. She knows they will accept whatever she says uncritically, so she does not need to concern herself with any response beyond theirs. Or maybe her position really has gone to her head the way Tom Quinn recounts in Kensingt
on Palace: An Intimate Memoir From Queen Mary to Meghan Markle. Maybe she really was on the power trip the staff who served and observed her insisted she was on. Could there be any justice in their having nicknamed her Me-Gain the Duchess of Difficult who was Di Two and Di Lite and expected everyone to bow down before her and accept as gospel whatever she said? Her conduct in the lawsuit against her father certainly gave merit to that interpretation. She made the most unlikely and anomalous claims. Because her case would have no merit if she admitted that she had set her five friends up to leak the contents of the letter to People - you cannot legally claim that your privacy has been violated when it has been done at your behest - she swore that they had done it behind her back, without her knowledge, consent or approval. This, if true, was astonishing, but if untrue, was perjurious. Either way, it was an incredible claim to make. Meghan had clearly not recriminated against any of the five who had betrayed her confidence. Rather than sue them for preaching her privacy, which is where the real breach occurred, she had sued the newspaper which had given her father, the real victim of the breach, a forum to defend himself. Incredulity piled upon incredulity when the scope of the lawsuit was addressed. It had been blown up out of all proportion from a simple tort into an approximation of a public enquiry in which the Mail on Sunday would be tried for every wrongdoing Meghan wished to throw at them, irrespective of relevance to the matter at hand. A prince with knowledge of the law observed, ‘It’s very unlikely that her lawyers recommended this course of action. She seems to think because she worked in a fictional law firm on Suits that she is a legal expert.’ Of course, lawyers have a duty to advise, but a client is the one who instructs them, and since lawyers get paid whether a client wins or loses, it is up to the client to exercise good judgement and make sound choices. Meghan clearly did anything but this, and following an application from the Mail on Sunday to throw out the lion’s share of her claim, Mr Justice Warby duly did so. It was but the first of the many rounds in what promises to be an exercise in loss.

  Who really wins and who really loses, except financially, is open to question in this game of double and triple bluff. The Sunday Times journalist Camilla Long wrote in April 2020, ‘Who wins is irrelevant - in many ways she has already lost. There will be a day’s headlines if she prevails after two, three or even four weeks of lashing stories about her destructive ambition and unedifying obsession with her image. Meanwhile she is reducing the pair of them to supermarket magazine fodder, telling Harry he’s getting better when in fact he’s getting worse. She will brush the whole trial aside as yet another injustice, no matter what happens.’

  Long is ‘no fan of the royal family, and in many ways I’d hoped she would expose them as the pale, stale charisma vacuums they are, but at least they have the humility to know when to stop.’ But Meghan is ‘someone who thinks that she can win at anything; be the centre of all attention; have the moral upper hand in any dispute. Her ego blinds her; it even blinds the people working for her.’

  But does it? What the British and Americans fail to understand is how different each of them is from the other. Beyond a common language, there is little else the two nationalities share. In Britain, reputations once destroyed are seldom reparable, but that is not so across the ocean. Much of what turns the British off about Meghan’s character is viewed far more sympathetically in her native land. What passes as chic and classy in the US is regarded as precious and pretentious in the UK. What is regarded as arrogance here is admired as confidence there. The same is true of pushiness, aggressiveness, and what in the vernacular is abbreviated as BS. Because Meghan is an American and royal, her coverage there will always have elements of native pride unless she so overreaches that even they get fed up with her.

  Meghan is also the beneficiary of the misconception that she has been a victim of racism and snobbery. She and Harry have been happy to allow these canards to stand, possibly because they have convinced themselves that they are true, though there is every reason to suppose that they know them to be the fig-leaves which they have conveniently clutched at as they conceal their naked deficiency in ways they find inconvenient or intolerable to reveal. Possibly they really do lack insight, and really do believe that their flaws do not exist, that their critics are vicious and prejudiced when in fact they simply see that the Emperor’s new clothes are not the glorious raiments he thinks they are. Either way, it should make little or no difference to the outcome of the fame game as long as Meghan and Harry continue to play it the way they’ve been doing it.

  American-style fame is a much easier commodity to float and maintain than British. For instance, when Meghan and Harry informed the world that they and Archie had facetimed with the Queen to wish her a happy birthday, the Americans accepted the confidence at face value, the tone of the stories being, ‘How sweet. Happy families’. In Britain, however, they were accused of hypocrisy yet again, for the Queen had asked that all communications within the family be kept private. Meghan and Harry, despite their avowal of wanting to keep their private lives private, had violated not only their privacy, but hers as well. But the Americans don’t even know about such nuances, their press lacking the interest in scrutiny the way the British do.

  To date, Meghan’s management with Sunshine Sachs of her and Harry’s public profile has appeared to be working the way they wanted it to. Doubtless they were all mindful of the tremendous success the Kardashians have achieved on the back of attention-grabbing tactics of dubious taste such as sex-tapes, vaginal displays, and the daily sharing of the most anodyne, mind-numbing detail of their self-centred lives, which, despite its innate vacuity, vulgarity, gross materialism and dullness, nevertheless fires the approval of their many fans. If such offences to good taste can become the successes they have, there is no reason why Meghan Markle and Harry can’t up the ante, trade upon their ‘classiness’ and titles, and become the royal version. All Meghan needs to do is sustain the regard her fellow Americans have for her, with the devoted Harry following in her wake as long as they remain a double act.

  At present, they seem to be benefiting in the United States not only from their superficial appeal as royals but also from the fallacy that Meghan was victimised by the British. This mixed bag has enhanced her profile on a variety of levels. On the one hand, there was admiration for her undoubted style and beauty, while on the other hand her admirers sympathised with the fact that she had been womanfully fighting and slaying the dragons of racism, snobbishness, misogyny, jealousy, lack of appreciation and the multitude of other challenges she and Harry have hinted at whenever they have shared their journey with their supporters.

  Many of these hints will be given flesh around the time this book is published, because Meghan and Harry have done a Diana. They have provided cooperation to Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand for a panegyric, due to be published this summer. If Andrew Morton’s and my experience are anything to go by, they will be bending the facts to burnish their subjects’ images and settle scores with a skill not seen since Josef Goebbels unleashed his talents for propaganda on an unsuspecting German populace. Already, there are indications from Meghan’s evidence in her lawsuit against the Mail on Sunday that she and Harry will be laying a considerable burden of blame on the doorstep of a malign British press. This will include her fractured relationship with her father, which she has been blaming on the press rather than her failure to engage with him. Doubtless, Harry and Meghan’s struggle will not be represented as that of an ambitious and over-confident woman who has linked up with a troubled and well-meaning but none-too-bright prince, but as brave humanitarian warriors who are fighting the good fight and being unfairly labelled greedy, hypocritical, spoilt and self-indulgent by a jealous and malicious contingent who wish to bring them down and prevent them from doing all the good they can as they change the world for the better.

  This is a scenario which will work better in America than it will in Britain. One of the many benefits of fame in the United States is that Americans are much more will
ing to admire without nit-picking the way the British do. They are willing to take at face value that which the British never would. They don’t want their heroes to have feet of clay, which is why fame in the US is so much easier and headier than it is in the UK.

  Another, very important but little acknowledged distinction is the differing roles the tabloids play in each country. In the US, they are more or less disregarded as fantastical organs of nonsense. This is because they often are. In the UK, however, they are serious publications whose content is justifiably taken much more seriously. This is where Sunshine Sachs and the Sussexes have been so clever. Americans think they’re fighting the good fight against maligners and will therefore disregard anything the British tabloids say. This will only change when Americans wake up and realise that tabloid doesn’t mean what they think it means. They’re dismissing the British at their peril.

  Despite the differences between the two cultures, and despite Harry and Meghan’s complaints about how much they’ve been suffering from the ill-effects of fame, there is no doubt that they enjoy theirs. If they did not, they would not be so assiduously courting publicity. No event that can be exploited, no matter how mundane, ever goes to waste in the dustbin of silence. Harry used to be more restrained in terms of ‘sharing’ than he now is, but both he and Meghan have always had an eye to the main chance where publicity was concerned. The difference between them is that Harry used to mine that rich seam for the benefit of charities like Sentebale and countries like Lesotho, with never a thought for personal gain, while nowadays everything they do is influenced by how it will impact upon their brand, not only reputationally but financially.

  Without a doubt, Harry and Meghan are an extremely tight couple. They have common aims and motivations which influence everything they do. All couples spark each other off in different ways, and Harry and Meghan’s interaction has been a fascinating combination of how a couple, wholly absorbed in each other and believing that restraint is a failing to be avoided as opposed to a virtue to be deployed as and when necessary, can access all that is positive and negative in both their personalities. Having done so, they then set in motion a train of consequences which have turned them from one of the most popular couples on earth into one of the most reviled in his homeland, all within the space of eighteen months.