While the Daily Mail has been disgusting towards the Duchess of Sussex for years, the vibe has gotten decidedly grotesque, bullying, hectoring and bizarre in recent weeks. There was the week-long tantrum over Meghan’s red dress at the Children’s Hospital gala, followed by reports of Meghan and Harry’s “separation.” We’re currently in a gossip cycle where these awful people are trying to piggyback on Tina Brown’s comments last week, where she claimed that Meghan is “a perfectionist about getting it all wrong. Her issue is that she doesn’t listen. She has all these people, asks them their opinion, and then doesn’t follow it. She does what she wants to do. And all of her ideas are total crap, unfortunately.” That led Richard Eden at the Mail to write one of the nastiest pieces I’ve read in months, in which he listed all of the “mistakes” he believes Meghan made over the years – mistakes like “naming her daughter Lilibet” and “giving an interview to Oprah.”
This new piece in the Mail might be one of the funniest and stupidest though. Christopher Wilson wrote: “Is it time for Meghan to follow the example of other American women who married into royalty?”
Slammed by ex-Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown as having ‘the worst judgment of anyone in the entire world’, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, appears to be attracting yet more negative publicity. Described as headstrong and ungovernable, the Duchess was summed up by Ms Brown in a new podcast: ‘The trouble with her is that she has the worst judgment of anyone in the entire world. She’s flawless about getting it all wrong. She really is.’
So maybe this is the moment for Meghan to follow the example of the thirty-plus American women who married into royalty in the past – those who remained dignified and left behind a good mark on the world.
*The most fabled of all is Philadelphia-born Grace Kelly, who brought glamour, fame, and an effortless ease to the throne of Monaco in the 1950s. An Oscar-winning actress, she’s best remembered for her part in the Alfred Hitchcock movies Rear Window and Marnie. She married Prince Rainier III in 1956 and became a model princess, creating and supporting countless charities before her tragic death in a car crash in 1982.
*But for the ousting of the country’s monarchy in 1973, London-born U.S. heiress Marie-Chantal Miller would now be Queen of Greece. The 56-year old beauty, daughter of billionaire businessman Robert Miller, met Crown Prince Pavlos of Greece, son and heir of ex-King Constantine, in 1994 and they married the following year. Now based in New York, she believes in behaving correctly at all times, especially (take note, Meghan) towards her royal in-laws. Mother of five, she says, “We sometimes forget to be caring towards others — and that’s where manners fundamentally start.”
*Lisa Halaby was born in Washington DC, the daughter of a US test pilot, airline executive and government official. A Princeton graduate, she worked as a town planner before meeting the widowed King Hussein of Jordan in Amman in 1978, taking the title Queen Noor when they married. As queen, she created a vast charitable organisation in her her husband’s name, while her international work focuses on environmental issues with the emphasis on water and ocean health. Now aged 73, she has been a widow since her husband’s death in 1999.
He keeps going and going, because of course he does. Poor Meghan left those horrid people five years ago and they’re still running long-winded hissy fits about how she’s “headstrong and ungovernable.” Two loaded words when it comes to Black women. Wilson, like Tina Brown, can’t really put his finger on what exactly Meghan has done “wrong” though – clearly, she’s not white enough for them, and clearly, they’re devastated that Meghan didn’t simply divorce Harry and move away, leaving the charismatic prince on their shores. Or are they mad that she didn’t stay too, so that they could abuse her at close proximity? In any case, they can’t come right out and say that, so we get loaded commentary about how she’s “ungovernable.”
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.