Meghan and Harry: The Real Story

of twenty seven? Most of the signatories of the letter were Labour MPs. Many were avowed republicans. Several of them were known political agitators. The few who weren’t rabidly left-wing anti-monarchists were either avowed feminists who saw misogynism everywhere, or then they were the occupants of marginal seats who were plainly jumping on what they estimated was the populistic and popular bandwagon in the hope that they would save their seats. Beneath the ostensibly noble sentiments there was therefore a tremendous amount of cynical and politicised self-interest. Which, as far as the palace was concerned, was just the sort of situation they had always sought to avoid, and which would never have occurred had Meghan and Harry not been pandering to the very political elements in the country who wanted to abolish the monarchy. This was yet another example of how dangerous it was when leading members of a choir decide that it is their personal interest to sing off key. The anti-monarchist, pro-republican Marxist MP Rebecca Long-Bailey actually said that while she wanted to abolish the monarchy, she’d like to see Meghan made queen first.

Even more offensive than the letter’s rank politicisation of an issue that had nothing to do with politics, was the implication that Meghan was being victimised on racial grounds. The thinly veiled allusion to ‘colonial undertones’ was accusing the press of racism when they had welcomed Meghan with open arms and suppressed much negative information about her. They were not prejudiced against her on racist grounds. On the contrary, they had been prejudiced in favour of her on those precise grounds. The fact that they knew, in a way none of the MPs who had signed that letter did, that Meghan viewed many British traditions with barely concealed contempt, did not make them guilty of ‘colonial undertones’. If anyone was guilty of prejudice, it was the MPs who had written the letter, or Meghan herself, for what can be more prejudicial than a foreigner disdaining national customs and institutions? It was obvious that whoever was prejudiced, it was not the press, but the authors and subject of the letter, which had been written with the specific purpose of exploiting a time of national vulnerability. It was the signatories who were prejudiced: against the monarchy, the centrist and right-wing elements of the British press. They were trying to make political capital out of something which they had no right interfering with.

The British people, however, had more to worry about in the lead-up to the election of the 12th December 2019 than any of the fanciful claims the female MPs had made. Water sought its own level and the issue floated out to sea, as everyone in Britain concentrated on the truly important issue of whether the country would remain a centrist democracy outside of the European Union or become a Marxist state, possibly in, possibly out of, the EU.

It was a massive relief to people all over the country when Boris Johnson was re-elected Prime Minister with a huge majority. Several of the MPs who had so mischievously tried to make political capital out of the conflicts between the press and the Sussexes lost their seats.

The problem of opportunistic Marxist MPs having been solved by the electorate, Harry and Meghan set about providing solutions to their own problems. They gave the first indication of what they had been planning for the whole year when they announced that they would not be spending Christmas with the Royal Family, but would go abroad with Archie to be with her mother. Although few people outside of a tight royal circle appreciated that the royal couple was taking the first step in realising their ambition to base themselves in California, safely beyond the reach of the palace and its supporters in the British media while they promoted their interests and became financially independent, Harry and Meghan had nevertheless just handed their critics a dagger and the media did not hesitate to use it. Their refusal to spend what Fleet Street and most well-informed people suspected would be Prince Philip’s last Christmas with him raised questions as to just how humane they actually were when dealing with those close to them, as opposed to strangers who would give them adulation as they indulged in displays of humanitarianism. It had been an open secret in well-informed circles in Britain for some time that Prince Philip commiserated with someone with pancreatic cancer by stating that he too was diagnosed with it. Out of respect for him and the Queen, the editors in the know had decided not to break the news until the palace announced it. As no announcement had been made to date, no editor had published that fact, but anyone with a brain in his or her head only needed to look at Prince Philip to see that he could not possibly be very long for this earth, pancreatic cancer or none.

So the press waded in and questioned just how sincerely humanitarian Harry and Meghan were. While some reports did allude to the rumour that Meghan had been deliberately detaching Harry from his family, none stated that she resented her grandfather-in-law for having advised Harry not to marry her. As such, they were exhibiting self-restraint, for the word in smart drawing rooms was that Meghan had skilfully used the family’s original caution about her to gain absolute control over Harry and steer him away from his family in the direction she wanted, which was worldwide celebrity based in California.

While the press marked down the couple’s bolt across the Atlantic to self-indulgent inconsideration, with the more left-wing newspapers taking the alternative viewpoint that they were a young couple and should not be expected to always spend the festive season with Harry’s grandparents, this book’s original proposal to the publishers written earlier in the year had stated that Harry and Meghan would be seeking to lead a life on both sides of the Atlantic as they set about maximising commercial opportunities while capitalising