New Money is therefore both more demanding and less hardy than Old. What Old Money accepts unflinchingly, New Money regards as a personal assault on its right to be comfortable at all times. Meghan’s conduct, with its insistence on her personal comfort being considered before anything else, showed that she was an archetypal evocation of the New Money school of learned softness. It also explained why she saw nothing untoward with frank acquisitiveness and pronounced materialism. New Money is materialistic in a way that no other class in society is. It uses not only itself, but others, to get what it wants. It is ruthless in a way Old Money seldom is. It thinks money is more important than it actually is, that cash can buy what it cannot, and that money is a magic stick rather than a means of exchange. It too often thinks people have a lower value than they do, and that anyone and anything can be used by them without damaging consequence. Usually, it learns the error of its ways in the second and succeeding generations, by which time it has been absorbed into the Old Money set, replicating its values.
Although Meghan is the exception that proves the rule, Old Money people are generally very comfortable to be with as long as you understand what their values are. They have codes of conduct which stretch back to the beginnings of civilisation. They have invisible boundaries which regulate their conduct and wellbeing from the cradle to the grave. New Money and Real Money are far more exciting. Their very lack of knowledge of these invisible boundaries makes for a freedom that is refreshing until you realise that you’re at sea with someone who doesn’t know how to paddle the boat. Prince Charles’s former butler Grant Harrold once said in my presence that he much prefers working for Old Money rather than New, because people with Old Money treat their staff better than people with New. There are reasons why expressions such as ‘rough diamond’ or ‘not polished’ used to be used. New Money people simply do not have the awareness that comes with a heritage stretching back generations. But now that so many of the Old Money people have lost prominence and so many of the New Money people have joined the feast, there has been a relaxation of the rules, which has loosened up behaviour and allowed cross pollination between different social groupings. It is this influx that has allowed even No Money people to take seats in the banqueting hall. Hence why Meghan not only gained access but was welcomed with open arms.
To all intents and purposes, prior to her marriage to Harry, Meghan would have been categorised as a No Money person. While she had made reasonable money following her success in Suits, she did not have enough to even buy and furnish a decent sized house such as she and Trevor used to rent, and maintain a reasonable lifestyle, which is the acid test between New Money and No Money. She really was Cinderella at the ball. This provides a partial explanation for why she regards financial independence as being so important. It must be remembered that Meghan’s success came late in life. She’s only enjoyed it for the last few years. Before that, she was dependent upon men for a roof over her head and the wherewithal to have a half-way decent existence. This dependence on men also explains why she became such an advocate of feminism once she made enough money to stand on her own two feet. Her appreciation of wealth and her left-wing sympathies can also be explained by her antecedents. With her father and mother, she led a petit bourgeois existence while being schooled with children from sometimes infinitely richer backgrounds than hers. With Trevor Engelson, she enjoyed a significant upgrade, but it was still only a bourgeois existence. Even in Canada, her house was in a resolutely middle class area. Although she got glimpses of a grander way of life, it was only when she married Harry that she actually transited from middle to upper class.
Changing both class and country at the same time is not an easy or straightforward proposition. Inevitably, there has to be a period of adjustment if you are going to make the transition successfully. What worked well in one environment might not in another. In America, where class and classiness have distinctly different connotations from Britain, Meghan’s demeanour came across as ‘classy’. This was why she had been given the role of Rachel Zane in Suits and why she had acquired the followers she did with The Tig, where she was able to present herself as an arbiter of style, taste, and discernment, and be accepted as such by her two million followers. In Britain, however, where ‘classiness’ is something else entirely, Meghan’s heightened appreciation of all things material or superior affected the way people reacted to her. They recoiled from her overt materialism and a demeanour which she might have thought was classy but which they regarded as pretentious. The lashings of charm which she deployed to convince people that she was a nice, regular person were also counterproductive; often her manner struck recipients as superficial over-eagerness to please. This got people’s backs up the way it did the critics of Elephants Without Borders, whose dismissal of her performance had one common thread: insincerity.
For all the doubts about her motives, Meghan is proudly and openly arriviste. Initially, this lack of heritage was viewed by the British as a plus, the way it had been with Catherine Middleton and Sophie Rhys Jones. Britons like ordinary people making the grade to greatness as long as they don’t
