‘I have a lot to say’ claims Meghan Markle ‘until I don’t.’ But there’s no sign of such silence happening anytime soon, given the Duchess of Sussex’s latest sally in the pages of an American magazine. Whatever happened to all that privacy, eh? In a 6,400 word cover piece for The Cut, the Duchess certainly had plenty to say on everything from the British media and royal family to how little girls see her as a ‘princess’ and of course the similarities between her wedding and the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. Already the Mandela family have hit back, with the great man’s grandson declaring that ‘overcoming 60 years of apartheid’ cannot be equated with ‘marrying a white prince.’
It’s all done to promote Meghan’s 28-man, multimillion dollar Archewell podcast, released last week just a mere 600 days after being announced. And given the extent to which the Duchess spoke over her guest, Serena Williams, it’s a surprise she has anything left to say. But, this being Meghan, there’s always axes to grind and grievances to bemoan: often to the point of self-parody. Indeed, Mr S had to check the byline several times to make sure Craig Brown hadn’t gone transatlantic. Below are six of the worst moments from the Duchess of Sussex’s latest musings, ahead of her return to Britain from Montecito, California next week…
The royals
The most important thing to remember about Meghan is that she is definitely, absolutely not vindictive. You got that? Sounding like a menacing Mafia don, she remarks to her interviewer Allison Davis that ‘it takes a lot of effort to forgive. I’ve really made an active effort, especially knowing that I can say anything’. According to Davis her voice was ‘full of meaning’ as she said this: even Don Corleone didn’t have Oprah Winfrey on speed dial.
Meghan then told Davis: ‘I have a lot to say until I don’t. Do you like that? Sometimes, as they say, the silent part is still part of the song.’ Steerpike’s dictionary defines silent as ‘not speaking; not uttering or making or accompanied by any sound’. Two years after ‘Megxit’, her media coverage has been anything but.
The fans
The second most important thing to remember about Meghan is that she is definitely, absolutely not anything other than selfless. Even though she and Harry have stepped back from their royal duties, Meghan is apparently very aware that people see her as a princess. ‘It’s important to be thoughtful about it because, even with the Oprah interview, I was conscious of the fact that there are little girls that I meet and they’re just like “Oh my God, it’s a real-life princess”.’ Some day, maybe they too will have the chance to date Ashley Cole.
The hubbie
For all her swipes at the Firm, its perhaps her fellow self-exiled member and darling husband who comes out worst. He emerges, midway through the interview, to greet the latest journalist summoned to tell ‘our love story’ the piece that they ‘haven’t been able to share, that people haven’t been able to see’: other than the royal wedding in front of 30 million people. In his absence, the Duchess refers to Hazza in similes that are gluttonous and baffling in equal measure. She tells her guest that ‘salt and pepper are always passed together. “She said, ‘You never move one without the other.’ That’s me and Harry. We’re like salt and pepper. We always move together.”’
The Duchess also depicts her husband as a banal simp, claiming that ‘one of the first things my husband saw when we walked around the house was those two palm trees,” she coos. “See how they’re connected at the bottom? He goes, ‘My love, it’s us.’ ’ Mills and Boon could only dream of such evocative prose. Love story? More like a horror show.
The press
For all her talk of forgiveness, there’s one group for whom Meghan reserves her purest bile: the dastardly British press. She claims that if the couple’s son Archie were in school in Britain, she would never be able to drop him off at school or pick him up without it being a royal photo call with, what Davis describes as, ‘a press pen of 40 people snapping pictures.’ As the Times royal correspondent Valentine Low pointed out: ‘that would come as news to her sister-in-law the Duchess of Cambridge, who has happily been doing the school run for years without any problem. There are rules that govern this sort of thing and they apply to Meghan’s children just as much as they do to Kate’s. The question is: does Meghan really not know that? Or has she forgotten?’
More serious still are Meghan’s insinuations about race. Talking about the British media pool system (designed to be mutually beneficial for both royals and journalists) she complains ‘there’s literally a structure by which if you want to release photos of your child, as a member of the family, you first have to give them to the royal rota. Why would I give the very people that are calling my children the n-word a photo of my child before I can share it with the people that love my child?’ Will Meghan name any members of the royal rota who apparently use such a slur with gay abandon? Mr S won’t hold his breath.
Such vehemence is all the more jarring, given Meghan insists elsewhere in the interview that, when referencing Netflix’s cancellation of her animated series, ‘I don’t read any press so I don’t know what’s confirmed’.
The interview itself
Davis is a fairly even-handed, even sympathetic, interviewer to Meghan. So it’s all the more baffling, then, that throughout their exchange, Davis suggests the Duchess made several desperate efforts to control what she was going to write. In one exchange, she dictated how Davis should interpret the noises she was making. Davis wrote: ‘At one point in our conversation, instead of answering a question, she will suggest how I might transcribe the noises she’s making, [saying] ‘She’s making these guttural sounds and I can’t quite articulate what it is she’s feeling in that moment because she has no word for it: she’s just moaning.’
Meghan went on to make a big show – ‘Do you want to know a secret?’ – of revealing her intention to go back on to Instagram; but when the interview was over, she had second thoughts, with Davis writing dryly ‘later Meghan would relay she was no longer sure she would actually return to Instagram.’ The interviewer walks away ‘wondering if somehow I’d missed everything she was trying to say’.
The future
Still, despite it all, at least poor old Meghan can take heart from the future and the couple’s $14.65 million new home. ‘The Montecito house is the kind of big that startles you into remembering that unimaginable wealth is actually someone’s daily reality.’ Meghan claims their new life is ‘a start-up, we were building a business’. If only every start-up had some good old blue-blooded royal cash to fund it.
Talk about making a Montecito out of a molehill…
