Malice in wonderland: How tabloids gave duchess Meghan the royal blues

During the past decade (in pre-pandemic years), “gender-reveal parties” became A Thing. A precursor to the baby shower, a gender-reveal party is where the more advantaged among pregnant parents host a lavish soirée at which the colour of the balloons, the party favours and the cake icing combine to announce the sex of the anticipated infant.

If you are British royalty, the only way to top such flamboyant affairs is to announce the gender of your baby on a major television channel, to none less than Queen Oprah Herself.

In the aftermath of what many media outlets are calling “the bombshell interview”, Twitter was chock-full of tearful memes, mostly posted by women who were overcome with emotion when a choked-up Prince Harry said on CBS: “It’s a girl.”

Of course, this is not the only thing people talked about after That Interview. Memes flew thick and fast. In one, a shadowy figure in a feathered hat (Camilla? The queen?) shoots a poisoned arrow through a blowpipe into Meghan’s neck just as the Duchess of Sussex is about to reveal which member of the royal family questioned the potential darkness of her unborn son’s skin.

While there was an outpouring of sympathy on social media platforms for Meghan after she spoke openly about the depression and suicidal thoughts caused by the way the British press and some members of the royal household had treated her, such compassion was decidedly lacking in the press across the pond.

The Sun wrote that Harry and Meghan had “burnt their bridges” and might never be able to return to Britain after the “bombshell Oprah interview”. The Daily Express called them “self-serving”, and the Mail, after initially dismissing the interview as “a sideshow”, published a deluge of articles detailing Meghan’s “claims” — a word which they did not put in inverted commas but which were clearly meant to be there, given the wording and the full-page picture they chose: a giant close-up of Meghan looking like a tearful little girl under the banner headline MEGHAN ACCUSES PALACE OF RACISM.

There was not much love lost between the tabloids and the Sussexes to start with. Last month, Meghan won a legal battle against Mail owners Associated Newspapers, which the courts declared had breached copyright by publishing a private letter sent by Meghan to her father, Thomas Markle. In the same week Prince Harry gave an interview to talk-show host James Corden in which he blamed the anti-Meghan media campaign for his decision to step away from the royal family. “We all know what the British press can be like, and it was destroying my mental health,” he said.

Following the Oprah interview, Associated Newspapers has complained to ViacomCBS that some of the newspaper headlines shown on air to demonstrate bigotry were “doctored” and demanded that the montage be removed before rebroadcast of the interview.

Published by deadline.com yesterday, the letter from Associated Newspapers’ group legal director Elizabeth Hartley said: “Many of the headlines have been either taken out of context or deliberately edited and displayed as supporting evidence for the programme’s claim that the Duchess of Sussex was subjected to racist coverage by the British press. This editing was not made apparent to viewers and, as a result, this section of the programme is both seriously inaccurate and misleading.”

The example said by the group to be most “egregious” was a partial headline reading “Meghan’s seed will taint our Royal Family”. The company said this was an edited version of the original headline, which was “ ‘Meghan’s seed will taint our Royal Family’: UKIP chief’s glamour model lover, 25, is suspended from the party over racist texts about Prince Harry’s wife-to-be”.

Their argument is that quoting a racist statement made by someone else does not make the paper racist. One could argue back that playing to the sentiments of many of their readers was exactly the intention, but that’s a matter for the lawyers to decide.

It might have been the tabloids that made the Sussexes lives a misery, but the personal betrayals and lack of family support were what drew most outrage from Oprah and her followers. As many a commentator has pointed out, revelations of racism in Britain’s relic of imperialism are a bit like announcing that the sun rises in the east, but just because we are not surprised does not mean we should not be shocked or sympathetic.

Speaking to Oprah about the fraught relationship between the Windsors and the press, Harry said there was an “invisible contract” between his family and the tabloids, and that his family were “afraid” of the press. Meghan added: “There’s a reason that these tabloids have holiday parties at the Palace. They’re hosted by the Palace, the tabloids are. You know, there is a construct that’s at play there.”

That construct, as anyone who has watched The Crown knows, offers a certain amount of curated access to the family, in return for which there is supposed to be some degree of privacy and respect for what happens behind closed doors. This unspoken agreement is not always honoured. The Crown, even though its producers state loudly, frequently and adamantly that all conversations and some events are fictionalised, is a case in point. The finely crafted series is undoubtedly part of the reason for ramped-up interest in the royals.

Harry’s complaint that his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, did not ask the press to cease and desist in their racist taunts is perhaps disingenuous. Some have suggested that it shows how little power the queen really has and demonstrates that the monarchy is merely a showpiece and a figurehead, but this is not strictly true.

While Britain is ostensibly a parliamentary democracy, unlike SA and most other Western democracies it does not have a codified constitution or a bill of rights. Parliament enacts laws based on statutes and precedents, but every law has to receive royal assent from the queen, who has signed thousands upon thousands of bills in her 69-year reign. She could theoretically decline now and then, but she’d be the first monarch to do so since 1708, when Queen Anne refused to sign a bill allowing for the Scottish militia to be armed, just in case the Scots sided with the French in their war with England.

The fact that both Queen Anne and Queen Elizabeth have been played on screen by the actress Olivia Colman is not the only irony in that bit of historical trivia. For Queen Elizabeth to call a halt to racism in the press, the British precedent of a free and unfettered media might need to be altered. This would most likely require a bill of rights, which would require a constitution, which would in effect require the dissolution of the monarchy.

In a hypothetical world, Meghan and Harry may not only have contributed to increased dislike of the monarchy, their legal battles with the press might even speed up the fall of the House of Windsor.

Which brings us to Brexit, the backdrop against which the Sussex saga has played out.

Brexit has set the UK’s residents against each other and created a climate of xenophobia, hatred and suspicion in which (at least among parochial right-wingers) anyone who looks different or speaks differently is considered dodgy and worthy of deportation. No wonder the populist tabloids didn’t take to Meghan.

British political analyst Anthony Barnett, in an interview with Isaac Chotiner published by the New Yorker on Thursday, said the Oprah interview and the scandal surrounding it could be seen as “a human allegory for Brexit”.

Likening Brexit to a supernova, Barnett said: “Great Britain emitted this great pulse of angry democratic energy. And it is now collapsing into a black hole, with all kinds of strange gravitational pulls … A million people have left the United Kingdom over the past year or so. Meghan and Harry are part of that million people, and they represent - as they argued in the interview - a form of multiracial modernisation that the monarchy turned down.”

There’s more to the tabloids’ malice than Meghan’s being a foreigner of mixed race, however. There’s also the fact that she is a woman

There’s more to the tabloids’ malice than Meghan’s being a foreigner of mixed race, however. There’s also the fact that she is a woman. Most of the memes and much of the toxic text have mocked her for “wearing the pants” or compared her to Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee for whom King Edward VIII abdicated. Some of this disdain was subtle, much was blatantly and horribly sexist.

The Sussexes’ decision to leave the UK was dubbed “Megxit” by the press, partly because it made a handy rhyme with Brexit, but partly because they blamed her, the femme fatale, for stealing their ginger prince. The term now peppering the British press is “Megxile” referring to the Sussexes’ choice to live away from Harry’s homeland.

One can’t help but wonder if the same vitriol would have been directed at an American man who married a British princess and took her to live in the US. Even if this did happen — and if a lily-white royal daughter married a man of mixed race it well might — it probably wouldn’t have plumbed the depths that Meghate has.

There’s a particular kind of loathing reserved for women who do not know their place as mere decorative objects and breeding machines. There is also much contempt for women’s “weakness”. Were a man to confess that he had become depressed and suicidal, would the papers mockingly spray his unhappiness all over their front pages, and would a male TV host refuse to believe him? I somehow doubt it.

The fallout will undoubtedly continue. The Oprah Bombshell will probably not dislodge the British monarchy. Nor will it make the gutter press any kinder — in fact it might do the opposite. So, was there any point to their doing it? Absolutely. What the ineffable Oprah showed is that a little humanity goes a long way. Harry and Meghan are people, after all. And they are expecting a girl. Let’s hope the establishment treats her with more kindness than it has her parents.