This is an opinion piece by award winning Welsh columnist, Matthew Paul. Matthew is the Welsh Media Awards Columnist of the Year 2019
As Piers Morgan has discovered to his cost (or more likely to the cost of GMB’s ratings), there are some things in life you’re just not allowed to doubt.
This used to be the case with people claiming they had been orgiastically raped by Prime Ministers and Field Marshals, but police practice regarding such matters has changed and it is now OK for officers to toy with the possibility that anyone who says Prime Ministers and Field Marshals raped them at a Satanic orgy may be a looney, or just a liar.
If, however, someone says that the Royal Family made them feel very unhappy, or that senior Royals are callous racists who establish suitability for titles by reference to the Dulux colour chart, it is wicked and wrong not to take this at face value.
In Meghan and Harry’s chuck-bucket interview broadcast on Monday night, Oprah Winfrey–her hair and makeup peculiarly arranged to look like a photographic negative of the Cowardly Lion– trotted out a series of bombshell revelations calculated to inflict the greatest possible damage on the Royal Family, while generating the greatest possible exposure for Haz and Megs.
Meghan’s account must be regarded as true because she said things we aren’t allowed to disbelieve. You can’t, for example, doubt that the press are racist because they treated Meghan exactly as they treated, um, Diana. You can’t wonder whether Meghan was at any point actually suicidal, or whether her ego, self-pity, desire for revenge or the prospect of a ratings bump for the mental health series for Apple that she carefully reminded Oprah she was working on made her egg things up a bit. In the world of the woke, anyone presenting themselves as a victim is impervious to scrutiny or challenge.
Certainly, she got no scrutiny off Oprah, whose job as interviewer was to feed Meghan lines with which she immediately agreed, then to gasp like a pantomime dame at Meghan’s replies. “Wha-aaaat?” Oprah choked, when Meghan said there had been ‘conversations’ and ‘concerns’ about Archie’s conjectured appearance.
Not everyone would immediately see what is wrong with being curious as to the appearance of your grandchildren, but when Oprah suggested that skin tone might be why Archie wasn’t already a prince, Meghan didn’t demur. “If that’s the assumption you’re making, I think that feels like a pretty safe one.”
It’s not.
The reason Archie isn’t a prince is because he wouldn’t be one anyway until Charles becomes King.
The convention that makes male-line grandchildren of the Sovereign princes is fairly recent, dating from Britain’s Imperial pomp in 1917 when there was a bit more for princes to do. Prince Charles has said many times that he wants to see a slimmed-down Royal family more suited to 21 st Century duties, not some Ruritanian foreign outfit with princes scuttling about everywhere.
Meghan, anyway, used to tell us that she and Harry just wanted the simple life for their son.
Archie –he of the Chick Inn– is already allowed by convention to be known as the Earl of Dumbarton. He isn’t, because his parents preferred him to be ‘just Archie’.
It might anyway be inconvenient for them to have to rename their charity ‘Dumbartonwell’.
This is fine. And if the title is going spare, many of us –particularly those of us who are, being honest with ourselves, snobs– would be perfectly happy to be styled Earl of Dumbarton.
We might even commit to visiting Dumbarton, and learning the names of some local landmarks.
After all, If you’re about to become Earl of Dumbarton, you would go out of your way to find out a bit about Dumbarton, wouldn’t you?
Not so the Duchess. Naturally, the moment she met Prince Harry they clicked instantly because “he and I were very aligned on our cause- driven work”.
Harry, it is true, had done a fair bit of cause-driven work; the cause usually being lobbing explosive ordnance at people he then referred to as ‘ragheads’.
Meghan too was profoundly cause-driven; the cause in this instance being making the wider world more aware of the existence of Meghan Markle.
But, causes aside, there Meghan’s curiosity ended. She certainly didn’t go out of her way to find out what being a working member of the Royal family really entailed, and was taken aback, at her first meeting with Her Majesty the Queen, when she was expected to perform a curtsey.
To suggest that what Meghan said about not assiduously researching the Royal family is a lie is pure speculation.
After all, Meghan, who was in a major American TV series, may well have been surprised that the Queen (who is, after all, only a sort of senior British civil servant) didn’t curtsey to her, or at least ask for an autograph.
It would also be pure speculation to doubt Meghan’s assertion that “when I joined that family, that was the last time, until we came here, that I saw my passport, my driver’s licence, my keys…I didn’t see any of that any more.”
Though she did travel abroad on holiday thirteen times during that period, and it’s a bit tricky to understand how she accomplished that without even seeing her passport.
If lackeys did lock away Meghan’s driving licence, it was perhaps for the best. Meghan’s licence was issued in California, and the Road Traffic Act 1988 provides that visitors to the UK and new residents may not use a foreign licence, “beyond the expiration of the period of one year”.
If the Duchess did try to drive with it, she might have been breaking the law.
There are no reports of Meghan ever passing a UK driving test, and if she didn’t, did she ever really intend to remain in Britain?
Anyone who doesn’t share ITV’s firm persuasion that everything Meghan says must automatically be regarded as true may also have difficulty squaring her account of being ‘married’ by the Archbishop of Canterbury (without special licence or witnesses) in her back yard three days before what was unequivocally only her second, not third, wedding. Or all the stuff about Meghan’s pre-wedding screaming match with Kate, concerning which the palace have issued a terse but classy reply: “Recollections vary”.
A magic mirror close to the Duchess of Cambridge has let it be known that it was Meghan who made Kate cry, that Kate took flowers round to make up, and Meghan slammed the door in Kate’s face. Recollections vary, but who are we, or Piers Morgan for that matter, to say Meghan is lying?
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