Good morning,
Royals
The Queen is so far silent, but the pressure on the Royal family is extreme to make a statement of some kind in the wake of a devastating interview aired last night in Britain by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. In that, Markle makes statements alleging an unidentified member of the Royal family asked Harry before the birth of their first child what color his skin would be, how brown would the baby be?
It of course smacks of racism and that has echoed loudly here and across the Atlantic where it has been condemned and drawn huge sympathy for the couple who have left royal duties and taken up residence in Los Angles. There was of course more, including Meghan saying she was so badly treated in Britain she thought of suicide but was refused medical help by the palace which sought to protect it’s reputation.
Meghan though is not Princess Diana, Harry’s mother who died in a Paris car crash and was celebrated as a victim of Britains nasty and unrelenting tabloid media although parallels are being drawn. Diana was young and innocent when she married Charles who later took up with another woman and eventually they would be divorced. But Meghan is an experienced actress, who knew well the media would portray the couples private life in photos and print, although the fairy tale wedding quickly turned to her estranged relationship with her father who didn’t attend the wedding and her family baggage was aired openly and widely. Later a letter from Meghan to her father would be printed in the press here, and the couple would take a tabloids to court. In the interview with Oprah, Meghan now says her father was working with the press and presumably selling his story the tabloids happily lapped up and salaciously published.
Harry said in the interview with Oprah, that the British are not bigoted, but charged the British press is bigoted which has upped the anti in the fight with the tabloids who have portrayed Meghan as “whining” and TV host Piers Morgan who was a newspaper editor previously said;
“Meghan and Harry's nauseating two-hour Oprah whine-athon was a disgraceful diatribe of cynical race-baiting propaganda designed to damage the Queen as her husband lies in hospital - and destroy the Monarchy”.
This morning he was accused by a guest of trashing Meghan, and Pierce Morgan walked off his own TV Set! Not the guest, but the host walked off, what a drama and it just keeps on coming.
It is clearly a sad moment for the dis-functional Royal family that usually ‘never complains and never explains’. I live in London, but as a Canadian reporter I have never indulged or been part of the tabloid frenzy to reveal lurid personal details of the personal lives of people I cover. I think it’s wrong, but understand there are millions of dollars at stake for newspapers who sell it to an audience willing to gobble it up.
But, I do take the point that Meghan and Harry keep complaining of wanting privacy, but have aired their Royal laundry and damaged the reputation of the Royals in ways that won’t easily heal, and while Meghan has no love of the Palace, one wonders, in fact many are asking aloud, why Harry didn’t do more to protect his family? Well the answer probably lies in the fact he watched his mother hounded to her death by the tabloids, and this was an attempt at payback.
On British TV this morning, Thomas Markle, Meghans father responds to his daughters charges, the first time he has spoken out since a wedding he never attended, and in fact he has never met his son in law, Prince Harry.
This sad story has shaken the Royal Family’s foundations and raised questions of values in British media and society like few others in recent memory, and the need for someone in the palace to speak out and try to dampen the spreading spreading flames that threaten to engulf the Royal’s is growing extreme.