Why are so many people – so many of the middle-aged men of the British media specifically – obsessed with Meghan Markle?
She is married into a family that enjoys a lot of privilege, but little real power. She is an actor of moderate success, a self-proclaimed activist, a would-be influencer with a Netflix deal, a proponent of women’s rights and someone who didn’t invite Piers Morgan to her wedding. She is hardly a significant threat to global democracy.
And yet more time was spent in recent days psychoanalysing her state of mind than Vladimir Putin’s. Her outfit for the queen’s funeral was scrutinised, literally, down to the soles of her shoes. As she curtsied, “eagle-eyed fans noticed an unusual symbol” on them, the Mirror solemnly reported. (That’ll be a logo, chaps.)
The response to Markle has reached alarming heights of toxicity in recent weeks. With the queen no longer around to act as a bulwark, there is nothing to hold the vitriolic mob back
On GB News, New Zealand journalist Dan Wootton and royal biographer Tom Bower – who referred to her during the jubilee celebrations as a “brazen hussy” because she rolled down a window and smiled – took the analysis to the level of a gossip over the biscuits at a parish committee meeting. Bower, who has spent the past six months filling newspapers with insights from his unique vantage point as a 75-year-old man who has never met her, declared that she was faking her tears. “The only person at the moment that I think Meghan is crying for is herself.”
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Morgan spends so much time thinking about her, you’d wonder how he can hold down a job. Luckily, he has managed to make being enraged at Markle an almost full-time occupation. Ben Goldsmith, the brother of UK government minister Zac, declared her “a manipulative bully” on Twitter, claiming that she is the personification of “the arrival of America’s deranged culture wars in Britain”. But what’s actually more deranged – the American culture wars or the middle-aged men parsing her every facial expression in the manner of feverish teenage fans stalking Harry Styles’s Instagram?
You could argue that it’s not personal; this is just how it has always been. The British royal family long ago entered into a Faustian pact with the tabloid press, the terms of which seemed to dictate that the woman in-laws were fair game as long as the men were left alone.
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Catherine, Princess of Wales, can do little wrong now, but she was once routinely mocked as “Waity Katie” Middleton. Before her was Sarah Ferguson – who seems to have decided that if she was going to be reviled no matter what she did, she might as well have some fun. She was papped in the south of France having her toes sucked by her financial adviser, and later caught in an undercover sting in which she offered access to her ex-husband Prince Andrew for cash.
But Fergie didn’t even come close to being the most hated woman in “the firm”. For years, that title was indisputably Camilla’s. It is easy to forget now that she has been reborn as the elegant and yet down-to-earth Queen Consort, but she was once decried – as Sean O’Grady wrote in the Independent recently – as a “gin-soaked, hatchet-faced, horse-faced, loose but frumpy woman with a Rothmans fag never far from her grasp”.
And then of course there was Diana, memorably described by her brother at her funeral as “the most hunted person of the modern age”.
Even by these standards, the response to Markle has reached alarming heights of toxicity in recent weeks. With the queen no longer around to act as a bulwark, there is nothing to hold the vitriolic mob back.
As more commonwealth countries question their ties with Britain, cue more and increasingly shrill, insistences that she wasn’t disliked because of her race, she was disliked for who she is
You could make the case that what we’re seeing is simply that Faustian pact at work again. Keeping everyone focused on whether Meghan broke protocol by taking Harry’s hand or flashing an inch of bare arm is a useful distraction. Note how little attention was paid to Charles’s first two acts as king: to fire most of his staff and give unctuous toad Prince Andrew a job.
But the rage directed at Markle feels more personal than merely a contrived distraction. It’s more than the usual tabloid misogyny either. Her accusations of racism appear to strike at some deep existential dread in the psyche of a certain type of British traditionalist, especially now as a number of commonwealth countries are publicly reassessing their relationship with the crown. Jamaica and Belize have already signalled their intention to follow Barbados and become a republic. Gaston Browne, the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, didn’t even wait for the queen’s funeral to be over to announce that he plans to hold a referendum on the issue. Even Jacinda Ardern is musing aloud that New Zealand will eventually be a republic.
Here is the real reason why those conservative voices in the British media are so trigged by Markle. As more commonwealth countries question their ties with Britain, cue more and increasingly shrill, insistences that she wasn’t disliked because of her race, she was disliked for who she is. “British people didn’t hate her because she wasn’t white, or because she had a career, or any of the other reasons suggested by the Sussexes’ PR. There was no big anti-Meghan conspiracy that kicked into gear as soon as she stepped on British soil. The public there simply saw through her,” Kara Kennedy in the Spectator insisted this week.
In truth, they’re horrified by what she represents – multiculturalism, youth, feminism, the monarchy’s diminished standing and Britain’s waning influence in the world. She isn’t the personification of America’s culture wars so much as a living reminder of Britain’s refusal to engage with its colonial past, and its increasingly uncertain future.