However, the news that the royal couple will give up using their titles, repay the $3M cost to refurbish their Windsor home and stop receiving money from the state-funded sovereign grant was met with triumphalism by much of the British press. “Queen orders a hard Megxit,” read the Sunday Mirror’s front-page headline. “Harry and Meghan Out in the Cold,” said the Sunday People. The Sun went for “Payback Time”, while the Sunday Express had “Freedom … at a price.”
Camilla Long, of the Sunday Times, was among the most scathing, arguing that among the victims of the couple’s decision were people working in the Grenfell soup kitchen visited by Meghan this month:
“You know who the real victim in this whole Harry and Meghan thing is? It isn’t Harry or Meghan, however much these fey children tell us they’ve had their spirits ‘crushed’ by the sheer number of palaces and diamonds and footmen we’ve flung at them. It isn’t us, even though we’ve had the stupidity to pay this pair of oxygen thieves more than £60,000 a day, if you take into account the £32m wedding, the £2.4m cottage renovation, the security and fripperies and Meghan’s dresses, for the privilege of being patronised and dissed to our faces by them, since they married in May 2018. It’s the poor, sweet, benighted ladies of the Grenfell soup kitchen I feel sorry for, who have been repeatedly duped into smiling and nodding as the duchess sweeps in to pretend to cook rice on yet another of her many content-gathering missions.”This has been only the latest in a two-week barrage of harassment of Harry and (especially) Meghan. The leading hate-mongers have been the Daily Mail, which splashed no fewer than 14 nasty stories on its web front page when the story broke earlier this month. The same commentators who sneered at Meghan for being dazzled by royalty now condemn her for wanting to leave it-- chief among them the idiot twit Piers Morgan.
Morgan rolled out the moronic and snide tone for which he has become known regarding Meghan: “Who the fuck do they think they are?” he began and escalated from there. “Nobody tells the Queen what to do,” he huffed, only to later demand: “Get rid of these whining, ego-crazed, deluded leeches, Ma’am.” Of course, Morgan’s column made reference to the fleeting occasion he met Meghan for half a drink four years ago-- an encounter that in Morgan’s mind has achieved mythic proportions, only to become symbolic to him when afterwards she decided against continuing their friendship. “She’s an unsavory, manipulative, social-climbing piece of work,” Morgan later raged, displaying his usual capacity for self-awareness. This is the same guy who has written precisely two columns on Prince Andrew’s friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein-- but yet he has written dozens on Meghan – who committed the worse-than-pedophilia crime of not inviting Morgan to her wedding!
Since the very beginning of her relationship with Harry, the British press has applied a mean-spirited double standard to the coverage of Meghan vs. Kate Middleton-- for doing almost the same things. Underlying all of this rubbish is thinly-veiled racism which Meghan has endured at the hands of the British press from the very beginning, and it's been extremely hard to ignore.
As Zoe Williams of the Guardian has pointed out, it is dispiriting to watch journalists make excuses for this – it’s not because she’s mixed race, it’s because she’s American; it’s nothing to do with race, her celebrity from a previous life made her uppity. The difference between the treatment meted out to the two princesses, Kate and Meghan, especially while they were pregnant, is absolutely chilling. So much of the bizarre, contradictory criticism leveled at Meghan (why is she flaunting her bump; why hasn’t she been seen out and about; why is she keeping Harry away from his family?) distils into: why does she exist? What right has she to inhabit space? If you think seriously about the disconnect between the scorn poured upon her, and anything she’s actually said or done to warrant it, it’s quite a shaming picture of the vindictiveness of the British press towards ethnic minority women.
The racism underlying even the earliest headlines-- about her being “(almost) straight outta Compton” and having “exotic” DNA, has been impossible to ignore. Princess Michael of Kent wore an overtly racist brooch in the duchess’s company. A BBC host compared the couple’s newborn baby to a chimpanzee. Then there was the sublimely ludicrous suggestion that Meghan’s avocado consumption is responsible for mass murder, while her charity cookbook was portrayed as somehow helping terrorists. Those who claim frequent attacks against the duchess have nothing to do with her race have a hard time explaining these attempts to link her with particularly racialized forms of crime-- terrorism and gang activity.
It is completely understandable that Prince Harry fears that the British press have them under siege to a degree that threatens to do to them what it did to his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales. The collective turn against the Sussexes by much of the media since they made their announcement illustrates precisely where part of the problem lies. It does not help that Britain has just elected a government led by a journalist who fabricated stories and whose manifesto gives the press a free pass to continue the abuses.
It’s no wonder the couple want to leave and protect their son Archie from the bile to which they’ve been exposed. What puzzling is that the British press, having attacked the couple continuously, now reacts with shock at their move.
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