Someone named John MacLeod is very upset. The Daily Mail published his lengthy rant this week, a rant which was partially a history lesson about how kings and queens always do what’s best for the survival of the monarchy. Since it’s the DM, you can imagine how this piece takes a quick turn to “this guy loathes the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.” Weeks after King Charles sent his PR guru to meet with the Sussexes’ representatives in London, John MacLeod insists: “King must put throne first and reject the return of Harry and Meghan.” Again, no one has suggested that “returning” is on the table. Harry and Meghan are going to live in their California mansion for a long time. But don’t let that get in the way of this guy’s rant.
In recent weeks there has been a curious groundswell of opinion, in many quarters, that the King must now make peace with his own second son and that the Prince and Princess of Wales should be big enough to lump it. By curious coincidence, snaps of initial peace-talks appeared on the same day that William, Kate and their delightful elder children appeared so enchantingly at Wimbledon. Soon after, and by no less curious coincidence, the Duke of Sussex reprised – and not for the first time – his late mother’s landmine walk in Angola, on the same day as the Queen Consort’s birthday.
Let me be honest. I often wish, rather desperately, that Harry and Meghan would finally catch a break. Hit some winning streak that would keep them in style and comfort and, above all, keep them quiet.
But I can think of no more crazed or appalling idea than that they should be welcomed home to this country, to the bosom of the Royal Family, to the renewed expense of the privy and indeed the public purse and – the very idea is fantastic and absurd – to renewed royal duties.
Our King is a singularly gracious, cultured, thoughtful man. In public life long before the most senior Members of Parliament. As we saw in Rome, Germany and elsewhere, he is a far more confident and accomplished speaker than his mother. His heartache amidst ongoing estrangement from his younger son – though it is not of Charles’s doing – is incalculable. Yet such a restoration of Sussex fortune – which, one suspects, in their current extremity really boils down to money – is unthinkable.
The damage they have wrought since Megxit is vast and irretrievable. Before all the world, they besmirched their kin, the Crown and indeed this country with baseless charges of the rankest racism – this from a man who once mocked an Army comrade and was even snapped, smugly, in Nazi uniform. This falsehood grievously damaged the Commonwealth, especially in the Caribbean. They slammed this land, the Palace and their family, courtesy of Oprah Winfrey, as Prince Philip lay dying.
That the Spotify deal has gone, that the Netflix package founders by the bows, that their docuseries (save for the first, the cruellest and most dishonest) have had but derisory ratings and that the sideline in jams, pink plonk and edible flowers is a Stateside joke scarcely surprises. They have no talent; no appetite for the hard yards of dedicated work. She can afford the finest clothes but, inexplicably, does not wear them well.
And none of this, on cool reflection, surprises: in eighteen months, Meghan proved incapable of even the less than exacting duties of a royal Duchess.
That is before we start on all the broken confidences, the ruthlessly discarded friends – from Piers Morgan to Jessica Mulroney – the traumatised former staff and, surely, the nadir: that twerking video. This apparently went down a storm in trailer-trash America but, this side of the pond, and as was once said of another, we saw only a woman unfit to be a royal Princess in this or any age. She is what she always was – a cool, beaming adventuress, her hand always in creepy Mission Control grip of his, as if they were welded by SuperGlue.
There can be no return to that role, or to this land. And, as his forebears grasped before, Charles III must let the King rule him in this – and not the man.
This guy is a true, unadulterated hater. He’s not hedging at all, he’s saying it with his whole chest: he hates Meghan, he hates “trailer trash America,” he hates Meghan’s clothes, he hates a pregnant woman dancing, he hates the work of the HALO Trust, he hates hates hates hates the very idea of a father and son being on speaking terms. Why is the Mail in the habit of publishing random people’s Burn Books? Anyway, like so many of the articles written in the past month, these ridiculously stupid people made the leap from “Harry might speak to his father” to “obviously, the Sussexes are BEGGING to come back so we can abuse them, but we hate them too much to want them back!!!” Delusional doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid and Meghan’s IG.
