Meghan markle

Thursday

Matthew Parris

The royals don’t exist, so they have my full support

Prince Harry does not exist and soon Meghan Markle will cease to exist too. None of the royal family exist. This truth, which has come to me rather late in life, has taught me how to stop worrying and love the monarchy. Despite my boyhood admiration for King Sobhuza II of Swaziland, I was always a bit of a republican. Not a tumbrils and guillotine kind, nor even, really, a campaigner for abolition, because as the decades have rolled it has become impossible not to feel respect for the Queen’s hard work; and besides, as the Australians have learned, there’s not a lot of point in removing the monarchy unless

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator's notes | 30 November 2017

We are congratulating ourselves and the royal family on overcoming prejudice by welcoming Meghan Markle’s engagement to Prince Harry. But in fact this welcome is cost-free: Ms Markle’s combination of Hollywood, mixed ethnicity, divorced parents, being divorced herself and being older than her fiancé ticks almost every modern box. It was harder, surely, for Kate Middleton. She was simply middle-class, Home Counties, white, and with no marital past — all media negatives. Her mother was a former flight assistant. People made snobby jokes about ‘cabin doors to manual’. There was nothing ‘edgy’ about Kate that could be romanticised. Luckily, she is also beautiful, sensible and cheerful, and politely concealed her successful

Robert Hardman

Diary - 30 November 2017

Meghan Markle certainly knows how to impress the in-laws. She has announced that she and Prince Harry are going to devote much of their married life to the Commonwealth. And we all know how much the Commonwealth means to the Head of the Commonwealth. In this week’s interview to mark their engagement, the future princess mentioned it twice as she spoke of her ‘passion’ for all the ‘young people running around the Commonwealth’. The Prince himself is already plugged in to umpteen charities on this patch, not least the excellent Queen’s Young Leaders programme. It is all music to the ears of a monarch who, as a young princess herself,

The Spectator

Barometer | 30 November 2017

Pit stopped After complaints from the Durham Miners’ Association, a rugby club at Durham University cancelled a pub crawl in which members were to dress as coal miners or ministers from Mrs Thatcher’s government. — Attitudes towards the 1984-85 miners’ strike were not always so censorious. In 2001, the conceptual artist Jeremy Deller staged a re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave, involving 800 re-enactment enthusiasts as well as 200 miners who had been there on the day. Staged at Orgreave itself, it was filmed and shown on Channel 4 with few complaints. Ups and downs Which industries saw the biggest rises and falls in real-terms productivity (i.e., greater than inflation)

Ed West

The marriage gap

Whatever their views about the monarchy, most people will warm to the news of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s engagement. Sentimental as it sounds, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the last royal wedding and how happy I felt for Prince William and Kate Middleton, as she was then. It was one of those rare events when you felt lucky to live in a good country with a bright future. A marriage is, after all, the ultimate statement of confidence in the future — and God knows, we could all do with that right now. Marriage is not easy and never has been, as Harry will know from

Melanie McDonagh

The trouble with Miss Markle

‘The thing is,’ said my friend, after the broadcast of the engagement interview with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, ‘you can’t imagine actually bowing or curtseying to her, can you?’ That is pretty well the crux of the engagement issue: can you see yourself doing either in the case of the newest prospective member of the Windsor family? Personally, I would curtsey to the Queen and I have done to Prince Philip; I would draw the line at Camilla, and I wouldn’t dream of curtseying to Meghan. My friend was in fact A.N. Wilson, biographer of,  inter alia, Queen Victoria. It was a blessed relief to talk to someone who wasn’t

Tuesday

Peter Tatchell

The royal family isn't racist – but the monarchy is

Contrary to what the liberal gushing might suggest, Meghan Markle marrying Prince Harry and joining the royal family is a very modest step forward for racial equality. The much bigger issue is that for the foreseeable future the UK’s head of state can never be black. The hereditary system excludes by default the possibility that the symbol of the nation could be non-white. This is a form of institutional racism. No one is suggesting that the royal family are racist, but the current method of appointing the head of state is racist by default. Although it was not devised with racist intent, it reflects an institutional racism, where the system of appointment

Monday

Camilla Swift

'Princess Meghan' has arrived to cheer up Britain

So, Princess Meghan it will be. No, I know that won’t be her name officially. But we all know that whatever Meghan Markle’s official title ends up being (right now, it seems most like she’ll become the Duchess of Sussex), ‘Princess Meghan’ will be her unofficial title in the press. The news of Harry and Meghan’s engagement comes as little surprise – after all, the tabloids have been telling us for weeks that the announcement might be on the cards. But you know, after a fairly depressing Budget, it’s nice to have a good news story. We might even get another Bank Holiday (sorry, what was that you said about

Steerpike

The politics of Meghan Markle

After Kensington Palace announced Prince Harry’s engagement to Meghan Markle, the rumour mill has gone into overdrive into what the Suits actress will mean for the monarchy – with some even suggesting the union is good news for the special relationship. Although the royal family is meant to stay strictly neutral with respect to political matters, Markle’s time as a public figure in the acting world means that several of her political views are already known.  First off, Markle is a Cameroon – previously praising David Cameron on social media for being a ‘class act’: https://twitter.com/meghanmarkle/status/753256000497520641 As for that special relationship, it’s unlikely she’ll wish to extend an invite to

Melanie McDonagh

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle: the union of royalty and showbiz

It may be churlish to be unkind about a young couple who have just announced their engagement but needs must. Someone has to say it, though let me say at the outset that the engagement has made lots of people very happy. Not least journalists. Prince Harry is fifth in line to the throne so constitutionally it doesn’t matter a hoot who he marries because neither he nor his children are going to become monarch, but, for what it’s worth, Meghan Markle is unsuitable as his wife for the same reason that Wallis Simpson was unsuitable: she’s divorced and Harry’s grandmother is supreme governor of the CofE. The last person

Linden Kemkaran

A mixed-race princess is just what the Royal family needs

We’ve had a brown president in the White House and today, that palest of institutions, the Royal family, is formally admitting a mixed-race girl into its bosom. Wow, just wow. I do wonder, speaking as a mixed-race girl myself, does this acceptance of colour into one of the world’s oldest monarchies mean that brown people have finally been acknowledged as being an integral part of the fabric of modern society? It’s funny growing up as neither one thing nor the other, embracing two cultures, two colours and many different blood lines.  My memories of being the only little brown kid in a very white part of Kent are not altogether

Freddy Gray

Made in Windsor: How the young royals became Britain’s biggest reality show

It’s a summer of change for the House of Windsor — out with the old, in with the young. The Duke of Edinburgh has just announced that he is standing down. The Queen carries on, but she’s 91, and now the younger members of the royal family are expected to step up. For an institution that supposedly represents stability, a period of transition inevitably brings dangers. How will Princes William and Harry and the photogenic Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge cope? The early signs are not altogether promising. Nobody these days expects the royal family to heed Walter Bagehot’s famous warning that they should not ‘let in daylight upon magic’; that

Brendan O’Neill

Why republicans should cheer the engagement of Harry and Meghan

The engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is great news. Great news for them, of course, because they are clearly in love, and who doesn’t like to see a handsome young-ish couple in love? And it’s great news for republicans like me, too, because it confirms the monarchy has now completed its transformation from a mystical, godly outfit into a celebrity enterprise, which I’m convinced will prove to be the final nail, or one of the last nails, in the coffin of this archaic institution. Harry and Meghan, we salute you! (Metaphorically, not literally. Republicans don’t do that.) In the coming days, the press will likely be packed with

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 10 November 2016

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said she still expected to start talks on leaving the EU as planned by the end of March, despite a High Court judgment that Parliament must decide on the invoking of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty that would set Brexit in train. Opinion was divided over whether the High Court had required an Act of Parliament or a vote on a resolution. The government appealed to the Supreme Court, which is to hear the case from 5 December. The judgment set off a confused game of hunt the issue. One issue was whether the press is allowed to be rude about judges. The Daily