If Meghan Markle and Prince Harry harbour any doubts about their decision to hand their notice in to the deranged circus troupe that is the British royal family—they have made it quite clear they don’t, but let’s indulge in a thought experiment—the response to their brief trip home at the weekend will surely have assuaged them.
The couple returned to the UK for Queen Elizabeth’s platinum-jubilee celebrations, a frenzied double-bank-holiday festival involving smug pageantry and bottomless Pimm’s, furious speculation about who would be on the Buckingham Palace balcony for Trooping the Colour, and the alarming sight of the queen’s face projected on to Stonehenge.
In keeping with the posh person’s penchant for an unbearably cutesy nickname, the celebrations were alternatively referred to as platty jubes, or platinum jubbly in honour of the 10,000 pieces of specially commissioned memorabilia that someone forgot to run through a spellchecker.
People counted the baby’s teeth (eight!), wondered why she had no legs (which certainly is a tad suspicious), demanded her birth cert, and scrutinised the photo in an effort to prove she doesn’t exist
Platty jubes also coincided with the first birthday of Lilibet, the youngest child of Harry and Meghan. The couple stepped away from the formal celebrations to mark the occasion with a low-key garden party at Frogmore Cottage, their home in the grounds of Windor Castle. They released a photo of the cute one-year-old sitting on the lawn. The image was met with instant approval and, in entirely predictable quarters, barely concealed relief—because the portrait confirms what was already suspected.
Lilibet is indeed a pale-skinned redhead. “Daddy’s little cutie!” trumpeted the Daily Mail. “That red hair gene is strong ... love to see it,” said one commenter on Instagram. “Meghan was a mere vessel! Totally Harry,” went another. (Not to let Junior Cert science get in the way of a satisfying dose of unconscious bias, but the redhead gene is recessive, which means that it comes from both sides.)
This reaction should not be mistaken for innocent commentary on the child’s appearance—not in the context of Meghan’s claim that a senior royal once worried aloud about “how dark” the skin of Lilibet’s older brother, Archie, might be, or her account of being subjected to relentless racially motivated bullying by the media, to the point where she had thoughts of suicide.
Still, these were some of the saner reactions to the couple’s return to England. In the battier corners of the internet, Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor appears to have inspired a nascent birther movement. People counted the baby’s teeth (eight!), wondered why she apparently had no legs (admittedly, that is a tad suspicious), demanded her birth cert, and forensically examined the photo in an effort to prove that she doesn’t exist, or that she does exist but isn’t actually Meghan’s child, or that she is a hologram created by Bill Gates, or ... well, insert the crackpot theory of your choice. You might as well. Everybody else did.
No bank-holiday weekend would be complete without a bit of sporting action, and the couple’s return to Britain also gave the media a chance to launch a fresh round of their favourite game, Kate vs Meghan. This is exactly like Spider-Man vs Superman, Thanos vs Darkseid or Russia vs Nato, except there is only ever one winner. It is always Kate.
Why would Harry and Meghan choose to put their family through more curtain-twitching, tight-lipped vitriol and barely disguised racism—and all because they knew what they’d like to do with their own lives?
Every aspect of Meghan’s brief public appearance was subjected to tedious comparative analysis: the kind of vehicle she and Harry took to St Paul’s Cathedral (a car, which according to the London Times “gave them a greater status than some minor royals, including Mike and Zara Tindall, who arrived for the service in a bus”, but obviously a much lower status than Kate and William, who arrived in a royal procession); the row in which they were seated (second, meaning they had to squeeze past not just Beatrice and Eugenie, but—oh, the indignity—the princesses’ husbands too); what they wore (him: medals; her: Dior, the shameless try-hard), how frequently she smiled, or made outrageous demands on the poor ailing queen, or was rebuffed by the Cambridges, and so on.
“Meghan must have been furious when she heard that photographs of their Windsor meeting were forbidden. Banned from the balcony for Trooping the Colour, no shot of her with the Queen in St Paul’s and then the final blow was no shot of Lilibet with her great-grandmother. Finally, the Palace is playing a good hand,” came one fairly typical piece of analysis by Tom Bower, Prince Charles’s biographer and renowned expert in what Meghan and Harry must be feeling.
Having all but hunted them on to the tarmac and into their private plane—or the “Russian Oligarch-style private jet” as the Mail, naturally, couldn’t resist putting it—before the celebrations were even over, the UK media promptly turned their attention to the question of when they’ll be back for more.
“Never again” will be the answer if the Markle-Mountbatten-Windsors have any sense. The platinum-jubilee weekend inspired an orgy of Meghan-baiting. Why would Harry and Meghan choose to put themselves and their children through further rounds of this curtain-twitching, tight-lipped vitriol and what must sometimes seem like barely disguised racism—and all because they committed the apparently unspeakable crime of having had a few ideas about what they’d like to do with their own lives?
Prince Andrew—who was accused, by comparison, of the crime of sexually assaulting and battering a sex-trafficked teenager, although it’s not regarded as polite to mention that, nor the rumoured €14.3 million settlement he paid her, despite being practically almost fully positive he had never met her—escaped the weekend almost entirely unscrutinised, due to having had the foresight to contract Covid and stay well away. More importantly, perhaps, the unctuous toad also had the foresight to be the queen’s son rather than, say, a self-confident Californian divorcee, so there is that too.
Part of Queen Elizabeth’s personal brand is her reputation for being a steadying and cohesive force in British life at a time of deep division, a symbol of endurance and unity. Like the images of her projected on to Stonehenge, or the hologram paraded through the streets in a golden carriage, it’s perhaps best not to look too closely at what the royal family actually stands for in modern Britain.