We don't need to talk about Meghan Markle
I’d like to lay something out on the table. I'm not and never have been a royalist and I don’t give a flying fuck about Meghan Markle. Her life has absolutely no impact on mine. It's nice that she does stuff for charity and that but I am, without an absolute shred of doubt, ambivalent to her existence. And yet here I am writing about her.
To be fair, she is a conduit to write about something else. How our billionaire owned non dom tax avoiding right wing press convince people what, and who, they should like, what, and who they should dislike and what we should do about people like me – who push back at this bullshit. We live in a world where the media's reach seems limitless, and in it Meghan Markle's name has become synonymous with controversy. She is subject to constant public scrutiny, from every move she makes to every word she speaks. She just a celebrity whose personal journey has been thrust into the public eye, but the obsessive media coverage surrounding her is a reflection of something far more insidious: the way the media manipulates us and how the monarchy's influence continues to shape public discourse.
Meghan Markle entered the public consciousness when she married Prince Harry, brother of the future King and son of a woman who the Daily Telegraph never shuts the fuck up about. It's telling that we still call her Markle when her surname is Sussex, well not really, it's Windsor, well not really it's actually Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg-Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Spencer but fairly sure that would make a proper mess of her Clevr Blends business card. They are the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, because another wierd trait of our Royal family is that they insist on naming themselves after pubs. Since then, her life has been subject to an unrelenting media frenzy. This was never just about a woman marrying into one of the world’s most prominent families, it became a fucking circus show. And whether one supports or despises her, or like me, doesn’t give a shit either way, the focus on her life only reflects the deepening influence of the monarchy and how it plays a key role in the media's ability to dictate societal narratives.
For a Royal, she has had to field a lot of shit from the press, often disproportionately so. A quick glance at the tabloids or social media reveals a toxic cocktail of racism, misogyny, and classism directed at her. But why does this happen? Like everything else in the British establishment, you get the answer by following the money. In the British press hatred, outrage, and scandal sell. The media thrives on conflict, and Meghan Markle, as the ‘outsider’ in the royal family, has been used as the perfect figure to stoke these fires. Lord Rothermere, founder of the Daily Mail and erstwhile mate of Oswald and Adolf once said “no one is interested is if a dog bites a man, but ah … if a man bites a dog”. And this absolutely sums up the tepid bucket of lumpy arse gravy that is our press.
Fleet Street has a bit of a problem with Meghan. On one hand they love the Royal Family with a vomit inducing level of cap-doffing. On the other hand, they are not that keen on immigrants and brown people. Her very existence within the royal family challenges deeply ingrained British class structures and the hierarchical nature of the monarchy. Meghan, a mixed-race woman with a career outside of the traditional royal mould, symbolises a break from the stiff, archaic traditions that many of us are conditioned to revere. As such, the media has weaponised her identity, creating a narrative that paints her as both a victim of royal racism and a betrayer of royal duty. This multi levelled assessment of image plays into the media’s need to present her as both a hero and a villain, ultimately fuelling a culture of divisiveness and hate. The one thing they don’t big up is that she is a welcome bit of chlorine in the gene pool in a demographic that’s famous for marrying its cousins. Thinking about it, I suppose that explains why the King has a house in Norfolk.
And while the press are happy to fill up column inches about her. We're not talking about the bigger issues. And this is the real issue. The monarchy is a symbol of class privilege, entrenching inequality in a society that increasingly values wealth over merit. Yet, instead of questioning the monarchy’s place in modern Britain, we’re asked to focus on Meghan's personal choices and whether she fits within the confines of royal tradition. This is the media’s sleight of hand: by getting us to care about individual figures, it distracts us from the systemic problems at the heart of our society.
If we stop and think critically, it becomes clear that this is literally the Emperors new cloths. Meghan Markle, a woman with no political office or power over public policy, has no actual bearing on the lives of most of us. Her royal connections, charity work, and personal life are as distant from our daily realities as the monarchy itself. Her presence in the media isn’t about her; it’s about keeping us engaged in a never-ending psychodrama that serves the interests of those who hold power, whether that’s the royal family, the media moguls, the political elite or anyone else that benefits from the status quo.
However, the Monarchy is a different matter. We are led to think that the Monarchy has no powers anymore and that the King is merely a figurehead. The Monarchy is far from benign. If it was just a rubber stamp for Government then why is it that the Prime Minister and the King have weekly meetings? The King was known for interfereing in taxation laws that affected this assets and private wealth in Cornwall as well as interfereing with egal process in the black spider letters. In 1975, years after the death penalty was abolished here, old Queenie signed a death warrant for the activist Michael X in Trinidad. Not the Government, not a Home Office Minister, but little old Queenie, and he wasn't the only one. Then there's democratic access to Government. We have a number of Sinn Fein MP’s elected to Parliament who don’t take their seats. Not as you’d think, because they are republicans and connected to the IRA, but because in order to take your seat in our Parliament you have to swear an oath to the Crown. Something they clearly aren't prepared to do. In 1921, the Irish literally had a civil war over this. In Australia, there has been controversy because First Nation MPs have an issue with this as well. Ah but they bring lots of money in to the country. This always get me - apart from the fact that you shouldn't build a Contitutional monarchy and a Governmental system around it on the jam tomorrow of tourism, it's also bollocks - it's the buildings that bring money in, and Versailles, in France, a place that famously doesn't have a monarchy, makes more money per year through tourism than Windsor Castle.
Instead of focusing on the royal soap opera, let’s turn our attention to the real challenges we face, economic injustice, racism, and the need for true political reform. Ol’ sausage fingers, Brand Windsor and the media that defends it, will continue to use figures like Meghan Markle to distract us. But it’s up to us to look beyond the spectacle and start questioning the system designed to subjugate us and keep us in the dark.
It is unlikely that Maghan will ever be Queen. Harry would have to step over two many bodies for that to happen, and if my some twist of fate she did, she would be a consort with no real power. Meghan is an absolute irrelevance designed to divide us when what we really need to talk about is the dysfunctional shitshow that is the monarchy. It is symptomatic of every bad law, judgement injustice and inequality in this country, everything that is done in the name of the King.
This is why the establishment, its vassals in the media and the fuckers pulling the strings in the background will use Meghan Markle and every other weapon at their disposal to ensure we don’t talk about it. They know how fragile our institutions are and if the monarchy goes, they will collapse like a house of cards.
And it is well overdue.
