If You Hate Meghan Markle, Clap Your Hands

The Last Days of a Tabloid Nation

I generally don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the Royal Family. And I wouldn’t normally write about the tribulations of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, were it not for the fact that so many people never seem to stop thinking about them and telling the world how much they loathe them.

I don’t share these sentiments. Revelation: I quite like Harry and Meghan. I support many of the causes that they support. I like the fact that Meghan once denounced sexism as a young girl and worked in a soup kitchen when she was thirteen years old. I like the fact that she uses her platform to call out racism and exclusion. I admire the couple for standing up to the British tabloids and the House of Windsor.

Harry once upon a time looked poised to become another upper class lout. He has shown courage, honesty and vulnerability in his attempt to remake himself, and his devotion to his wife is something to be respected, not condemned. That said, I had no particular interest in the Netflix documentary series. I eventually ended up watching a couple of episodes, because it was impossible to look at a newspaper or go on social media without coming across someone who had an opinion about it.

It also didn’t escape my attention that most of the show’s critics are people I have zero respect for, so if they hated the series then I thought it must have something to recommend it.

What I saw did gave me no reason to revisit my previous opinions. I saw two flawed but vulnerable people trying to process the often painful and frightening events they have been through together. They came over as warm and human. Compared with other things going on in the world, these experiences may not seem especially significant, but privileged people can experience their own traumas.

Their accounts of what happened were sometimes surprisingly moving, and also occasionally precious - as I would have expected from a woman who once compared her wedding to the end of apartheid. I don’t need slushy music playing over every scene in a documentary to make me feel something, thank you very much. And I can’t help but cringe when someone reads out a message from Beyoncé praising them for their courage and vulnerability.

Nevertheless it’s their story, and they have the right to tell it the way they see it. And whatever reservations I may have about the way that they have presented themselves, they are so much better and so much nicer than many of their critics.

They may be rich and privileged, but they are at least able to empathize with people who not rich. These are not people who, when a woman like Ngozi Fulani complains about racist treatment from a member of the Royal household, would turn on the complainant in order to reject her accusations. They aren’t people who would call striking ambulance drivers ‘shitbags’, or revel in the deportation of refugees to Rwanda.

These were my impressions and I don’t expect people to share them, or even pay attention to them, but those who want this country to have even half a chance of becoming a humane and decent society again, should most definitely pay attention to the hatred and outrage that has been directed against them.

The Outrage Machine

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the two of them really are the spoilt, narcissistic, duplicitous attention seekers their enemies say they are. Let’s say that Meghan is a ruthless and calculating ‘gold-digger’ who has manipulated a noble prince of the blood into betraying his own family.

Even if all this were true, why does it matter, or rather why does it matter so much? What explains the constant stream of vitriol, indignation, snarky insinuation, and open abuse about the couple, day after tedious day, week in, week out?

Why do some of the worst people and the worst institutions that British society has to offer talk obsessively about what Meghan and Harry have said, about their lifestyle and opinions, about the clothes they wear, or their body language, or their children? In the last week alone the Daily Mail had a front page story in which ‘Royal insiders’ claimed that ‘stress’ caused by Harry and Meghan’s quarrel with the Royal Family had a ‘detrimental effect’ on our elderly monarch.

This was the latest iteration of the ‘Meghan killed the Queen’ narrative, and as always, there is nothing to prove any such thing. Meanwhile, in the illustrious pages of theSun, boorish saloon bar rent-a-mouth Jeremy Clarkson could be found declaring that he hated Meghan on a ‘cellular level’, before comparing her to the serial killer Rose West, and announcing his wish to see her paraded naked up and down the country so that angry crowds could cover her in excrement.

Once upon a time, such middle-aged 4Chan/Incel-level outrage would have been confined to the Internet fringe, but here was the editor of the Sun happily waving it through.

Elsewhere a gaggle of performatively-outraged pundits on GB News were accusing Meghan of treachery and ‘treason’. Even Lord Frost came slouching out of his dank reactionary swamp to accuse Meghan and Harry of ‘smearing’ millions of Brexit voters in their series. Both the malevolent GB News presenter Dan Wootton and Piers Morgan - an attention-seeking bullying braggart who knows so much more about narcissism than Harry or Meghan could ever teach him - have invited the kickboxer-turned-’influencer’ on their shows to discuss his ‘views’ about Markle.

Morgan and Wootton are seassoned Meghan-stalkers, who you can only imagine must be sticking pins into Meghan dolls at night in their bedrooms or possible doing something else with them. But Tate is a man who has said that rape victims ‘bear responsibility’ for their attacks, who was once ejected from Big Brother after a video surfaced showing him hitting a woman with a belt, and who has bragged about his willingness to use violence against women.

Yet here he was dismissing Markle’s accusations of racist treatment by the Royal Family or the British media, as evidence of her unwillingness to be’ perspicacious and self-reflective.’

If you say so, belt-boy. Elsewhere Nigel Farage could be found accusing Meghan of dishonesty - you at the back, stop sniggering - and Alex Jones’s sinister, basement-dwelling former sidekick Paul Joseph Watson could be found tweeting about impossible it was to believe anything Markle says.

These are people you need to wash your hands just thinking about, and I haven’t even mentioned the grown-up Mean Girls pundits, like Camilla Tominey, Sarah Vine, Alison Pearson or ‘royal biographer’ Angela Levin, who churn out malicious gossip and cod-psychological ruminations about the Sussexes on an almost daily basis.

Beyond these ‘respectable’ outlets, there are the depraved Twitter and YouTube anti-Meghan hate accounts identified by Bot Sentinel, which ‘ fabricate falsehoods about Harry and Meghan and strategize about how to disseminate conspiracy theories and disinformation on other social media platforms.’

No wonder police have investigated ‘disgusting and credible’ threats on Markle’s life, and no wonder she looks traumatised when she talks about them.

All these individuals, newspapers, and trolls are part of an outrage machine that reaches from the front pages of the daily newspapers, to tv chat shows, YouTube videos and Twitter. The machine has been operational for some time, from the ‘(Almost) Straight Outa Compton’ and ‘Harry’s girl is a porn star’ stories that greeted the couple’s engagement, to the gimlet-eyed ‘analyses’ of Markle’s fashion choices, or the idiotic speculation about why she cradled her ‘baby bump’ that never attached itself to Kate Middleton.

Some of this hostility was due to British snobbery, and the morbid relationship of veneration/possessiveness/ownership between the British public and the Royal Family. Markle’s humble and mixed-race background immediately defined her as an outsider. And if you don’t believe that race had anything to do with the hatred directed towards her, consider the racist subtext in some of the Mail’s early coverage of the royal engagement.

Or check out some of the Tweets in the Bot Sentinel report. If race has been a factor in the anti-Meghan campaigns, it isn’t the only factor. Much of the hostile coverage she received - particularly but not exclusively, from female columnists - was steeped in jealousy, envy and resentment.

Some of this hostility was based on Markle’s political opinions. Markle may not be Rosa Luxemburg, but she has never been what a Royal woman should be. Princess Diana once pushed that role to the outer limits, by associating herself with campaigns against mines and cluster-bombs.

As we all know, the rightwing press loves our cluster-bombs, but it could put up with Princess Diana - just - because she was still an insider, however uncomfortably so, and this was long before the culture wars and the ‘war on woke’ had became a thing.

The ‘Woke’ Duchess

But Markle had strong opinions from the start, and causes and charities she wanted to support, and they weren’t the causes that the rightwing media wanted anyone, let alone a member of royalty to involve herself in.

When Markle guest-edited Vogue, and designed a ‘woke’ cover featuring Greta Thunberg, Jacinda Aherne, Greta Thunberg and other ‘women of change’, she was condemned by a range of right-wing pundits from Sarah Vine to Melanie Phillips. The Sun’s “Meghan Markle slammed for ‘wading into politics by promoting Trump-hating celebs’ in ‘left-wing’ edition of British Vogue,” gives the tone.

Naturally Piers Morgan was part of the chorus, decrying ‘ Me-Me-Meghan Markle's shamelessly hypocritical super-woke Vogue stunt’ [which] proves she cares more about promoting herself than the Royal Family or Britain.’

Is Morgan aware of Freud’s theory of projection? Probably not, and it wouldn’t much difference if he was. But Markle’s ‘wokeness’ has become another reason to hate her, and transformed her into another target in the pseudo-culture wars, through which the right seeks to keep its constituency whipped up into a state of permanent outrage.

Whether she intended it or not, she has joined the statue pullers, the ‘Critical Race Theorists’, the National Trust ‘activist-historians’ who want us to ‘hate our history and our culture. This is why her mock-curtsy enraged so many people, and why it provoked one member of the voluminous conservative Twitterati to exclaim ‘Our culture is not your costume.’

It’s why Fox News joined in the condemnation of the couple last week, and why the former Fox News presenter Megyn Kelly - a woman who ought to know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of misogynistic abuse - has jumped on the the anti-Meghan bandwagon and accused Harry and Meghan of ‘dishonouring the Queen’.

It’s impossible not to detect a distinct whiff of white fragility emanating from this relentless denigration of a woman who really represents no serious threat to the institutions they claim to be defending. And some of the more extreme viciousness directed against Markle on social media echoes the similar treatment directed at other women whose public profiles are associated with feminism and or left or left-of-centre politics.

When Caroline Criado-Perez had the temerity to suggest that Jane Austen appear on £10 notes, she was bombarded with death and rape threats. Gina Miller was also targeted with viciously misogynistic racist abuse for her political interventions over Brexit. The Filipino journalist and campaigner Maria Ressa has been subjected to an orchestrated hate campaign, supported by the then-president Rodrigo Duterte, of which these sample words taken from hundreds of tweets and Facebook posts give a flavour:

Last but by no means least, the anti-Meghan hate machine is a profitable enterprise. This certainly explains some of the troll accounts which have dedicated themselves entirely to her reputational destruction, one of which was created by a female former-brothel owner who monetised her YouTube at one point to the tune of some $44,000 a year.

Nice, but toxic, work, if you can get it. And many individuals and media outlets have realised that you can get it, as long as you don’t mind wading through the gutter to do it. These include nearly all the GB News presenters, who can’t stop talking about Meghan even when they tell their viewers to ignore her and they’ll go away, and a whole range of individuals and media organisations that don’t want her to go away.

On the contrary, they want her to be there, so that the hashtags they help generate will direct traffic towards their sites. Meghan-hatred transforms non-entities into somebodies, like the horrid little troll Sophie Corcoran, who appeared on Megyn Kelly’s show this week. According to some pundits, British people hate Meghan because she attacked our ‘beloved Queen’, as one GB News presenter put it this week, but ‘love’ has nothing to do with this industry of hate.

It may be directed at one woman, who you can choose to like or not like, but the hatred is the point here, and it can be transferred to anyone, from a striking nurse to Anthony Facui. It is galvanising, bracing hatred, emanating mostly from the conservative/extreme-right political spectrum, which seeks to whip up as many people as possible into a state of permanent outrage and victimhood that can extend from Brexit and anti-lockdown protests, to climate change denialism, and the vicious denigration of striking nurses and ambulance-drivers.

There is some irony in the fact that Harry and Meghan are being accused of damaging the Royal Family, when they may well have represented a final opportunity to reform and modernise the institution of the monarchy in the new era of ‘Global Britain.’

Instead, the throne is now occupied by a bumbling, arrogant, and tone-deaf king who has not yet had the courage to condemn the orchestrated bullying of his son or his daughter-in-law.

And I can’t help thinking that this refusal to speak out may have negative consequences for the victims of this machinery of hatred, but also for the institution that those who operate it claim that they want to preserve.