British royal family

Being Mr. Meghan Markle is no honeymoon

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are finally enjoying their “honeymoon period.” Or they are according to the Duchess of Sussex, who made the statement on a fawning podcast as part of a brand building media blitz – and who certainly seems to be enjoying herself.But has she asked her husband if he’s reveling in their belated honeymoon quite as much as she is? Once the spare to the throne, his presence as her forlorn shadow at events to honor her now appears largely surplus to requirements even to Meghan. “That man loves me so much,” she gushed on Montecito neighbor Jamie Kern Lima’s podcast on Monday. She likened their relationship to a video game where you "slay the dragon, save the princess.

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Is Kamala Harris turning into Meghan Markle?

Somewhere atop the sun-drenched hills of coastal California, failures go to rebrand themselves, and rebrand their rebrands as "pivots." There, Kamala Harris and Meghan Markle are busy writing the next chapter in the book of blaming the system for the personal failures of wealthy and powerful people. Harris, fresh from discovering that Democratic strategists had invented the America that was enthusiastic about her, now contemplates her political afterlife. She does so from the same region of the same state where Markle, having learned that royal traditions don't yield to Instagram aesthetics, crafts multi-million-dollar deals to explain why it's everyone else's fault. Welcome to the Golden State, where yesterday's rejections become tomorrow's empowerment memoirs.

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With Love, Meghan is a nightmare ending to a fairytale

“Has anyone in the world ever been so tickled by the sight of lettuces?” Meghan titters to chef Alice Waters, on the final episode of her new “lifestyle television series,” With Love, Meghan. Meghan’s latest venture is an exercise in how many inspirational quotes you can simper out in five hours. She’s less duchess, more Instagram influencer. She doesn’t have the pissed-off husband half-arsedly holding the camera while she explains, in excruciating detail, how to make a balloon arch. Instead, she has a plentiful Netflix crew and reported $100 million budget.  I’m trying my hardest to find something nice to say and, well, the guests aren’t too awful and the food looks alright.

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The Sussex Squad comes for Larman

I am not, nor ever have been, a friend of Jeffrey Epstein. Yet, after I wrote a piece earlier this week commenting on Meghan Markle’s peculiar decision to change the name of her lifestyle brand America Riviera Orchard to As Ever, this was merely one of the things I was accused of being. Within hours of the story being published, I was inundated with a level of online abuse that swiftly went from the intimidating to the unintentionally hilarious, so vitriolic and overblown was its content.

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The royals coming after American free speech

The British royals are coming after American free speech, just days before Donald Trump is set to take office as president for the second time. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle expressed outrage that Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, changed policy to rely on community notes versus a dedicated fact-checking department. Ironically, the pair suggested Meta’s policy change “directly undermines free speech.” How exactly? Because, according to Harry and Meghan, Mark Zuckerberg is, allegedly, prioritizing those using social media “to spread hate, lies and division.

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Why?! Prince Harry to get ESPY

Cockburn blinked twice when he saw that Prince Harry, the not-so-honorable Duke of Sussex will receive the Pat Tillman Award for service. At the Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly Awards, or ESPYs, Prince Harry will be granted the award for his strong connection to sports and for serving the way Pat Tillman did.  Social media reactions to this news did not disappoint: "what sport did he play professionally again" "that is absolute treason" "is this a joke?" and "profoundly unamerican move imo." Many in the comments section were quick to remind the haters that Harry founded the Invictus Games, a “community for all international wounded, injured or sick servicemen and women, serving or veteran.” Prince Harry founded the Invictus Games in 2013.

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Why is the UK and US treatment of Kate Middleton so different?

There is no possibility, if you consume any kind of media, that you will not be aware of Kate Middleton’s absence from public view over the past couple of months. For a time, it was possible to put the various rumors and speculation down to over-excited people on the internet with too much time on their hands and over-vivid imaginations. Then, in an apparent attempt to quell speculation, Kensington Palace released a strangely Photoshopped image of the princess on Britain's Mother’s Day, and all hell broke loose. Even those who would normally have sighed at the increasingly prurient stories found themselves saying things like, “I’m not a conspiracy theorist but...

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Being curious about race does not make you racist

When you exist in a mixed-race family like I do — black dad, white Jewish mom, Asian uncle, Latino ex-husband — race is something that’s hard to escape. We talk about our similarities, explore our differences and consider how the experiences of one generation might be similar or different for the next. Race is somehow always on our tongues. But that doesn’t necessarily make my family racist. Nor does it make the royal family racist either.  Back in March 2021 during Oprah Winfrey’s sit-down with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, I was horrified by their now infamous exchange over the alleged concern by unnamed Windsors about the skin color of the Sussexes’ first kid. We all know what supposedly went down.

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Can The Crown redeem itself in its final hours?

Netflix’s royal saga The Crown has been one of its biggest hits of the past few years. Sacrificing subtlety for big, dramatic arcs, with award-winning performances by a cast that has, in a stroke of genius on the part of its creator Peter Morgan, changed every two seasons, it’s been the most gripping and rich account of the post-war British royal family ever put on screen. It has been helped both by an enormous budget and the useful way in which the present-day battles between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and the rest of the Firm have come to mirror The Crown’s increasingly eventful power struggles among the various branches of the family.

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The royal lust of Hampton Court

The Dowager Countess of Deloraine, who was governess to the children of George II at Hampton Court and other royal homes, was a notorious bore — so much so that her “every word” made one “sick,” according to the courtier Lord Hervey. When she naively asked him why everyone was avoiding her, he replied with exquisite irony that “envy kept the women at a distance, despair the men.

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The Crown season six: a regal return to form?

Say what you like about Netflix’s The Crown, now coming into its final series — the first four episodes launch on the service today, with the concluding half-dozen coming next month — but it is one of the few shows that has combined winning truckloads of awards with compelling its viewers to have an opinion on its often surprising manipulations of history. Its creator Peter Morgan has been both praised and vilified for the liberties with fact he has taken, all of which he has dismissed on the grounds that he is creating fact-based entertainment, rather than a documentary series. That invention can often illuminate, rather than obscure, the workings of the forever secretive British royal family.

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Are Harry and Meghan making moves for a royal return?

It's been a year since Elizabeth II’s death and Harry and Meghan are looking to make their move. With the Queen — that old bulwark of tradition — finally out of the way, the couple has judged it safe enough to return to the royal fold. Their in: Prince Edward and Sophie, the Duchess of Edinburgh.    Cockburn can only imagine what ruin the attention-loving couple has in store for the British royal family. And while he wouldn’t inflict Harry and Meghan on his worst enemy, Cockburn can’t hide his excitement that they are finally making their way back across the pond.

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Treachery! Americans rank Britain the world’s best country

It turns out the Revolutionary War was fought in vain. According to a US News and World Report survey, most Americans prefer the United Kingdom to these United States. In Cockburn’s estimation, this a betrayal, a national embarrassment and the least patriotic thing an American could say. We might as well join the Commonwealth.  According to the US News annual Best Countries ranking released on Wednesday, Americans believe the UK is the best country in the world. The report, which aggregates data from respondents worldwide about cultural influence, quality of life and power among other categories, ranked Switzerland first for the fifth time in eight years. America came in fifth, falling one spot since last year.

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Will Trump stop using reelection money on legal bills?

Donald Trump is in the process of setting up the Patriot Legal Defense Fund, a fund to help pay off legal bills for him and his co-defendants in the four indictments he is facing, according to a report in the Messenger. Up until this point, the former president’s legal fees had been paid by his Save America super PAC. “Save America wasn’t really designed as a legal defense fund, so as the legal landscape evolved, so did this effort,” a Trump official told the site’s Marc Caputo. So who can expect to be covered? Rudy Giuliani, presumably, who is named as a co-conspirator in Fani Willis’s Georgia case, and was the beneficiary of a Trump-hosted legal fundraiser at Bedminster last night. Giuliani’s fellow election attorney Jenna Ellis?

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How old is Meghan Markle… really?

There are plenty of legitimate reasons to shave a few years off your age. Sportsmen do it all the time for example. Cockburn did it in a bar last week.  But if you’re in the public eye, are known for not being particularly popular and are estranged from your fame-hungry family, it’s possible that you'd raise suspicions if doing so. Meghan Markle has recently been accused of lying about her age as she celebrated her forty-second birthday on August 4.  The conspiracy arose on the internet, as all the best ones do. A YouTube video viewed tens of thousands of times claims that the duchess is actually several years older. "The court papers filed by her sister state Meghan was born in 1977," the narrator says.

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Report: Meghan Markle backed for president by Biden’s sister

From the palace to the White House? Joe Biden's sister, Valerie Biden Owens, endorsed Meghan Markle as a woman she would back to be president, the Daily Mail reports. The former actress is topping a poll after Democrats asked which woman they would vote for. She is tied with Vice President Kamala Harris and ahead of Hillary Clinton.  While this may seem impressive considering Meghan has yet to make any serious moves in the political world, polling experts have put the positive result down to the "fact that the choices the Democrats have are not great," according to the Mail.  Cockburn isn’t sure how strong an endorsement Valerie Biden Owens is: by all accounts she has no idea what is actually going on in the world.

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Meghan and Harry versus the Beckhams 

David and Victoria Beckham are the latest celebs to be Markled. In case you don’t know what this is, Cockburn includes the Urban Dictionary definition below: Markled: To be "Markled" is when a new friend appears in your life, bombards you with attention and favor requests, once you are secure in the friendship things settle down, however, after a period of no communication you attempt to contact your friend only to be ignored and ghosted without warning, explanation and every avenue of open communication is now closed and you are effectively deleted from the friends life once you have served your purpose and are no longer of any use to her as she has now ascended the next rung of the social ladder.

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Prince Harry’s UK phone hacking claims dismissed

Prince Harry’s recent run of bad luck is continuing, after it was ruled Thursday that his phone-hacking claims against a UK publisher have been thrown out by a High Court judge.  The judge also dismissed Harry's conspiratorial claim that there was a “secret agreement” between Buckingham Palace and the British press, calling the arrangement Harry described “implausible.” In his ruling, the judge said that the prince’s case had “not reached the necessary threshold of plausibility and cogency.” Harry’s lawsuit accusing the publisher of the Sun tabloid of unlawfully snooping on him, can go to trial.

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Has Gavin Newsom blocked Meghan Markle?

Is Gavin Newsom the latest big name to snub Meghan Markle and Prince Harry? Royal author and socialite Lady Colin Campbell claimed that the California governor has blocked Markle’s phone number in an attempt to distance himself, as her political demands continue to fall on deaf ears. https://twitter.com/gbnews/status/1683593356524363777?s=46&t=KTzG0soGgiCKUdkuiUQOwA “Gavin Newsom has been harassed by Meghan to such an extent for her putting forward her idea that they should allow her to step into Dianne Feinstein’s shoes, which would incidentally give her access to the Intelligence Committee because that goes along with the seat, and Dianne Feinstein is a member of the Intelligence Committee," she said on GB News Monday.

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