British royal family

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, is suing a British newspaper for publishing a handwritten letter to her father. Prince Harry, for his part, has attacked the press for waging a campaign against his wife ‘with no thought to the consequences’. But it isn’t just the tabloid media that is turning on the American duchess. She’s turning into a royal nightmare. In the cover piece of the first US edition of The Spectator, Rod Liddle argues that the ‘Princess of Woke’ is rubbing up the British the wrong way. Please America, take her back? The great triumph of recent American politics is for the people of your fine country to have elected as president a man who is the precise embodiment of what supercilious Europeans think Americans are really like.

It’s good of Prince Charles to represent the British royal family at the funeral of President George H.W. Bush in Washington, D.C. today. No doubt, however, Queen Elizabeth II will wish she could be there. The Queen doesn’t do many foreign trips these days — she’s 92 — and Charles is acting as ‘shadow king’. But she and Bush 41 were close. Their friendship evokes memories of a time when the relationship between Britain and America was truly special — not just a lot of hot air about wars. As the Queen’s latest biographer Robert Hardman notes, Elizabeth II and Bush 41 relished each other’s company. They seem to have bonded over the infamous ‘royal talking hat’ moment outside the White House in May, 1991.