Harry and meghan

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.

America! The land of the free. A place for second chances. But if you're a foreigner who wants to keep basking in the aforementioned freedom, the one thing you probably shouldn't do is write about your excessive drug use in a memoir when you're on a visa.  That's the mistake made by Prince Harry, who now faces legal action that could end with his deportation back to Britain.  You’d think a royal armed with the best schooling (and lawyers) money can buy would know that. But as is clear from Prince Harry’s latest debacle, hundreds of thousands of the finest British pounds in tuition will only get you so far. In his memoir Spare he wrote that he had consumed cocaine on several occasions. “Of course. I had been doing cocaine around this time.

Picture the convivial scene. You have been invited into the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s palatial £11 million mansion in Montecito, California as an honoured guest. Once you have removed your shoes, been frisked for weapons or recording devices and been offered a kombucha smoothie, you are ushered into the inner sanctum of the world’s most talked-about satellite branch of the royal family. What would you expect to find? A dartboard with Prince Charles’s face on it? Endless piles of obscure genealogical books that explain why Prince Harry is, in fact, the rightful heir to the throne? Or endless expensive, studiedly tasteful rooms that lack any heart and soul whatsoever?

Once again, a moment that should be a unifying and celebratory for the Windsors has attracted division and discord. It has been reported today that Harry and Meghan will not appear on the Buckingham Palace balcony for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations. All of this controversy for a fleeting appearance on what someone described on social media as ‘an outdoor patio on the second floor of an old building’. It’s the world’s most famous outdoor patio, utilised first by Queen Victoria in 1851 to mark the opening of the Great Exhibition. Since then, the Buckingham Palace balcony has been a focal point and climax of significant national celebrations and commemorations. Even Neville Chamberlain rocked up there, fresh from signing the Munich agreement.

Who or what drove Harry and Meghan to leave the royal bosom for the land of slebs on the other side of the Atlantic? That’s one of the central questions of a new two-part documentary, The Princes and the Press, that aired on the BBC last night. The obvious suspect is the dreaded British media — barging, intrusive, xenophobic — riddled with prejudice, we’re told, against a mixed-race American in the monarchy. But the jostling between royal households seems equally responsible. After the early days of Hazza and Megz, a clear jealousy from some of William and Kate’s people began to seep into the media. The younger brother and his American wife were suddenly the darlings of the British press.

Pharmaceutical companies might think it a bit rich being asked to waive the patents on their Covid vaccines by Harry and Meghan, a couple who have rejected the concept of public service in an attempt to monetise their royal status. But let’s overlook the charge of hypocrisy and ask whether there really is any substance to Harry and Meghan’s charge that ‘ultra-wealthy’ pharmaceutical companies are holding up the vaccination of the developing world by refusing to surrender their intellectual property. It is certainly not true in the case of AstraZeneca, which has made its vaccine available at cost price.

Finally, some news to cheer us all up on this grim, relentless August. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been rendered ‘speechless’ by the news from Afghanistan and Haiti. No doubt, there’ll be no more Oprah interviews or birthday messages. And there’ll be no more lectures from Harry on the importance of imagining how it feels to be a raindrop or from Meghan on the importance of people asking her if she is okay. At least, that’s what we should assume, right? Surely being left ‘speechless’ is a sign that you are about to shut up? Unless, of course, you are Harry and Meghan. In their world, being ‘speechless’ requires the release of a 200-word public statement.

At the tender age of 36, Prince Harry has got his first job since leaving the royal family. Congratulations to him. As most teenagers will know it is both a liberating and formative experience. Paper boy, shopfloor dogsbody, chief impact officer – the roles can be unglamorous, but they're almost always worth it. Harry’s big post-Megxit break into the world of work is everything we could have expected. He will be working as something called a ‘chief impact officer’ at a Silicon Valley firm called BetterUp, which offers professional-development and mental-health coaching to businesses and their employees. Going by BetterUp’s website, it seems to peddle therapeutic burble to firms with more money than sense.