Meghan markle

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

The sense of an ending | 17 May 2018

From our UK edition

The timing of the Today programme’s series about hospices could not have been more apt, coming as it did so soon after Tessa Jowell’s death was announced with its array of tributes and the poignant interview with her husband and one of her daughters. In themselves such personal testimonies are not always that helpful — everyone’s situation is individual and the actual outcomes necessarily different. But what Jowell’s family said about her last hours and their evident acknowledgment and acceptance of their situation gave a real sense of purpose on Monday to Zoe Conway’s report from the North London Hospice. This was part of the Dying Matters campaign, urging us to think more about death and end-of-life care.

Lara Prendergast

The House of Soho

From our UK edition

I have a phobia of wedding lists. They always seem very presumptuous. Friends ask for monstrous amounts of things that I’m sure they don’t really want. I look at their lists and my heart sinks. I know I should buy something, but what to choose from all the overpriced paraphernalia? I wonder if the guests of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle felt the same way when their royal wedding invitations arrived. It had been announced that the pair didn’t want presents and instead, donations should be made to seven charities that reflected their ‘shared values’. But then came the news that their ‘private’ wedding list would be held with Soho House. Does a royal couple really need their friends and family to buy them stuff to set them on their way?

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 3 May 2018

From our UK edition

Campaign for real cricket Sir: Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s splendid article ‘Cricket, unlovely cricket’ (28 April) remonstrated against the threat to Test matches and the County Championship posed by the juggernaut of what he termed ‘Twenty20Trash’. He ended with the words ‘after the very successful Campaign for Real Ale, what about a Campaign for Real Cricket?’ As one of the four traditional beer lovers who founded Camra and as an MCC member, I wholeheartedly agree. We must rescue our beloved sport from the hands of the money-obsessed administrators who are foisting an apology for beach cricket on true lovers of traditional forms of a noble game.

Thursday

Cindy Yu

The Spectator Podcast: The New Arrival

From our UK edition

In this week's podcast, we discuss Meghan and the monarchy – is Meghan Markle good news for the Establishment? And what are we to make of her anyway? We also discuss the potential for Tory rebellion on the customs union, and ask, does economic research back up higher government spending? As the royal baby is born earlier this week, all eyes are on the monarchy. But he’s not the only new arrival to the family in recent times – Meghan Markle will be formally joining the monarchy in less than a month’s time. So what are we to make of the new Princess? For this week’s cover, Jenny McCartney thanks God that Meghan is not a spoilt, entitled Chelsea Sloane, and Julie Burchill writes that Meghan is a modern ‘adventuress’.

Julie Burchill

Hooray for the adventuress

From our UK edition

I’m keen on all sorts of my fellow females — broads, gold-diggers, career girls — but the best is the adventuress. According to Merriam-Webster, she is ‘a) a woman who seeks dangerous or exciting experiences; b) a woman who seeks position or livelihood by questionable means’. To me she is an admirable character who simply seeks to make life an awfully big adventure rather than be merely hatched, matched and dispatched as women historically were expected to be. If people are either radiators or drains, she is a blast furnace determined to use her youth and beauty as fuel to be burned rather than fruit to be preserved.

Jenny McCartney

Meghan’s hour

From our UK edition

The wedding of Prince Harry, sixth in line to the British throne, and Meghan Markle, actress and former star of the legal drama Suits, is almost upon us. The cake has been commissioned from a Hackney bakery — ‘a lemon elderflower cake that will incorporate the bright flavours of spring’, according to a palace statement — and alterations are still being made to the wedding dress (the bride reportedly keeps shrinking). By 19 May, the spotlight will be firmly on the bride and groom, since William and Kate are again in the bleary-eyed enchanted zone of new parents, this time of a baby boy: Kate has thus been relieved of any formal role, save the task of turning up with the wriggling newborn at the wedding.

Monday

Damian Thompson

Meghan Marxist!

The wedding of Meghan Markle to Prince Harry has no precedent in the history of the Royal family. How will a relatively ordinary person, albeit a celebrity, cope with the rigid etiquette and stifling sense of entitlement of the culture into which they are marrying? I’m referring, of course, to Harry. From the moment he becomes Ms Markle’s husband, he will be expected to observe a code of behaviour designed to trip up the newcomer. I’m not kidding, alas. Since she was a small girl, Meghan has breathed the purified air of the liberal American ‘filter bubble’ – so called because it ruthlessly filters out people, ideas and even casual turns of phrase that are deemed ‘inappropriate’.

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Laureates past on the engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle

From our UK edition

The latest challenge asked for a poem written by a poet laureate present or past on the engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. The role of laureate is not for everyone. Craig Raine once said to Ted Hughes, during a discussion of the then-vacant post, ‘Of course, no one in their right mind would really want it.’ (‘You’d get some terrific fishing,’ Hughes responded.) And Andrew Motion — who was in the hot seat for ten years and was much mocked for the rap he wrote to mark Prince William’s 21st birthday — was candid about its pitfalls: ‘How was I to steer an appropriate course between familiarity (which would seem presumptuous) and sycophancy (which would seem absurd)?

Tuesday

Harry Mount

Meghan Markle and the return of American Anglophilia

Prince Harry's imminent wedding to Meghan Markle will reinvigorate the dying special relationship between Britain and America. It is a boost for the fading American regard for the monarchy.In America, the mother country is increasingly the forgotten country – and it has been fading for a century, ever since the First World War. As Sellar and Yeatman put it in 1066 and All That, after the allied victory 'America was thus clearly top nation, and History came to a full stop'.As the increasingly weaker party in the 242-year affair, we cherish the special relationship much more than the dominant partner. That great Anglo-American WH Auden – an exile to New York, born in York – got it right: 'If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me'.

Sunday

Melanie McDonagh

The Queen should force her unmarried relatives to corridor creep this Christmas

From our UK edition

Thank God for the proprieties. This magazine's editor, Fraser Nelson, rattled a few score Anglicans today when he declared in his Radio 4 newspaper roundup at Broadcasting House (pleasingly paired with the FT’s Lionel Barber, BTW) that Meghan Markle and Prince Harry were to share a bedroom when they stay with the Queen at Sandringham over Christmas. This was on the back of a piece by Rachel Johnson, sister of, in the Mail on Sunday, deploring the fact that Meghan was to glad hand the crowds after the Christmas service, even though she’s only engaged. It was the bedroom-sharing arrangement bit that scandalised me.

Wednesday

Lara Prendergast

Mockery is good for the monarchy

From our UK edition

Isn’t Meghan fabulous? Hasn’t she totally brought the monarchy into the 21st century? Doesn’t she make Kate look like such a square? We were so bored of Sloaney English roses, weren’t we? Meghan Markle is widely considered to be the best thing to have happened to the royal family — and Britain — in a long time. The newspapers are ecstatic, and not just the patriotic ones. There will be pictures, pictures and more pictures to come. Or fake pictures, if that’s what sells. The Sunday Sport recently ‘discovered’ a fake topless picture of Prince Harry’s squeeze, stuck it on the front page and ran with the headline ‘Harry’s Meghan in nude phone photo shock’.

Thursday

Nick Hilton

The Spectator Podcast: Carry on Brexit

From our UK edition

On this week’s episode we're looking at the Brexit situation as 2017 draws to a close. We’ll also be marvelling at all the wondrous, and infuriating, jargon to come from our EU withdrawal, and asking whether British aristocrats are being seduced by the new ‘glamocracy’. First up: the days might be getting shorter, but the crises faced by Britain's Brexit negotiations seem never-ending. Ireland has been the sticking point this week, compounding a torrid month for Theresa May. Her task is Herculean, writes James Forsyth in this week's magazine cover story, not because she herself is Hercules, but because her tasks are getting more and more difficult. Will the EU ever show mercy on her?

Harry Mount

Rise of the glamocracy

From our UK edition

The world may be dazzled by Prince Harry marrying a divorced, mixed-race American TV star. But his grand friends and royal cousins will hardly bat an eyelid. Because they’ve been marrying celebs (and Americans) for the past decade or so. In a subtle, gradual change in the British upper classes, the aristocracy has given way to the glamocracy. Gone is the blue-blood obsession; gone the marrying off of smart cousin to smart cousin which has continued since Agincourt; gone the Mrs Bennets frantically flicking through Burke’s Peerage, desperate to marry off their boot-faced daughter to the local squire. These days, young royalty and aristocracy are increasingly mixing with, and marry-ing, international money, beauty and fame.

Matthew Parris

The royals don’t exist, so they have my full support

From our UK edition

Prince Harry does not exist and soon Meghan Markle will cease to exist too. None of the royal family exist. This truth, which has come to me rather late in life, has taught me how to stop worrying and love the monarchy. Despite my boyhood admiration for King Sobhuza II of Swaziland, I was always a bit of a republican. Not a tumbrils and guillotine kind, nor even, really, a campaigner for abolition, because as the decades have rolled it has become impossible not to feel respect for the Queen’s hard work; and besides, as the Australians have learned, there’s not a lot of point in removing the monarchy unless you can agree on the alternative. What alternatives suggest themselves?

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 30 November 2017

From our UK edition

Pit stopped After complaints from the Durham Miners’ Association, a rugby club at Durham University cancelled a pub crawl in which members were to dress as coal miners or ministers from Mrs Thatcher’s government. — Attitudes towards the 1984-85 miners’ strike were not always so censorious. In 2001, the conceptual artist Jeremy Deller staged a re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave, involving 800 re-enactment enthusiasts as well as 200 miners who had been there on the day. Staged at Orgreave itself, it was filmed and shown on Channel 4 with few complaints. Ups and downs Which industries saw the biggest rises and falls in real-terms productivity (i.e., greater than inflation) since 2007? CPI inflation over the period was 25.9 per cent.

Robert Hardman

Diary – 30 November 2017

From our UK edition

Meghan Markle certainly knows how to impress the in-laws. She has announced that she and Prince Harry are going to devote much of their married life to the Commonwealth. And we all know how much the Commonwealth means to the Head of the Commonwealth. In this week’s interview to mark their engagement, the future princess mentioned it twice as she spoke of her ‘passion’ for all the ‘young people running around the Commonwealth’. The Prince himself is already plugged in to umpteen charities on this patch, not least the excellent Queen’s Young Leaders programme. It is all music to the ears of a monarch who, as a young princess herself, famously pledged ‘my whole life, whether it be long or short’ to this ‘family of nations’.

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 30 November 2017

From our UK edition

We are congratulating ourselves and the royal family on overcoming prejudice by welcoming Meghan Markle’s engagement to Prince Harry. But in fact this welcome is cost-free: Ms Markle’s combination of Hollywood, mixed ethnicity, divorced parents, being divorced herself and being older than her fiancé ticks almost every modern box. It was harder, surely, for Kate Middleton. She was simply middle-class, Home Counties, white, and with no marital past — all media negatives. Her mother was a former flight assistant. People made snobby jokes about ‘cabin doors to manual’. There was nothing ‘edgy’ about Kate that could be romanticised.

Melanie McDonagh

The trouble with Miss Markle

From our UK edition

‘The thing is,’ said my friend, after the broadcast of the engagement interview with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, ‘you can’t imagine actually bowing or curtseying to her, can you?’ That is pretty well the crux of the engagement issue: can you see yourself doing either in the case of the newest prospective member of the Windsor family? Personally, I would curtsey to the Queen and I have done to Prince Philip; I would draw the line at Camilla, and I wouldn’t dream of curtseying to Meghan. My friend was in fact A.N. Wilson, biographer of,  inter alia, Queen Victoria.

Ed West

The marriage gap

From our UK edition

Whatever their views about the monarchy, most people will warm to the news of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s engagement. Sentimental as it sounds, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the last royal wedding and how happy I felt for Prince William and Kate Middleton, as she was then. It was one of those rare events when you felt lucky to live in a good country with a bright future. A marriage is, after all, the ultimate statement of confidence in the future — and God knows, we could all do with that right now. Marriage is not easy and never has been, as Harry will know from his own childhood. Nevertheless, people have always accepted that marital unions and stable families make society healthier, happier and more prosperous.

Tuesday

Peter Tatchell

The royal family isn’t racist – but the monarchy is

From our UK edition

Contrary to what the liberal gushing might suggest, Meghan Markle marrying Prince Harry and joining the royal family is a very modest step forward for racial equality. The much bigger issue is that for the foreseeable future the UK's head of state can never be black. The hereditary system excludes by default the possibility that the symbol of the nation could be non-white. This is a form of institutional racism. No one is suggesting that the royal family are racist, but the current method of appointing the head of state is racist by default. Although it was not devised with racist intent, it reflects an institutional racism, where the system of appointment favours one race over others.