Meghan markle

Friday

Cockburn

Scoop: top GOP donors to meet in Miami in plot to stop Trump

Everybody hates Donald? An emergency gathering is set to be held in Miami next week to talk about “the Trump problem,” a source tells Cockburn. Steve Wynn and other big-shot GOP donors are said to want to “move on from Trump,” so are coming together to decide how to keep him from securing the 2024 nomination. The former president has been said to be in a “terrible mood” and “throwing regular tantrums” after the failure of his chosen candidates in the midterms. He is also facing mutiny from previously die-hard fans who adored him before Tuesday, such as: Candace Owens: "Trump needs to take a good look in the mirror and he needs to take a good look in the room, and he needs to read the room accurately.

duchess trump

Thursday

Cockburn

Prince on pre-order: Harry’s memoir release date announced

Cockburn has a few vacations coming up in 2023, so is on the hunt for some new light reading material. Thank God that Prince Harry has announced that his long-awaited memoir, Spare, will hit shelves globally on January 10. The cover features a close-up of the man fifth in line to the British throne, staring down the barrel of the camera, blue eyes glinting, beard tidily trimmed. His expression says, "this is my story." Publisher Penguin Random House said in a press release: “Spare takes readers immediately back to one of the most searing images of the twentieth century: two young boys, two princes, walking behind their mother's coffin as the world watched in sorrow — and horror.

prince harry memoir spare

Thursday

Cockburn

Style blog rates Meghan Markle’s funeral ’fits

Whisper it — but Cockburn can’t help but love a funeral. Old churches, black clothes that take a few inches from the waist, the spread is always great and the wake is single-handedly the best after-party anyone, dead or alive, could ask for. But there are a few rules. The first, one that should be glaringly obvious, is not taking smiling selfies for Instagram. Now, Cockburn knows that for a funeral such as Queen Elizabeth II’s, photos are unavoidable. But it seems that the people at Meghan’s Mirror, the style blog devoted to Meghan Markle, are lacking in basic etiquette. A little over a month after the death of the Queen, Meghan’s Mirror has splashed photos of Meghan’s outfit at the events surrounding the Queen’s death on their blog's homepage.

meghans mirror blog

Friday

Cockburn

Great! Another podcast about feminism 

Politics, feminism, sex, TikTok. These four topics will form the heart of Emily Ratajkowski’s new podcast High Low with Emrata. Doubtless Cockburn speaks for everyone when he says: praise the gods, a podcast about feminism is just what the market is missing. The new Sony-produced series will consist of two episodes per week. One will see the model and swimwear entrepreneur sit down for intimate conversations with special guests. Perhaps she'll diverge from the Meghan Markle playbook and actually let her guests speak. The second will have Ratajkowski’s own commentary on current events. Cockburn is sure you’re just as excited as him to hear what the model has to say about the Electoral Count Act of 1887 and ballot harvesting.

emily ratajkowski

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

Queen Elizabeth II made a difference — to Britain and the world

“The Queen is dead, boys, and it’s so lonely on a limb.” So the ever-provocative Morrissey sang on the title track of the Smiths’ 1986 album. At the time, his wishes were regarded as little more than republican throat-clearing, shot through with satirical wit. In the same song, he imagined an unlikely encounter with the Queen, who remarks caustically, “Eh, I know you, and you cannot sing.” Some of his detractors might agree. But now, thirty-six years on, the Queen really is dead. Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-reigning monarch in British history, died on September 8, 2022 at the age of ninety-six. The second Elizabethan age — one that surpassed the first for both achievement and longevity — has come to an end.

queen elizabeth ii

Wednesday

Teresa Mull

Even the Queen’s clothes evoked her sense of duty

Queen Elizabeth II was a bright spot in the world in more ways than one. She was, by all accounts, a warm and gracious monarch who led her country through storm after storm with “timeless decency and an enduring calm,” as Australia’s prime minister put it. Yet despite her reserved demeanor and steadfast sense of duty that harkened to a much more modest age, the Queen had what appeared on the surface to be a surprising sartorial sense. Do a quick Google Image search for “Queen Elizabeth style” and you’ll see what I mean. Her outfits were often brightly colored and recognizable. Despite this, though, she wasn’t known, as Princess Diana was, for being a trendsetter, exciting fashion magazines and red-carpet commentators with “look what she wore!” moments.

london
Cockburn

Cockburn’s letter from London

Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II last week, every national TV network in America dispatched crack squads of producers to London to cover the aftermath. Staff shortages meant that The Spectator opted to send Cockburn over on an economy flight, although he bets that if it was anyone else, they’d be flying classy. After Cockburn got over the screaming kids and bad liquor on his JetBlue plane, he decided to start at Buckingham Palace. This was, in hindsight, a huge mistake. In fact, Cockburn would go as far to say that the British royal family’s HQ is host to a cabal of the worst humans on earth. Loud, crying Americans, British oiks taking smiling selfies, Instagram moms laying flowers down seven times to make sure that their dutiful camera man got the best angle of their ass.

Friday

Cockburn

How to drink like the Queen this weekend

Cockburn joins the rest of the world in mourning the good Queen Elizabeth II, a stalwart figure of grace and warmth who endured much during her long life and seventy-five-year reign — often, incredibly, with an impish twinkle in her eye. The Queen worked as a truck mechanic during World War II, served alongside fifteen prime ministers, including Winston Churchill, lived through fourteen US presidencies, and weathered the marriage scandals of Princess Diana and Prince Charles, the heartache of Diana’s tragic death, Meghan Markle’s endless attention-seeking antics, and an exhausting schedule of public appearances. It's no wonder the woman liked to enjoy a drink — or four?

Matt Purple

She lived her best life

CNN and Fox were fine, but you had to tune in to the British news channels to get the full weight of the Queen's death on Thursday. Every anchor, every reporter, spoke in a voice burdened by grief. So it was easy to forgive one Sky News commentator when she said, "At a time when it's all about having a brand, the Queen stood in defiance of that trend." In fact, it's hard to think of anyone who had a more cultivated brand than Elizabeth II. Her every public appearance, every utterance, every twitch was carefully calibrated toward the image of a stately monarch. Yet you can also understand what the Sky commentator meant.

Thursday

Cockburn

Britain reeling after Queen’s health announcement

Cockburn is saddened by the news emerging from Britain about Queen Elizabeth II earlier, after Buckingham Palace announced that they were "concerned for her health." The Palace statement said, “Following further evaluation this morning, the Queen's doctors are concerned for Her Majesty's health and have recommended she remain under medical supervision," adding, "the Queen remains comfortable and at Balmoral." After the news, king-in-waiting Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall made their way to Balmoral, the Queen's Scotland home. They were followed shortly after by Prince William and his wife Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge. The Queen's other children, Anne, Andrew and Edward are also on their way to Balmoral.

queen elizabeth ii

Monday

Matt McDonald

Di another day

I was reprimanded by my parents for talking during the minute’s silence at Princess Diana’s funeral. In my defense, I was six years old at the time. Almost twenty-five years have passed since that fateful night in Paris, when the People’s Princess was pursued by the press one last time. In the years since, Diana’s legacy has hung over not just the British royal family, but the relationship between society and celebrity. Her death marked one of the first real moments of global introspection: was our paparazzi too invasive, our press too dogged? We now look back at the media’s treatment of Britney Spears, Whitney Houston and Lindsay Lohan and ask the same questions. But it all goes back to Di.

princess diana

Wednesday

Cockburn

Prince Harry’s ‘toxic’ mental health startup tied to royal ventures

For a man that supposedly wanted to cut his connections with the Big Bad Royal Family, Prince Harry still appears to be reaping the rewards of his blue-blooded lineage. Last week, Cockburn discovered that BetterUp, the mental health company that named the Duke of Sussex as its “chief impact officer” in 2021, has been branded by people purporting to be former employees as a “psychologically unsafe place to work” on Glassdoor, a website where posters can review companies. Posts on the site allege that the leadership “lie, play games, test/watch/spy on employees” and say the company “a pretty nasty underbelly.” BetterUp did not respond to a request for comment regarding the claims.

betterup

Monday

Gilbert T. Sewall

The unremarkable Meghan Markle

Two days after a May 24 elementary school shooting left nineteen children and two teachers dead and another seventeen injured, the wife of Britain’s Prince Harry made an unannounced visit with her camera crew to the Texas town of Uvalde. Vanity Fair said, “She was spotted placing a bouquet of white flowers near a makeshift memorial,” not bothering to rewrite the press copy. Was spotted? In real time during the outing, aggressive publicists at Archewell were shopping and circulating copy and photos to media, getting instant pickup by Yahoo News, People, Elle, and other outlets worldwide. “The forty-year-old Duchess of Sussex — wearing jeans, a t-shirt and a blue baseball cap — reached down with her head bowed,” articles said, one after another.

prince harry meghan markle hostage

Thursday

Harry Mount

A royal affair

The cover blurb, from “Lady Anne Glenconner” on this huge book proclaims: “Brilliant. Tina Brown has inside knowledge and writes so well.” The credit for the author of the 2019 bestseller, Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown should in fact be “Lady Glenconner”. You might not think it matters much these days that, over and over again, Tina Brown gets the titles wrong in this book. But this is supposedly the ultimate insider’s look at the royal family over the last forty years or so. And titles are at the heart of the Firm — think of the agony of Prince Harry and Prince Andrew at no longer being able to use their HRH titles and having to give up their honorary military roles.

royal brown

Tuesday

Dot Wordsworth

The language of the victimhood war

Language is used in a weird way in the victimhood war, where those who see themselves without agency bravely speak their truth to power. Their truth cannot be negated merely by examining the evidence, for it derives from lived experience. The powerful are axiomatically guilty, and must be called out for their behavior, or behaviors, as the new usage puts it. They must then own or take ownership of the issue. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex found themselves victims without agency in the racist world of the royal family. During their interview with Oprah Winfrey, they spoke of conversations between the Duke and a member of the family about their unborn son Archie and what color his skin might be.

own

Friday

Alexander Larman

Is Prince Charles the royal racist?

It has been a mystery that would have baffled Perry Mason or Ellery Queen. Since Meghan Markle and Prince Harry informed a shocked Oprah Winfrey in their bombshell interview that "there were concerns and conversations" about "how dark" the skin color of their first child-to-be was likely to be, the couple have slowly dripped information into the public domain. It's been made clear that it was a "senior royal" who expressed the opinion, albeit neither the Queen nor the Duke of Edinburgh. Although given the latter’s public remarks on race and nationality, it might have been easiest if the soon-to-be-late Prince Philip had simply claimed responsibility. Now, the "senior royal" has finally been fingered, and the alleged guilty party is Prince Charles.

charles

Monday

Alexander Larman

The unstoppable Meghan Markle

It has been quite the 2021 for Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex. When she wasn't publishing children’s books or giving birth to her second child, the trollingly named Lilibet, she was winning court cases and dropping in at the United Nations. Little wonder that some have speculated that, in the not too distant future, she might even consider running for the highest office in the land. But more than anything else, this year has been dominated by interviews for Meghan. The conversation that she and her husband-cum-comic relief sidekick Prince Harry had with Oprah Winfrey in March certainly enlivened lockdown with endless conversations about whether the Duchess’s much-vaunted "truth" was anything of the kind, and launched a thousand opinion pieces.

Thursday

Alexander Larman

How Meghan Markle wins the White House

In October, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, made her most significant political intervention to date. She marked her fortieth birthday by writing an open letter “as a mom” to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, and asked Congress to legislate for paid family leave for new parents. Markle may have thought she was pushing at an open door: the Democrats were striving to include paid family leave in the Build Back Better Act. But this may not be the only open door Meghan is pushing at. Seasoned observers will notice the Markle trademarks in the letter. There is the folksy appeal to her humble heritage: “I grew up on the $4.99 salad bar at Sizzler... I knew how hard my parents worked to afford this because even at five bucks, eating out was something special, and I felt lucky.

meghan

Saturday

Grace Curley

Who asked Meghan Markle to save Build Back Better?

Could a helping hand from a considerate royal help Nancy Pelosi in her time of need? Right now the House Speaker is stressed. Can you blame her? The $3.5 trillion spending boondoggle, which the left claims we need desperately in order to save our doomed planet and also fund their pet projects, is still gridlocked. Thanks to Pelosi’s skills as a “master legislator,” this monstrosity of a spending bill is tied to the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. At one point Nancy tried to back off her all-or-nothing posturing, but it was too late. The far-left Squad had already started parroting her “in tandem” talking points. On top of all of this, Pelosi’s subjects in the mainstream media have become unruly lately.

markle

Thursday

Cockburn

Harry and Meghan, maskless in Manhattan

Aspiring hermits Prince Harry and Meghan Markle retreated to the notably reclusive borough of Manhattan today to visit the One World Observatory and the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The not-so-royal couple were accompanied by Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York and Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City. But neither New York politician saw fit to don a face mask outside — nor did they ask their esteemed guests to. Instead, Hochul, de Blasio, his wife Chirlane McCray and their son Dante, bared their faces and posed up close for photos with the Sussexes in front of the gathered crowd. https://twitter.

harry