Prince harry

Monday

Dominic Green

Will the royal baby be an American?

From our US edition

The news that Duchess Meghan of Markle, Britain’s favourite American, has a right royal bun in the oven by dashing sex maniac Prince Harry brings a smile to the faces of all patriotic Britons. An absent-minded smile, the quiet smile of a polite, proud people as it visualises the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, butt naked in various positions, and tries to guess which one it was that resulted in conception. It’s a national game of Clue. This may seem intrusive, but the royals have never had their sex so privately. In the good old days, royalty mated like pandas, with difficulty and before an approving audience. A royal wedding was a diplomatic union, not a love match.

megxit prince harry meghan markle baby

Monday

Steerpike

Thomas Markle: Prince Harry thinks Brexit is an experiment we have to try

Oh dear. First Meghan Markle's father declined an offer to walk his daughter down the aisle for her wedding to Prince Harry. Now, Thomas Markle has performed a royal faux pas and given an interview to the UK press on his son-in-law's political leanings. In an interview with Good Morning Britain, Markle is asked by Piers Morgan about Prince Harry's views on Brexit: TM: It was just a loose conversation about something we have to try. There was no real commitment to it. PM: Do you think he was in favour of it? TM: I think he was open to the experiment https://twitter.com/chrisshipitv/status/1008580175859154944 Mr S wouldn't call that a ringing endorsement...

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

The sense of an ending | 17 May 2018

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

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?

Monday

Damian Thompson

Meghan Marxist!

From our US edition

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’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 30 November 2017

Home The engagement was announced of Prince Henry of Wales, aged 33, and the Los Angeles-born Meghan Markle, an actress aged 36. They are to marry at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in May. Ms Markle scotched rumours that she might be a Catholic, declaring herself a Protestant preparing to be baptised into the Church of England and receive Confirmation before the wedding. Though Ms Markle is divorced, she has been allowed to marry in a church service. The couple told the broadcaster Mishal Husain in a televised interview that they were attempting to cook a chicken one day last month when the prince went down on one knee to propose. During the interview, Prince Harry said: ‘The corgis took to you straight away.

Robert Hardman

Diary – 30 November 2017

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’.

Julie Burchill

Meghan Markle has rescued her prince

Of all the interesting combinations which sexual geopolitics has come up with, that of the American girl and the English man is one of the most enduring, giving a saucy spin to the phrase ‘Special Relationship.’ It started with cold hard economics when the second half of the 19th century saw the creation of the American billionaire - Vanderbilt and his railways, Carnegie and his steel, Singer and his sewing machines. The daughters of such men became known as The Dollar Princesses; girls who came to cold old England bringing million-dollar dowries to reboot ruined stately homes in exchange for the one thing money couldn’t buy them in the brave New World - a title.

Melanie McDonagh

The trouble with Miss Markle

‘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.

Tuesday

Peter Tatchell

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

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.

Monday

Freddy Gray

Made in Windsor: How the young royals became Britain’s biggest reality show

It’s a summer of change for the House of Windsor — out with the old, in with the young. The Duke of Edinburgh has just announced that he is standing down. The Queen carries on, but she’s 91, and now the younger members of the royal family are expected to step up. For an institution that supposedly represents stability, a period of transition inevitably brings dangers. How will Princes William and Harry and the photogenic Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge cope? The early signs are not altogether promising. Nobody these days expects the royal family to heed Walter Bagehot’s famous warning that they should not ‘let in daylight upon magic’; that is, preserve the dignity of the monarchy by shrouding themselves in mystery.

Linden Kemkaran

A mixed-race princess is just what the Royal family needs

We’ve had a brown president in the White House and today, that palest of institutions, the Royal family, is formally admitting a mixed-race girl into its bosom. Wow, just wow. I do wonder, speaking as a mixed-race girl myself, does this acceptance of colour into one of the world’s oldest monarchies mean that brown people have finally been acknowledged as being an integral part of the fabric of modern society? It’s funny growing up as neither one thing nor the other, embracing two cultures, two colours and many different blood lines.  My memories of being the only little brown kid in a very white part of Kent are not altogether happy.

Brendan O’Neill

Why republicans should cheer the engagement of Harry and Meghan

The engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is great news. Great news for them, of course, because they are clearly in love, and who doesn’t like to see a handsome young-ish couple in love? And it’s great news for republicans like me, too, because it confirms the monarchy has now completed its transformation from a mystical, godly outfit into a celebrity enterprise, which I’m convinced will prove to be the final nail, or one of the last nails, in the coffin of this archaic institution. Harry and Meghan, we salute you! (Metaphorically, not literally. Republicans don’t do that.