If there is one tried and true British adage that the Windsor family lives by, it is that of the stiff-upper-lip. One is restrained, in England, and one gets about one's business, especially as or when the coursing dogs of the press are nipping at one's heels.
Not so our American communicators, politicians, actors, and the like. Our most public characters live their lives in a very different, somewhat confessional, active, and far more combative mode. Meghan Markle, the new American addition to the Windsors, is proving that she is inexorably cut from this latter cloth, not that of her in-laws, and therein, as Shakespeare eloquently put it, lies the rub.
It can be that Meghan Markle is still in a fair position with the British press -- she is charming, fresh and beautiful, and married to a beloved Windsor prince, after all. But, although there has surely been painful reportage beforehand, in the last sixty days, the glow of the 'honeymoon' that she had been experiencing in the pages of Fleet Street as a result of the blitzkrieg trifecta of courtship, marriage and pregnancy has been considerably dimmed.
One could reasonably posit that the problem for Ms. Markle began at birth, with her extended family and her half-siblings, but however and whenever it began, the wedding to Harry and its staggering pressures put the Markle family in all its current internal debate on full display. The display was not comfortable for anybody, not for her father, Thomas, nor her siblings, nor for the newly-minted duchess herself, and certainly also not for her in-laws. The difference is in how they have handled it.
Her father's disastrous pact with the Los Angeles-based paparazzo and their subsequent visit to the tailor in the shipping container marked a pre-wedding low point in the publicity from the American side of the Atlantic. But in the great race for the bottom in the Markle family, that was soon topped by the duchess' sister Samantha's inevitably shrill, humdrum pronouncements, her hyperventilated book, and her apparent ability to cash in on her half-sister's renown by engineering regular, strident television appearances.
For their part, Fleet Street simply lapped it all up, and the steely Windsors did what they are so practiced at doing, namely, maintaining a very cool stiff-upper-lip. Not so, their daughter-in-law. The post-wedding phase of this, which includes the pregnancy up until now, was marked after the Sandringham holidays with one amazing -- and especially amazing for the Royal Family -- event, namely, the premeditated lancing of the "Meghan" version of the Markle-family strife by unnamed "friends" in the pages of People magazine.
We can debate how this was organized, when, and by whom, but any glance at the roster of invitees to the recent "baby shower" in New York will suggest a few names in what we might call the Markle Kitchen Cabinet. There is no hint that any of these celebrants were the friends involved in placing the People story.
It is, rather, the take-charge culture of Ms. Markle and her cohort that is an engine in these developments. The women close to Meghan Markle are powerful and smart, modern, formidable career women all -- among them, Amal Clooney, Serena Williams, Jessica Mulroney, and Misha Nonoo. To a woman, they are very hands-on when it comes to their careers and their own media management, as they should be and deserve to be, and as was Ms. Markle herself in her day. First, then, kudos all round, and to Ms. Markle for assembling her glittering circle.
But as we know, the People magazine gambit backfired badly. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, the Newtonian blowback: Thomas Markle immediately published a long, handwritten note from his daughter, intended as an olive branch but containing such unfortunate notes of self-interest that it had exactly the opposite effect. Which is why he gave it to the press.
Next came the fallout in Britain. In many cultures, nobody likes a whiner, but nowhere is this more true than in England. In a word, the People piece was roundly perceived as "whinge-ing," in the lingua franca. The response in England was more along the lines: Why bother to set anything straight? You're the Duchess of Sussex, for Christ's sake. Get on with it.
And finally, to the Court of St. James, the real business of the matter: The "boys," William and Harry, had, up until now, one superbly practiced phalanx of a court of their own, led by their very adroit Communications Secretary, the London-School-of Economics-educated Jason Knauf, formerly head of the Royal Bank of Scotland's public relations department. Knauf, a Royal Household stalwart and a ferocious rep for William and Harry since 2014, was reportedly informed of the People story the day before it broke.
It's a failure of imagination on several levels to not involve Mr. Knauf, or his staff, in deliberations like this, rather than have him informed by the story as it unfolds. Aside from the basic palace personnel mismanagement, the larger, more glaring failure in the People magazine joust lies in not imagining the Kensington Palace court (of the boys), to which the Sussexes are at the moment inextricably bound, as representing the future kings of England, as William and George will be. Like it or not, Mr. Knauf's and the Kensington court's role was, is, and will be to help shepherd those two future kings through the shoals of public life. The Duchess of Sussex and her husband were very much part of that effort, on behalf of the Crown. Somehow that fact got dropped by the wayside in the decision to utilize the editorial services of People to air intramural grievance.
The first reports of the fallout may or may not be accurate, but they certainly seem organic, as in true on the vine. The reports are that, with Harry's and Meghan's upcoming move from Kensington Palace to the country, the court that heretofore surrounded the boys will not be one, but two. It makes all the sense in the world, and isn't necessarily a sad or bad thing. In the grand picture of the Court of St. James, it's a way to isolate the Markle problem, to keep it from getting in the way of the real business of the monarchy. Put another way, it's a way to let a dedicated staff deal with the duchess, seemingly so practiced at a different, more Hollywood-driven form of public engagement.
