I WAS SUMMONED TO Buckingham Palace. A lunch with Granny and Pa. The invitation was contained in a terse email from the Bee, and the tone wasn’t:
Would you mind popping around?
It was more: Get your arse over here. I threw on a suit, jumped into the car.
The Bee and the Wasp were the first faces I saw when I walked into the room. An ambush. I thought this was to be a family lunch. Apparently not.
Alone, without my staff, without Meg, I was confronted directly about my legal action. My father said it was massively damaging to the reputation of the family.
How so?
It makes our relationship with the media complicated. Complicated. There’s a word.
Anything you do affects the whole family.
One could say the same about all your actions and decisions. They affect us as well. Like, for instance, wining and dining the same editors and journalists who’ve been attacking me and my wife…
The Bee or the Wasp jumped in to remind me: One has to have a relationship with the press…Sir, we’ve talked about this before!
A relationship yes. But not a sordid affair.
I tried a new tack. Everyone in this family has sued the press, including Granny. Why’s this any different?
Chirping crickets. Silence.
There was some more wrangling, and then I said:
We had no other option. And we wouldn’t have had to do it if you’d all protected us. And protected the monarchy in the process. You’re doing a disservice to yourselves by not protecting my wife.
I looked around the table. Stony faces. Was it incomprehension? Cognitive dissonance? A long-term mission at play? Or…did they really not know? Were they so deep inside a bubble inside a bubble that they really hadn’t fully appreciated how bad things were?
For instance, Tatler magazine quoting an old Etonian saying I’d married Meg because “foreigners” like her are “easier” than girls “with the right background.”
Or the Daily Mail saying Meg was “upwardly mobile,” because she’d gone from “slaves to royalty” in just 150 years.
Or the social media posts about her being a “yacht girl” and an “escort,” or calling her a “gold-digger,” and “a whore,” and “a bitch,” and “a slut,” and the N-word—repeatedly. Some of those posts were in the comments section on the pages of all three Palaces’ social media accounts—and still hadn’t been expunged.
Or the tweet that said: “Dear Duchess, I’m not saying that I hate you but I hope your next period happens in a shark tank.”
Or the revelation of racist texts from Jo Marney, girlfriend of UKIP leader Henry Bolton, including one saying that my “black American” fiancée would “taint” the Royal Family, setting the stage for “a black king,” and another averring that Ms. Marney would never have sex with “a Negro.”
“This is Britain, not Africa.”
Or the Mail complaining that Meg couldn’t keep her hands off her baby bump, that she was rubbing it and rubbing it as if she were a succubus.
Things had got so out of hand, seventy-two women in Parliament, from both main parties, had condemned the “colonial undertones” of all newspaper coverage of The Duchess of Sussex.
None of these things had merited one comment, public or private, from my family.
I knew how they rationalized it all, saying it was no different from what Camilla got. Or Kate. But it was different. One study looked closely at four hundred vile tweets about Meg. Employing a team of data specialists and computer analysts the study found that this avalanche of hate was wildly atypical, light-years from anything directed at Camilla or Kate. A tweet calling Meg “the queen of monkey island” had no historical precedent or equivalent.
And this wasn’t about hurt feelings or bruised egos. Hate had physical effects. There was a ton of science showing how unhealthy it is to be publicly hated and mocked. Meanwhile, the wider societal effects were even scarier. Certain kinds of people are more susceptible to such hate, and incited by it. Hence the package of suspicious white powder that had been sent to our office, with a disgusting racist note attached.
I looked at Granny, looked around the room, reminded them that Meg and I had been coping with a wholly unique situation, and doing it all by ourselves. Our dedicated staff was too small, too young, grossly underfunded.
The Bee and the Wasp harrumphed and said we should’ve let it be known that we were under-resourced.
Let it be known? I said I’d begged them repeatedly, all of them, and one of our top aides had sent in pleas as well—multiple times.
Granny looked directly at the Bee and the Wasp: Is this true?
The Bee looked her right in the eye, and, with the Wasp nodding vigorously in assent, said: Your Majesty, we never received any of these requests for support.
