No wonder Harry and Meghan are quitting. The rightwing press left them no choice | Hadley Freeman
January 10, 2020The Daily Mail and the Queen are enraged by the couples decision to step back from their royal duties. But a combination of abuse and neglect have forced their hand
Its unlikely that Marshall McLuhan was thinking of the British presss deranged relationship with the royal family when he made his famous declaration that the medium is the message, but the response to the Duke and Duchess of Sussexs announcement certainly bore out his theory. What lies behind Harry and Meghans SHOCK decision? We turn to our 18 columnists who have spent the past three years slagging them off every week, was, in spirit, the headline on most rightwing British newspapers today.
For truly exclusive insight into Harry and Meghans thinking, the Daily Mail need not have looked any further than its websites front page on Thursday morning: the site ran no fewer than 14 stories tearing into the couple. The same commentators who sneered at Meghan for being dazzled by royalty now condemn her for wanting to leave it. Anyone who has been lucky enough to avoid being in an abusive relationship can, excitingly, experience that dynamic for themselves via the medias reaction to Harry and Meghan. Thursdays front pages were the newspaper equivalent of an abusive husband expressing shock that his wife has finally left him.
And, speaking of abusive relationships, there was the inevitable input from Meghans eternally available father, Thomas, who has truly shown his capacity for paternal love by regularly denigrating his daughter to the international press. When Meghan sent him a letter in August 2018 telling him he had broken her heart into a million pieces by flogging stories about her to the media, the loving father responded by promptly handing said letter, along with other cards and baby photos of his daughter, over to the Mail.
The Mails columnist Piers Morgan maintained the completely sane and normal tone for which he has become known when it comes to Meghan: Who the f**k do they think they are? he began and escalated from there. Nobody tells the Queen what to do, he huffed, only to decree, sentences later: Get rid of these whining, ego-crazed, deluded leeches, Maam. Of course, Morgans column makes reference to the seismic, nay, legendary time he met Meghan for half a drink, an encounter that in Morgans mind has achieved mythic proportions, only to become symbolic to him when afterwards she, bafflingly, decided against continuing their friendship. Shes an unsavoury, manipulative, social-climbing piece of work, Morgan raged, displaying his usual capacity for self-awareness. Stats: Morgan has written precisely two columns on Prince Andrews friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He has written so many on Meghan who, lest we forget, committed the worse-than-paedophilia crime of not inviting Morgan to her wedding that my browser crashed.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us