The Little Mermaid Princess

....

Part II

The article since the Sparklettes are FF’ing anything Meghan

Excellent and informative article.

Of course the NY POST is where you go for truthful, unbiased analysis of these sorts of things.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Patrick Jephson in the Times.... was a private secretary to Diana... I think he quit after Panorama, formerly of most shocking royal interview status.

This is a tragedy — a settling of family scores that should never have been allowed to reach a single television screen, let alone the homes of half the world.

Public bloodletting on such a scale piles more damage on an already wounded royal family and the pain will be felt by millions. And for what? So that Harry and Meghan could tell “their” truth, whatever the cost to his sovereign, his country and to any chance of reconciliation with the family he professes to love.

Presented as a touching tale of suffering bravely borne on a journey to liberty and inner peace, this was actually an assassination attempt on a beloved institution whose unforgivable crime was “a lack of support and a lack of understanding”.

The attempt may yet prove successful. So toxic are the allegations of racism, callousness, neglect and deceit that any attempt to refute or even contextualise them seems doomed.

Harry has no regrets, he says, and is proud of what he has done. And, the way he tells the story, so he should be: he has saved his wife and children (Archie is to have a sister, the one unambiguously good piece of news in the entire broadcast) from an “unsurvivable” life inside the gilded prison of royalty.

It’s a life rendered more intolerable by the media, an enemy Harry plainly loathes with a passion and understandably so. A damning dossier of offensive front pages appears regularly throughout the interview to drive the point home.

Meghan does have one regret: “Believing them when they said I would be protected.”

Ah. “Them.” The real villains of the piece, the men and women of the household who failed to safeguard “one of the greatest assets for the

Commonwealth the family could have ever wished for”, as Harry describes his wife.

This gets rather personal for me since, for eight years, I was one of Them, private secretary to Harry’s mother. I failed to safeguard her too, ultimately, but it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying.

The much maligned “men in suits” — although, it’s worth noting, Team Sussex was an all-female operation — are as fallible as anyone but always struck me as humane and liberal-minded. Yet in Oprah’s interview they were culpable of driving Meghan to the verge of suicide, among a litany of disturbingly serious charges. These should, of course, be properly investigated, not least to provide much-needed hard evidence to balance the Sussexes’ tearful TV testimony.

Meghan admits to a surprising lack of curiosity about the monarchy she married into. Learning how to make it work for her would have been time well spent. Some deep research into her mother-in-law’s experience would have been useful too. Princess Diana — with justification — also felt that “the system” failed to take account of the emotional needs of the people it was designed to serve. But she set an example of steely resolve that any new royal wife could have spotted.

Speaking in her own controversial TV interview in 1995, she said: “You couldn’t indulge in feeling sorry for yourself: you had to either sink or swim. And you had to learn that very fast.”

Like Meghan, Diana also battled loneliness and mental turmoil, made worse by post-natal depression. There is a chilling similarity to Meghan’s account of looking in vain for appropriate help in an organisation that offered little solace for despairing new royal wives. Describing her own suicidal feelings, Diana said: “I was actually crying out because I wanted to get better in order to go forward and continue my duty.”

My duty. For all her frustration and unhappiness at finding herself trapped in a doomed marriage, Diana never lost her sense of duty to the Crown and the causes she supported. Meghan’s background as an independent and successful woman before her marriage was in stark contrast to the ingenue Diana’s, which may explain why she and Harry have a different perception of that most royal of obligations: duty before self.

Maybe it’s time for that iron law to be re-examined, if only so that future generations aren’t, to use Harry’s word, trapped in a system that would warp their humanity and stunt their emotional growth.

That might (just) be the silver lining in the vengeful cloud that the Sussexes last night laid over the House of Windsor. It’s a cloud that looks very distant from sunny California, where Meghan collects eggs from her flock of rescued chickens and Archie rides pillion on Harry’s bicycle (“Something I could never do when I was young,” the duke mystifyingly claims).

“It’s a happy ending,” says the duchess, “greater than every fairytale you’ve ever read.”

About half the TV audience will feel a warm glow of agreement. As for the other half, the Sussex sceptics, alternative viewing options are available — and recommended. Patrick Jephson

Greyed out already.

Really, Megastans... you won't even tolerate discussion?

You're excellent people. Look at what you've become. Get the help Meghan couldn't. You need it.

The chickens were beyond PWT. And the "greater than any fairytale YOU'VE ever read" rather than "I'VE ever read" sealed the deal on an armchair Borderline diagnosis for me. (As well as the suicide threat while pregnant and accusations of everyone else just being jealous.)

I'm sure Titleless Archie won't OD in fifteen years when he watches mom telling the world she was gonna off herself while pregnant with him. Class act, the Douchess. Always thinking of everybody else. (Which is true, except everybody else is the audience.)

By the way, a good number of those “offensive front pages” paraded by Oprah were from ridiculous American supermarket tabloids that absolutely no one reads or takes seriously. Before Meghan, they would regularly blare headlines like “Queen Rejoices as Camilla DYING!”