Meghan Had Nothing to Do With Kate's Tatler Disaster (Part 2)

Wherein we discuss the social decapitation of a Future Future Queen

Having set the dramatic tone of the bust-up in Part 1, we now get into the real meat and potatoes of this mess. Tuck in, folks - there's a lot to digest!

In May 2020 the Duchess of Cambridge's world was rocked by a spiteful mean-girl article published by Tatler magazine. Under an exceedingly thin veneer of praise, author Anna Pasternak lobbed grenade after grenade at Kate, lambasting everything from her limp work ethic, spectacular sense of entitlement, dull personality, and tenacious social-climbing to rumors of an eating disorder. Kate's nearest and dearest were hit by shrapnel as well, with wounding barbs directed towards her pretentious sister, weakling father, unspeakably vulgar mother, and even her foolishly manipulable husband William.

(Aside: I'm almost totally unsympathetic to Kate, a dyed-in-the-wool mean girl herself, as well as the preposterously rapacious Middleton clan. They have largely brought this catastrophe upon their own heads. However, even I will admit that Pasternak's speculation over an ED crossed the line from tit-for-tat gossip to genuine harm. Uncool.) 

ED ≠ ammunition

A newly Kate-besotted public raised an outraged finger of accusation, and after the briefest of hesitations, swung it directly toward Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, Our Lady of Perpetual Clapbacks and known Mean Girl Extraordinaire. After all, Meghan has indisputably been waging a low-grade press war against Catherine ever since that February 2017 blind item in Lainey Gossip, in which Kate neglected to offer Meghan a ride to the shops. Surely this was just the latest salvo in that ongoing conflict?

(Another aside: This is normally where I'd link to the Lainey blind, but I refuse on the basis that she's not only a liar and a hack, she's also desperate and transparent. I do appreciate the entertainment value of a good triangulating viper, but they better not let that game face slip.)

The public's suspicion further hardened as a personal connection between Meghan and Tatler staff was established. Journalist Vanessa Mulroney, the sister-in-law of Meghan's then-best friend Jessica Mulroney, was revealed to be a former employee of the magazine. Surely then, that must be the conduit through which Meghan planted the story?

The plot thickens

I say no. In fact, I think this connection is essentially meaningless. Elite circles, the likes of which Meghan and the Mulroneys move in, are highly interconnected. I'd be willing to bet that just about anyone could Six-Degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon themselves into the current Tatler inner circle (in fact, I bet *I* could do it and I'm hardly an elite). I'm also skeptical that a former staffer would have enough clout to single-handedly convince current leadership to essentially go to war with Kensington Palace.

This brings me back to a point I made in Part 1: when it comes to royal ructions, we tend to forget that the Cambridges and Sussexes are not the sole four humans in the universe. There exists an entire elite ecosystem, populated by a substantial cast of characters all pursuing their own agendas. This network of relationships forms a kaleidoscope of constantly shifting alliances and conflicts. Kate occupies a corner of this world which is particularly renowned for its power plays and machinations. After all, the term "court intrigue" has long been a universal metaphor for the power dynamics amongst any group of insiders.

And that's what I think happened here. This is the latest episode of a long-running court intrigue which has basically nothing to do with Meghan. In fact, I contend that the Tatler debacle is actually a continuation of L'Affaire Hanbury. How's that for a bold claim?

I'm baaaaaack!

The Hanbury angle is ultimately what ties all of this together - Kate, Anne Boleyn, Catherine the Great, Anna Pasternak, Dan Wootton, Richard Kay, Tatler, The Sun, Daily Mail, the Royal Rota, and so on, from the heart of the establishment all the way to its periphery. Kate is engaged in a society turf war, and it does not appear to be going well for her. We finish laying out this theory in Part 3. See you there.

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Meghan Had Nothing to Do with Kate's Tatler Disaster (Part 1)

 On May 19, 1536, one of England's most infamous psychohistorical dramas reached its bloody climax with the execution of Anne Boleyn. The mad King Henry VIII had splashed out a sanguine new chapter in his legend, an epic of ravenous lusts that had singlehandedly altered the face of Christendom and reshaped the course of world history.

Watch 'The Last Days of Anne Boleyn' (BBC) or 'Anne & Mary Boleyn: Two Sisters' on Youtube. Amazing stuff

May 19th thus marks a momentous event, to be sure, but hardly a happy one. So why then, on May 19, 2020, were so many royal reporters chirpily announcing the 484th anniversary of Anne's execution? Her death isn't celebrated as a Guy Fawkesian national holiday, and 484 isn't particularly special as far as anniversaries go (as opposed to, say, the imminent 500th). You might expect one or two history buffs to note the timing, but the number of near-identical tweets from such a large fraction of a specialist press pack had my spidey-senses tingling. (Nota bene: many of these tweets were deleted not long after. Were I a cannier royal watcher I'd have the screenshots; alas, I do not.)

Could this be a coordinated back-handed insult to the Sussexes? After all, their wedding anniversary is May 19th (an inauspicious date even at the time, though almost cartoonishly apposite in retrospect). It seemed unlikely, as many of those same reporters had wished them a happy anniversary in other tweets. Furthermore, and I freely base the following claim on intuition, supposition, and absolutely no hard evidence whatsoever: as a back-handed jab it just doesn't *feel* very British. The passive-aggression in marking an anniversary this way is too roughhewn, too obvious and inexpert. One would expect a professional cadre of British men-and-women-of-letters to land the killing blow with certain savage politesse, not this na-na-boo-boo level of playground snark.

So I went about my week, intuitive feathers vaguely ruffled, until the 25th of May 2020 when the killing blow was indeed landed (albeit not against Meghan):

Savage politesse? Madam, you rang?

The coup de grace came in the form of a cover story about Kate from Anna Pasternak, writing for that storied bastion of savage politesse, Tatler magazine. While superficially flattering, the Pasternak article in fact stabs a knife in every exposed inch of Catherine's back, then twists the blades till the flesh rends.

(IMPORTANT ASIDE: Large swathes of the original article have been scrubbed from the Tatler website due to Cambridge legal maneuvering. But Mr. Gore's Good Internet is forever, beloveds, and I have therefore linked you to the unflinching truth via The Wayback Machine. Besos, Señor Gore.)

In truth, I should have put two-and-two together earlier. Like many, I raised an eyebrow when the "Catherine the Great" cover was announced, because no one considers Kate great. Even her most ardent admirers talk about her in terms of her potential for future greatness, while the rest of us consider her a lazy, charmless ingrate hopelessly out of her depth.

Moreover, the comparison to Catherine the Great hadn't made sense in the context of a flattering article. After all, the famed Russian Empress was a usurping German upstart, an ambitious married-in who had shoved aside her weak husband in order to seize power for herself. An odd reference indeed. But in the context of a society takedown of a middle-class upstart, a social-climbing married-in trying to seize power over her aristocratic social set... well suddenly the comparison starts to make sense. (We'll talk about this suspected society turf war in Parts 2 and 3, but there's some limited background at the end of this post.)

Make way, bitches

So that's what all that "484th anniversary" Twitter business had been about. Not a playground spat with the Sussexes, but rather a harbinger of the imminent social beheading of a middle-class grasper who didn't know her place. It was a wolfish winking-and-nudging binge between insiders, and a status-signaling public roll call which asserted the Boleyn Clique as the favored members of the Rota.

And what, the reader asks, does Meghan have to do with any of that? Simple: nothing. Nothing at all. Royal watchers tend to forget that the Cambridges and Sussexes are not the only four humans in the UK, and that there is a vast, complex web of social and political relationships that continues to be at play independent of the latest Harkle shenanigans. We'll continue the discussion in Part 2, where we demolish the claim of Meghan's culpability and begin the reveal of the real malefactors.

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