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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Meghan Didn't Start the Rose Rumors

With regard to the now infamous Affaire Hanbury, one of the most persistent speculations I see increasingly (and annoyingly) presented as fact is that Meghan is responsible for starting rumors of the affair. And it's like guys. I get it. Meghan is awful. But there is basically zero chance that this rumor originated with Meghan, as I believe a dispassionate analysis of the facts will demonstrate. Shall we commence?

Naughty boy Bill

Our story begins on March 22, 2019 in the pages of The Sun newspaper. Under the headline "Kate Middleton has fall-out with glamorous best friend and tells Prince William to ‘phase her out’," the collapse of the formerly close friendship between Rose and Kate is chronicled by reporter Dan Wootton. Though Wootton never explicitly identifies the reason for the rupture, in the first sentence of the piece he does pointedly identify Rose as Kate's "rural rival."

Consider the context here. This is a gossip article in the British tabloid press, which is a globally famous morass of rancid misogyny (and Wootton is a pig, although fair play to him he does have a knack for landing important royal exclusives - but I digress). In the misogynist's mind, what does it mean for two women to be in conflict and competition with each other, or in other words, rivals? Why, they are fighting over a man, of course! So while the reason for the falling out is never made explicit, the savvy reader is nonetheless invited to intuit the existence of an affair in the very first sentence of the piece.

This is some very subtle sh!t, and a classic British tabloid tactic for breaking sensitive stories without running afoul of draconian UK libel laws. And there you have both the first and second strikes against Meghan being the source of this story. Our Lady of Perpetual Clapbacks charges through life with all the subtlety of a Rottweiler sinking its teeth into the soft flesh of a startled burglar. Our Megsy also has zero understanding of the British psyche, and has made exactly zero effort to assimilate to British culture or adopt the British way of life. (South Africa, any one? Stiff upper lip? Internally damaging?) Meghan is incapable of planting a story like this because she lacks the psychological capacity for subtlety, as well as fine-grained knowledge of the British press/legal system.

Classic Megsy

Compounding Meghan's personal deficits is the press team she chose to work with, the infamously aggressive Sunshine Sachs. We royal watchers have witnessed SS steadily alienate the British public with hardball tactics tailored to American celebrity culture but poorly suited to the UK. We also witnessed SS double, triple, and quadruple down on these tactics despite obvious backlash. Trust and believe, SS did not magically develop the ability to engage the British way for the span of exactly one story. Strike 3.

The way this story gained traction in the media is another strong indicator Meghan was not involved (strike 4!). Wootton's exclusive would probably have fallen off the radar fairly quickly if not for a bizarrely over-the-top rebuttal penned by Richard Kay in the Daily Mail. Kay loudly sings William's praises as a family man, decries the threat to Cambridge "domestic tranquility," makes vague allusions to potential legal action, minimizes the relationship with the Cholmondeleys, and generally takes the whole Lady-doth-protest-too-much routine to the Nth degree.

I won't get into nitty-gritty of the Kay piece because there's just way too much detail there, but suffice it to say that every sentence is basically a brand new WTF moment. Keep in mind that most readers of the original Sun piece probably interpreted it simply as a story about a friendship ending, and hey, who hasn't lost a friendship in their lifetime? Big whoop. But suddenly, Kay is bringing up the Cambridge children and praising "family man" William (why? what does "family man" Wills have to do with his wife losing a friend?), condemning "extraordinary" rumors (wait, this seemed like ordinary "life happens" stuff - what's the extraordinary part?), alluding to previous legal actions against the press to defend Cambridge reputations (whose reputation is at stake and why?) while noting that "inconsequential reports are simply disregarded" (again, why is this consequential?), and on and on and on.

Sus

We should note here that Richard Kay is known to have very strong back channels to the palace. He was thick as thieves with Diana back in the day, and is known to have maintained connections with both the Wales boys. So to an observer-in-the-know, Kay's piece looked very much like the Cambridges lashing out in fury and panic over a tabloid rumor that three days prior hadn't seemed like a very big deal. The obvious conclusion was that the "rural rivals" story was in fact a very, very big deal. 

(This perception would later be fully cemented by William circulating threatening legal letters to press outlets. Notably, these letters asserted his right to privacy pursuant to Article 8 of the European Convention to Human Rights. They made no mention of British libel laws, with the obvious implication being that he had no grounds for a libel action since truth is an absolute defense. A defiant and offended press continued reporting the affair rumors, with one Daily Beast headline sassily asserting "Prince William’s Lawyer Tries to Suppress Rumors of Affair.")

To summarize: The "rural rivals" story gained traction due to the Cambridge's overreaction. It was a massive Cambridge own goal, deliberately nudged along by silver-tongued viper Richard Kay. (A similar pattern of overreaction would later play out with the Catherine the Great Tatler debacle, which I am firmly convinced Meghan also had nothing to do with - I'll probably do a post on that at some point.)

Silver-tongued silver fox. Is that 30 pieces of silver I hear jangling in your pocket?

Finally, social media took the story fully viral. Giles Coren tweeted and deleted his now infamous confirmation, and Nicole Cliffe expounded her theory of L'Affaire Hanbury in an eye-popping (since deleted) Twitter thread.

And lo, the deed was done. So while I believe Meghan has enthusiastically weaponized L'Affaire Hanbury via the Sussex Squad (classic Sunshine Sachs tactic), I believe the story emerged and gained traction independently of Our Lady of Perpetual Victimhood.

That conclusion in turn begs an obvious question. If not Meghan, then who?

My best guess is the story was planted by some faction within the Turnip Toffs, possibly but not necessarily by Rose herself. Indeed, I think the original Sun article contains a critical clue:

The tension between the future Queen [Kate] and Meghan along with the imminent split of the royal households has emboldened the Duchess, who is growing more comfortable with her public role.

That's the key word right there. Emboldened. It seems Kate had been feeling her oats lately, and attempted to assert her dominance over her aristocratic social set by exiling two of their own - two very, very high-ranking members, no less. But the powerful jaws of the British class system clamped shut on Kate. This story was planted to remind her that her future role as Queen Consort doesn't wash out her past as a social-climbing, Wisteria-sistering, middle-class parvenu. And social-climbing arrivistes don't get to exile blood members. (I believe that to be the Turnip Toff perspective, and must stress that it is certainly not mine! If you're interested in further reading on this theme then I highly recommend this post from Royal Foibles.)

And yes, I do believe the affair is real. If a single one of these Windsor men is faithful then I will eat my damn shoe. Fin.

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