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The pattern of today’s royal summers has changed little in the past few decades.
In early June comes the Trooping of the Colour, to mark the monarch's birthday. A few days later (while, the idea goes, affection for the monarchy is running high) the royal accounts are published, showing what the family cost and balancing that against just how tirelessly they have struggled on behalf of the nation in the preceding year.
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A few days later we have Royal Ascot, the Queen’s carriage ride around her favorite racecourse, a waving of hands, a greeting of the great and the good, and then the work is nearly done.
In mid July, after Wimbledon, the Queen and the royal family at large shut up shop for a long, two-month summer holiday.
The Queen disappears off to Scotland and other royals, Prince Charles, Prince Andrew, Prince William, and Prince Harry, pare back their work commitments and cut staff in their offices to skeleton levels.
And the royals get to enjoy the summer quietly at home or behind the substantial walls of their friends’ vast estates untroubled by headlines or handshakes.
So one can imagine the sinking feeling that Meghan Markle’s decision, apparently taken without consulting Buckingham Palace, to guest-edit a controversial issue of the British style bible Vogue this summer must have engendered.
Although there had been reports that Meghan was going to be editing the issue, it was only as excerpts of the magazine began to appear on Sunday evening that the extent to which she was involved became clear. Harry’s involvement, complete with some vanilla thoughts about racism and privilege, were completely unanticipated by the wider media.
The editor of the magazine, Edward Enninful, gave some insight into how the magazine was put together in a triumphal interview with The Times newspaper.
As anyone who has worked at a glossy magazine will know, when a high profile, top-secret cover star is secured, operations are carefully managed. A small and tight circle of individuals are involved, with the rest of the staff often being given pages of future issues to keep them quiet.
This seems to have been the case at Vogue. Meghan was not seen once at Vogue House in the nine months since she and Enninful first met, over what she called “a cup of steaming mint tea.”
Meetings were held at Kensington Palace, and after Meghan and Harry moved to Windsor, communication took place via Skype, rather than at the London offices of the magazine.
Intriguingly, it does appear that Enninful’s first goal was to get Meghan to simply appear on the cover.
However she refused this and instead proposed—by text, while she was sitting at home on her sofa with her dogs—the guest editorship.
Her own editor’s letter, and Enninful’s interviews, make clear that this was entirely her own idea, that she did not seek approval from anybody else in the palace and did not feel the need to.
Perhaps she did consult with someone other than her dogs, but that’s certainly not how she tells it.
Of course some might say that she’s an adult with considerable experience of the media. She knows what she’s doing and, having seen what happened to Kate and Diana, she does not want to be controlled by the palace machine and have her personality smothered as they had theirs.
Meghan wants to do things her own way.
Sources at Condé Nast have been quick to point out that Prince Charles has twice guest-edited Country Life but the reality is that his input there was almost entirely ignored by the wider media—Meghan’s Vogue takeover has been front page news all week (as Condé Nast would have of course hoped it would) in the U.K.
Unfortunately, the coverage has been far from positive and Condé Nast (famously thin-skinned at the best of times) has taken umbrage at the firestorm of criticism the issue has received.
The Daily Beast, for example, has been blacklisted by the Condé Nast press office for our coverage of the negative reactions Meghan’s guest editorship has engendered, and having the temerity to express the opinion that Meghan might have made a mistake in doing this.
However, it’s not just the usual suspects (The Daily Mail, Piers Morgan) who are being intensely critical of Meghan and Harry’s latest media outing; Camilla Tominey, a senior editor at the Daily Telegraph, hardly the most republican of publications, felt moved to headline her royal newsletter, “Are these the most patronizing royals ever?” and wrote, “I don’t think I have ever seen a more misguided outpouring from a pair of royals since I first started covering the beat in 2005.”
For good measure she called the September issue, “virtue-signaling nonsense.”
Many will disagree with Tominey and other critics like her, and point to the charity work that Meghan clearly feels passionate about, and the good causes which she supports—all receiving thorough promotion in this issue of Vogue.
The palace declined to comment on whether or not Her Majesty’s senior team—to whom Meghan and Harry’s PR supremo, Sara Latham, who has not exactly covered herself in glory since taking on the role, is supposed to report—had been appraised of the project at all.
It certainly seems deeply unlikely that HM’s press secretary, the careful and cautious Donal McCabe, would have gleefully signed off on an interview in which Harry reminded us all not to be racist.
Even an entry-level PR student knows that the first rule of PR is not to unnecessarily revive memories of previous embarrassments, such as, ooh, the time your principal wore a Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party or called his Pakistani mate in the army a ‘paki’.
Meghan and Harry’s decision to continually bypass the palace’s senior people, short-circuiting the entire royal press machine, only really has one explanation.
They must think they know best.
