Communications professionals sometimes use the phrase “internal comms” to describe how companies talk to people within their organization, and “external comms” to describe how they talk to everyone else.
The extraordinary dispute that erupted between Meghan Markle and Buckingham Palace this week over the removal of Meghan’s first names from Archie’s birth certificate painfully exposed the complete breakdown of both in the royal family and their now-renegade, escaped former sub-brand, the Sussexes.
The debacle marked a new low in the already fractured relationship between the two camps.
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To see the palace and the Sussexes publicly squabbling about who removed Meghan’s given names from Archie’s birth certificate (Meghan said the changes were “dictated” by “the palace”, official sources at Buckingham Palace said it was the Sussex’s then-office which made the change) will have dismayed the old guard of courtiers, who see discretion as key to the dignity of the Crown.
While U.K. law specifies that changes to a birth certificate can only be made by a parent of the child, it does appear that in this case the changes were made by members of Meghan’s staff without Meghan’s literal sign-off.
Meghan is said by sources to have been completely shocked and blindsided when presented with images of the amended birth certificate over the weekend.
One source told The Daily Beast they believed that one of Meghan’s senior staffers at the time, an individual who was close to Buckingham Palace, was told by high-ups there that a “clerical error” had been made on the birth certificate by including Meghan’s names and that it needed to be amended so it matched her new passport.
The palace hasn’t however been willing to explain why the given names needed to be removed—especially puzzling as Kate Middleton has her names on her kids’ birth certificates.
Indeed, the writer Lady Colin Campbell who first tipped off the Sun to the story, told The Daily Beast it would have made more sense if the certificate had been amended the other way, to include her names, as usually only the king or queen regnant forgoes their given name (although this matter is complicated by the fact that Diana’s name was listed only as HRH the Princess of Wales on her son’s birth certificates, no forenames in sight).
One fact that is not disputed by either side is that Meghan’s first names were removed from her son’s birth certificate, nine days after the registration was first made. On the original certificate, registered on May 17, 2019, the duchess gave her name as “Rachel Meghan Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Sussex.” But 19 days later, on June 5, alterations were submitted to both their names.
The duchess’ name was “corrected” to read only, “Her Royal Highness Duchess of Sussex,” which brought the way her name was recorded into alignment with the way Diana recorded her name on similar documents.
Not a particularly big deal, you might think. Britain’s Sun on Sunday tried to portray the name change as a “snub” to Kate Middleton, who does have her name on her kids’ birth certificates, but few other outlets gave the story more than a few paragraphs.
The Sun, longtime Fleet Street operators were quick to guess, made up the “snub” angle because Harry and Meghan’s people have made it a policy not to answer their queries. They declared last year they would have “zero engagement” with British tabloid papers.
Information abhors a vacuum, so with no comment forthcoming from Sussex Towers, the Sun instead wheeled out a battery of royal writers to speculate about it, and one of them said it was a slight to Kate.
Waking on Sunday morning, it appears that Meghan became hugely angered by this story. Within a couple of hours, a furious statement had been issued (the statement came to the attention of much of the world via Omid Scobie’s Twitter account because the Sussexes are off social media right now).
It said: “The change of name on public documents in 2019 was dictated by the palace, as confirmed by documents from senior palace officials. This was not requested by Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex nor by the Duke of Sussex.
“To see this U.K. tabloid and their carnival of so-called ‘experts’ chose to deceptively whip this into a calculated family ‘snub’ and suggest that she would oddly want to be nameless on her child’s birth certificate, or any other legal document, would be laughable were it not offensive.
“There’s a lot going on in the world—let’s focus on that rather than creating clickbait.”
There’s also a lot going on in this statement and it’s worth unpacking it.
Meghan claims shadowy forces, aka “the palace,” ordered the name be changed without her knowledge or permission. She claims to have documentary evidence for the above claim. She asserts neither she nor Harry requested the change. She accuses the media of deception in the story by inventing the angle about it being a snub to Kate. She suggests that she is now “nameless” on her child’s birth certificate. She accuses the media of ignoring pressing global problems in favor of creating clickbait about her.
Any one of those claims from Meghan would have been enough to set off a new round of media speculation, but all of them bundled together brought huge attention on what had been a minor story, especially when the palace then felt provoked to dispute Meghan’s characterization of events and delivered their own bombshell; it was Meghan’s office who changed the certificate.
It also revived the troubling narrative of conflict: As the royal author Christopher Andersen, whose study of the dynamic between Harry, William and his mother, Diana’s Boys, has been a perennial best seller since its publication 20 years ago, told The Daily Beast: “By firing back that any changes were ‘dictated by the Palace,’ Meghan made it painfully clear that she still chafes at any reminder that the Palace still exerts some control over her life—right down to what’s listed on her child’s birth certificate.
“The mere fact that this minor clerical change could ignite such a firestorm of controversy is further proof that tensions, distrust, and resentments still exist between the Sussexes and the powers-that-be at Buckingham Palace.”
It is perhaps instructive to consider what shape a PR response to the Sun’s initial inquiry a smoothly functioning family business would have taken.
Maybe, rather than ignoring the inquiry over a matter of principle and then desperately trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube the next day, someone in California could have had a chat with the Sun’s reporter, then had a chat with their counterpart at the palace, then both sides could have signed off on a joint anodyne statement along the lines of, “Clerical error. Nothing to see here.”
If the media had continued to demand a reason, Buckingham Palace’s line—that it was so that the names on her official documents all matched—seems reasonable. (A source told The Daily Beast the specific document in question was a new passport for Meghan which bore the name HRH The Duchess of Sussex.)
Maybe that isn’t exactly what happened. But aggrieved as Meghan and Harry may be with the palace, picking every fight with them is counterproductive. And aggrieved as they may be with Britain’s tabloid media, simply wishing them into non-existence by ignoring them is the original sin of this cautionary tale. The fault was then compounded by ignoring the first rule of external communications, which is that your internal communications need to be smooth, so that everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet.
Whether individuals within an organization like or loathe one another should be entirely beside the point. By making her fury at the high-handedness of the palace so public, Meghan has further widened the gulf of distrust between Montecito and Buckingham Palace.
