Sunday’s Delayed Newsletter!

Sorry! Sunday's free The Royalist Newsletter got stuck in drafts. My humble apologies!

Well, I am very sorry, but the regular Sunday newsletter, which should've been sent out yesterday, didn't get as far as having the send button pressed.

I must say I'm very touched that some people actually noticed, and even sent me a message to check if I was okay.

Thank you so much, I am, just disorganized, and here it is!

What This Week’s “Bazaar” Meltdown Really Signals for the Sussexes’ Future

Meghan’s frantic insistence on the Duchess title is an attempt to pre-emptively imprint her family’s royal connections on the public before their inevitable removal.

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex’s Harper’s Bazaar interview which appeared this week was meant to be a triumphant middle finger in the direction of the British royals.

Released on the very day Prince William and Princess Catherine were issuing a key royal signifier about their increased responsibility by attending to the stodgy duty of the Royal Variety Performance, a clear attempt to overshadow them, it represented the most extraordinary own-goal yet by Meghan.

The world ignored the tedious girlboss platitudes and instead reveled in her compulsive insistence that everyone around her use the full royal title, even in situations where it made no sense.

A house manager announcing “Meghan, Duchess of Sussex” to a single journalist grabbed headlines. Lesser noted was that the article opens with Meghan insisting on the same treatment when meeting a group of schoolchildren at the La Brea Tar Pits.

It was absurd and ridiculous. For a sense of how cringey such behavior would be to a born and bred British aristocrat look at Jane Percy, who told the Telegraph this week she only rarely uses her “Duchess of Northumberland” title. She said: “Unlike other duchesses who put their names everywhere, I’m not using my title. One or two duchesses haven’t really helped the cause lately.”

For me, the subtext of the past fortnight is that Meghan’s behavior increasingly looks less like confidence and more like pre-emptive branding before the inevitable.

As The Royalist was first to report, the removal of Harry and Meghan’s titles by King William is not hypothetical. As William made clear to Eugene Levy, big changes are coming. Recent events concerning Andrew M-W have only made that outcome more likely.

Meghan, belatedly, appears to have woken up to the direction of travel. Before Andrew, the argument was that divine right meant that royal titles could never be taken away (a claim The Royalist always said was nonsense). Post-Andrew, the question has become, why should all these other people keep their titles?

Meghan’s strategy is to use the titles more, not less, across the whole gamut of her existence, private, commercial and PR to try and imprint them on the public mind at large. The same applies to her use of the surname ‘Sussex’ when in fact her surname is M-W.

Bazaar set the seal on two particularly bad weeks for the Sussexes, beginning with the Kardashian party debacle, a small drama that nonetheless cut to the heart of the couple’s increasingly brittle relationship with the internet.

The conversation became less about a non-existent consent form and more about why anyone would lie about something so easily disproved, and what it did to claims to be authentic.

The Bazaar piece compounded rather than offset the problem. The interview was controlled but not convincing, self-presentational without the corresponding self-awareness. Authenticity was the declared theme, but the orchestration surrounding it told a different story.

The result is a portrait of a woman who appears to be hypocritically invested in the symbols and titles granted her by an institution she has spent a lot of time and energy attacking.

The British public is clamoring for a reckoning and for titles to be removed from all Sussexes and Yorks. If King Charles really wanted to shift the desperate polling for the monarchy and the appalling state of his legacy as it currently stands, he would man up and do the job for William.

The problem for Harry and Meghan is not isolated missteps, it’s the trajectory.

Project Sussex clearly is moving in the wrong direction—and its principals are becoming more and more unpopular.