In which Pissed-off Toff analyses the widespread hatred of Meghan Markle; considers his own particular aversion to her physical appearance; and suggests that we enjoy her sheer ghastliness more than we might care to admit.
To my temporary refuge in southern Tuscany a friend writes with the news that government borrowing in December of last year was a staggering £27 billion and that car production in the UK is at its lowest level since 1956. Whilst it is true that the country is almost bankrupt, and whilst it is clear that the relentless drive towards ‘carbon net zero’ can only result in the destruction of all manufacturing, together with ever-increasing misery and unemployment … whilst it is regrettably true that there will be some degree of discomfort along the road to ecological salvation, I wonder whether my friend is not perhaps taking an unnecessarily gloomy view. Because if we can for a moment ignore the explosion of debt and the implosion of productive enterprise, we see, among the ruins of the old economy, the birth of a new industry which is not only growing at the most remarkable speed, but which is also entirely carbon-free. I refer, of course, to the ‘I-hate-Meghan’ phenomenon: a major new branch of the entertainment business which is at the same time dynamic, ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’, and whose rude health we witness whenever we go online, turn on the TV, or open a newspaper.
Here, for example, is what the writer and broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson recently had to say about Meghan Markle in his column in The Sun. ‘I hate her,’ he wrote just before Christmas. ‘Not like I hate Nicola Sturgeon or Rose West. I hate her on a cellular level. At night, I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant “Shame!” and throw lumps of excrement at her.’
‘Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way,’ he added. Quite so. Indeed, it seemed to me that in outlining his medieval fantasy, Clarkson was exercising an unaccustomed degree of restraint. Where, I wondered, was the branding with a red-hot iron? Where was the public flogging? Where, too, was the salutary pond-ducking followed by the final burning at the stake as the peasantry looked on, howling with delight?
Granted that the former presenter of Top Gear was merely expressing the thoughts of most people in the country above the age of forty, it is a pity that he later saw the need to apologise not just once, but three times: first on Twitter; then in an email to Prince Harry on Christmas Day; and again publicly, in mid-January. “I am really sorry,” he wrote in this last communiqué. “All the way from the balls of my feet to the follicles on my head. This is me putting my hands up.”
But if a violent fit of ‘woke’ humourlessness among the younger generation caused Jeremy Clarkson to step back from the fray, there are many others who are more than willing to broadcast their loathing of Meghan Markle, aka the Duchess of Sussex. The sheer number of these detractors is remarkable, as is the passion with which they speak out. Almost daily, we hear Dan Wootton on GB News, Piers Morgan on Talk TV, and – from America – Megyn Kelly on The Megyn Kelly Show. To their voices we add the long list of people who are happy to be interviewed at any hour of the day: the biographers Tom Bower, Angela Levin and Valentine Low; the historian David Starkey; and even Meghan Markle’s own half-sister Samantha … to name but a few. Then there are the on-line video channels largely devoted to exposing the awfulness of the woman Prince Harry so ill-advisedly married: from her drawing room at Castle Goring in Sussex, the well-informed Lady Colin Campbell (or ‘Lady C’, as she likes to refer to herself) delivers frequent hour-long bulletins; and a beautiful young Australia-based lawyer who goes by the name of Pluto regularly fires sustained broadsides from her YouTube video channel called Lost Beyond Pluto.
Nor is this just the ‘racist’ media stirring things up, as Markle likes to claim. In this case they accurately reflect the opinion of a large section of the public. Take my youngest brother. Although he is normally charming and easy-going, the mere mention of Markle’s name causes him to froth at the mouth and jibber like a man possessed. Or take the comments that you find below the on-line videos about Markle, and look at the adjectives that are routinely applied to her. ‘Poisonous’, ‘insufferable’, ‘monstrous’, ‘detestable’, ‘despicable’, ‘horrendous’, ‘odious’, ‘toxic’, ‘unspeakable’, ‘loathsome’, ‘diabolical’, ‘sickening’, ‘venomous’, ‘vile’, ‘vicious’, ‘repugnant’, ‘evil’ … the list of hostile epithets goes on and on.
Indeed, the sheer range of epithets applied to her, and – in Meghan’s case – their legal implications, is an area of study in its own right. In law, it is permissible to ‘insult’ someone publicly; but not to ‘abuse’ him … or, of course, her. The distinction between the two concepts is debatable; but since ‘Duchess Difficult’ is notoriously litigious, the question is not just academic. So when, in private and with some degree of understatement, the Duchess of Cornwall (as our new Queen Consort still was at the time) referred to the Markle adventuress as a ‘minx’ and expressed the opinion that this pushy little hustler was entirely unfit to marry into the Royal Family, she was in safe waters. But when, in a video filmed in her drawing room at Castle Goring, Lady Colin Campbell described Meghan as a ‘bitch’, she was sailing close to the wind. However, she was quite safe when she further suggested that Prince Harry’s wife was routinely called many other things besides. No-one needed to be told which Anglo-Saxon term of endearment Lady Colin principally had in mind.
And here’s a story you won’t have heard. A friend of mine knows a successful British actress who was a guest-star on the set of the American TV soap-opera Suits, Meghan Markle’s one claim to D-list fame. This British actress, whose name escapes me, told my friend that Markle was “universally loathed” by the other members of the cast. That takes some doing.
* * * * *
What, then, inspires this outpouring of visceral detestation of the Markle woman? What is it about her that has inspired a surge in the phenomenon of so-called ‘hate-watching’, whereby the viewer masochistically seeks out videos and TV programmes featuring some despised person?
The egotism, the narcissism, the monumental vanity; the arrogance, the ruthlessness, the treachery; the untrammelled avarice; then the rank hypocrisy, the routine deceptions, the barefaced lies, the treasonable defamation of our country and its monarchy; and perhaps the sheer evil of this monstrous individual … is it such cardinal sins that cause us to hate her? I would say not. I speculate that we loathe Meghan Markle not so much because she is an exceptionally nasty piece of work; nor, even, because she is perhaps downright evil; but rather, for something closer to the surface. It is, I suggest, for her lesser crimes that we love to hate her. We hate her because she is insufferable.
The intolerable self-pity and victimhood; the infuriating air of martyrdom; the sickening self-righteousness; her maddening habit of never letting go of Prince Harry’s hand (Look how much we just love each other!); her unbearable trick of intoning that sing-song “Right?” with its transatlantic uplift after every lie or cliché she utters; the odious sententiousness; the utter lack of any trace of humour; the ghastly intensity of her voice, oozing saintliness and fake sincerity … Yes, that’s it: worse, perhaps, even than her treachery is her unbearable, all-pervasive phoneyness. That, I suggest, is why we really hate Meghan Markle: because everything about her is fake, utterly phoney, entirely manufactured.
* * * * *
So much for Markle’s character, which is unanimously condemned as vile. When it comes to her appearance, however, the opposite view prevails, with even her most committed detractors agreeing that she is easy on the eye. Thus in a video filmed at Castle Goring, Lady Colin Campbell describes Meghan as ‘beautiful’; interviewed by Dan Wootton on GB News, the royal biographer Angela Levin recently called her ‘a beautiful woman’; and in an episode entitled The Blackmailer on her YouTube channel mentioned above, the delectable Pluto is in agreement: “I’ve always said that she is beautiful,” she states.
Meghan Markle beautiful!!?? The woman makes my skin crawl. But before we come to that, here she is as she wishes to be seen and as most people still do apparently see her … here she is on a couple of magazine covers, presented on her very own terms and to the very best advantage.
Wearing a pristine white jumpsuit and standing squarely in front of her husband on the cover of Time magazine, she looks directly into the camera, a mane of lustrous chestnut hair tumbling seductively over her bosom. Let us ignore, for the moment, the hilarious fact that Time magazine sees fit to include this couple in the 2021 list of their ‘100 Most Influential People’; and let us also ignore the fact that the balding cauliflower-eared Prince Harry has been shamelessly photoshopped to make him look almost glamourous. In this image, every effort has been made to present Meghan as a modern goddess; and the result is admittedly striking:
Now let’s take the September 2022 cover of The Cut magazine. This time it’s just Meghan, again looking directly into the camera; and today, it would seem, she’s in don’t-mess-with-me mode, black hair just beginning to go grey drawn back tightly in severe ’n’ sexy manner:
So what’s the problem, you might ask. Well, it’s all so manufactured. In both portraits we see a full-frontal image of Meghan Markle. There is a reason for this: it is the one angle from which her infuriating retroussé nose hardly registers. Then her eyes. Although they are in fact small and close-set, the artful application of dark make-up in both portraits cleverly combines with Meghan’s olive irises (her one and only really attractive asset, I’d say) to create a bold and exotic effect. And the mouth. In both photographs, Markle poses with her lips slightly open. The reason? Not only does it look just that little bit saucy, but her buck teeth are thus hidden from view. As for the hair in the two portraits, we might be looking at the heads of two quite different people. Where on earth does that thick mane of glossy chestnut hair come from? Not from her much-vaunted African ancestry, that’s for sure.
In other words, striking though they are, both these portraits are manipulated to the point of deception. Indeed, only the combined skills of the best hairdressers and make-up artists and the most complaisant photographers and lighting technicians can conjure up the facial images of Meghan that she wishes us to see … images which seem to seduce even her most determined detractors.
* * * * *
So let us now take a closer look at the raw material beneath the illusion … the real Meghan, so to speak; Meghan in her natural state, before the various magicians at her disposal get going with their tricks. Let us furthermore show no mercy, just as Meghan Markle showed no mercy to others as she trampled and bullied her way to fame. And like the escaped lion Ponto in Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children, let us start at the feet and work our way up.
Legs: “Look at that, Mummy! It’s a bow-legged stick-insect!!”
Bum: There is unfortunately no sign of that much-publicised African heritage in her bum. It’s as flat as a pancake:
Skin: Meghan has the most terrible coarse skin, covered in blotches and blemishes which she disguises as best she can with layers of makeup. And what with the strange shiny patches on her nose and forehead, she might be one of those waxwork marionettes from Thunderbirds (remember?):
Teeth: Meghan has the large buck teeth of a horse:
Eyes: Meghan’s eyes are small and close-set. She disguises this by wearing fake eyelashes, by the lavish application of kohl, and also by enhancing and extending the arch of her eyebrows, so as to broaden the general effect. See, below, her eyes in their more-or-less natural state, when she was a girl; also, the fake eyelashes:
Nose: That maddening retroussé nose! Granted that she is an inveterate liar, this pointy little snout is a gift to cartoonists (think Pinocchio):
Hair: In its natural state Meghan’s hair is coarse, wiry and going grey. Here she is as a small girl, before the world’s most expensive hairdressers got going on her. Oh, and the photograph on the right shows where that nose of hers came from:
So: the spindly legs, the scrawny bum, the coarse skin, the horsey teeth, the close-set eyes, the retroussé nose, the wiry hair … not only is all this the very antithesis of female beauty, but here we have the makings of a witch that even the Brothers Grimm would be proud of. Indeed, it is surely only a matter of time before the inhabitants of California look up one night and see Meghan Markle flying on her broomstick across the moon-lit sky, a conical hat on her head, a black cat sitting behind her, and long grey hair trailing in her wake; while her dunce of a husband, turned by a wave of her wand into a mangy ginger mongrel, howls into the void.
* * * * *
As the divine Pluto points out in a video entitled The Prude on her YouTube channel (Lost Beyond Pluto), “Meghan Markle is the gift that just keeps on giving.” Just when we think that the woman can’t get any worse, she outdoes herself once again. So monstrous is she, so mindbogglingly ghastly, that – oops! – we are hooked.
Recently, for example, she has been telling the world about how she felt ‘objectified’ when she worked as a briefcase girl on an American gameshow called Deal or No Deal. This despite the fact that she applied for the job of her own free will and happily took the money; and despite the fact that after she left this relatively harmless show, she proceeded to ‘objectify’ herself far more thoroughly by playing slutty roles in a series of pornographic Hollywood productions … so that here we see the future daughter-in-law of King Charles III administering a blow-job to some fellow in a car:
Oh! And there’s another almost identical scene in a straight-to-TV B-movie called Random Encounter, which I review elsewhere in these pages.
This, I would argue, is the point of Meghan. She satisfies some atavistic need for a hate figure. And when our daily lives are beset by tribulations which we are powerless to alleviate, the absurd adventures of this sublimely awful individual offer a welcome distraction.
So: three cheers for Meghan???
END
PS: Allow me to point you towards the other pieces I have written about Meghan Markle, which you will find on the present website. In chronological order:
- Meghan Markle and the blow job … in the Reviews section (28 August 2020);
- Harry ’n’ Meghan – the poodle and the harpy … in the Big Issues section (15 November 2020);
- Meghan Markle – pure poison … in the Big Issues section (1 April 2021).
