Harry & Meghan #60 They Think It's All Oprah... It is Now!

[Falkor]

Congrats to @AnderbeauJohnson for a cracking thread title!

Bits of the Oprah interview are being re-shot and it'll be shown at 1am in the UK, after the Commonwealth celebrations featuring the rest of the Royal Family. Bets are being taken as to whether Prince Phillip is in hospital purely to upstage the gruesome twosome or not.

 

[Wackie Jeaver]

excellent title! I'm sure it's not all over though, pretty sure that the Sussexes are the gift that just keeps on giving... like herpes.

 

[StrawberrySeed]

As the last thread came to an end we were discussing whether Kate’s mum and dad will get honorary titles when Wills becomes King. Does anyone know if they will?

There was also much mirth at the end of the last thread about Smeggy asking HMTQ if Doria could have a title and her fury when TQ told her to ‘No! Now, do one Beggy Smeggy’ (or words to that affect). Cheeky mare eh?!

 

[Vanelope]

So all this talk about Middleton parents getting titles is just speculation because they are the only parents of a future Queen who don’t have any - and Catherine will be a Queen because she is married to a King and nothing will change that.
I wonder if they have been offered one already and didn’t take it up - the aristocracy as a whole were savage to Mrs M because she was once a flight attendant - wasn’t doors to manual a snide thing said about her? Maybe they don’t want to be a part of all that? They are loving grandparents to princes and a princess and apart from some tacky party things they haven’t cashed in on it for aaaaages.
maybe they know they will never be accepted by the toffs so don’t want to bother for themselves? But anyway, however Meghan heard about it and asked for Doria, it’s insane, probably never going to happen and makes her look completely grasping.

 

[StrawberrySeed]

Congrats to @AnderbeauJohnson for a cracking thread title!

Bits of the Oprah interview are being re-shot and it'll be shown at 1am in the UK, after the Commonwealth celebrations featuring the rest of the Royal Family. Bets are being taken as to whether Prince Phillip is in hospital purely to upstage the gruesome twosome or not.

Well done @AnderbeauJohnson for a winning thread title! I knew it was a winner as soon as I read it, as did many others. An extra well done as I think you only joined in the discussion on the last thread, didn’t you?

 

[Ndrangheta]

That ventriloquist act with Oprah in full ...

 

[SecretSherryDrinker]

Awesome title!!!!

I'll wager there are a few tabloid journos having strokes that they didn't think of that as a front page headline a few days ago!

 

[whathastheworldcometo]

Why would an American woman, related to a woman married to a British prince, get British title?

I wouldn't have thought the Middletons would get a title, but see the point that they are closely related to a future King and Queen. And they are British.

 

[cosmo girl]

Great thread title @AnderbeauJohnson thank you @Falkor for starting new thread

Oprah will probably talk about Meghan's press treatment.
Sukiweeks put this on twitter. I forgot about some of these headlines

 

[Baguette]

Excellent title @AnderbeauJohnson and I look forward to the Star nicking that one! Thanks for the shiny new thread!

 

[Bloody orange Hell]

Amazing title.
Yep. I think it will end up in the press too.

 

[Fredsnail]

Amazing title.
Yep. I think it will end up in the press too.

Quick copyright it don't give the milk away for nothing!

 

[keylimepie]

This is from Woman and Home website.

So will Michael and Carol Middleton receive honorary titles from the Queen? Or will they simply stay as they are?

If they are not given any titles, the Duchess of Cambridge’s parents will be the first ever grandparents of a monarch not to have titles.

It will certainly be a significant historical moment. The Queen’s grandfather was the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, while the future king, Prince William’s grandfather on his mother's side was Earl John Spencer - and of course, his grandmother is the Queen. It follows a long line of tradition going back to the Tudors, with Anne Boleyn’s father given an earldom before she gave birth to Queen Elizabeth I.

Internationally recognised expert on British royalty and titles, Marlene Koenig tells woman&home everything we need to know about the possibility of the Middleton's receiving titles.

 

[AnderbeauJohnson]

Thanks everyone for voting for my thread title and for giving me a voice - I can only hope that, one day, Meghan also manages to have/get/use her voice.

 

[Chum]

Thanks everyone for voting for my thread title and for giving me a voice - I can only hope that, one day, Meghan also manages to have/get/use her voice.

She should join Tattle

 

[SnowyCal]

This was interesting from the Skippy blog. Websites with Duchess of Sussex & DuchessMeg were registered in 2016 by someone in California.

 

[SnowyCal]

They are all still obsessed with the idea that Meghan is using a fake Harry & Harry is still in the UK hiding away with the Royal Family

 

[Baguette]

There's a long and thoughtful Opinion piece in Bloomberg, by Martin Ivens, former editor of the Sunday Times, who is currently a director of the Times Newspapers board.

Worth a read. It's long and (£), so behind a spoiler to save space. One key point:

In this case Warby is right that Markle and her husband deserve the same right to privacy as any ordinary citizen, despite their fame. Few daughters would relish their intimate correspondence being splashed all over the news. But context matters and Markle’s use of language in the letter raised enough questions about its purpose to be aired at trial.

Meghan Markle Strikes a Victory for U.S. Celebrity

There’s a risk that the London ruling on the duchess’s letter to her father will tilt the balance to the rich and powerful over the right to disclose information.

www.bloomberg.com

Meghan Markle Strikes a Victory for U.S. Celebrity
There’s a risk that the London ruling on the Duchess’s letter to her father will tilt the balance to the rich and powerful over the right to disclose information.

Spoiler: Full story

The British monarchy chalked up an unexpected triumph against the U.K.’s tabloid press this month. Ironically, it took an outsider to do it, one who’s quit the royal family in high dudgeon over its controlling ways and upped sticks to Los Angeles.

Whether justice was truly served in the case of the Duchess of Sussex versus Fleet Street remains open to question. Libel and privacy trials are always a lottery in England — and their implications reach far beyond the wounded pride of newspaper editors because they reestablish the dividing lines between privacy and the freedom to report on the powerful.

Meghan Markle, who is married to Prince Harry, is jubilant nonetheless about her High Court success against the Mail On Sunday, a mid-market newspaper, over the publication of a private handwritten letter to her estranged father. She claimed a victory over press prurience.

But this wasn’t a story of hacks snooping on a famous figure: It was her father, Thomas Markle, who gave the letter to the paper. The Duchess said that publication infringed on her privacy, while the newspaper argued that her father was entitled to release the letter, which it claimed showed signs of being written with a view to a wider audience.

By handing down a “summary judgment” in her favor, London Judge Mark Warby spared Markle and her father from making embarrassing court appearances. The judge ruled that the newspaper had clearly breached her right to privacy and her copyright as author of the letter. Unless the Mail on Sunday appeals, it will have to pay legal costs and damages.

The judgment reflects the ongoing recalibration of privacy laws and newspaper freedoms in Britain. But in a broader sense it was a victory for the U.S. celebrity system, which ruthlessly controls media coverage. Prince Harry, who blames the press for the death of his mother, Princess Diana, has cheered his wife on throughout — the continuation of a long rift with Britain’s rough-and-tumble tabloids.

The Duchess prefers to talk to the media on her own terms, signing deals with Netflix Inc. along with Harry. Her next interview will be given to Oprah Winfrey, long-reining queen of U.S. television, who was also a guest at the Sussexes’ marriage in St George's Chapel, Windsor. Why worry about impertinent hacks when you can connect with your adoring fans via handpicked favorites, often with the questions vetted in advance by public-relations experts?

The British popular media is aggrieved to have been outmaneuvered by a minor American star catapulted to major league status by association with the royals. And some U.K. critics of the tabloids are delighted by this: One scoffed in the Guardian newspaper that journalists thought it was “the couple's job to provide competitively priced content from which newspapers could profit much more handsomely than themselves.”

Markle has certainly challenged the idea of anyone else exploiting her content. She subsequently released news of her latest pregnancy alongside a romantic black-and-white photograph of the Duke and Duchess in an idyllic setting. The Daily Star’s page-one headline caught the ambivalence of the occasion: “Publicity-shy woman tells 7.67 billion people, I’m pregnant.”

As a former newspaper editor, I believe there are more serious issues at stake here, although my own personal experience of Lord Justice Warby has been wholly to the good. He found for my old newspaper, the Sunday Times, in a libel case brought by a former Conservative Party leadership contender who, we reported, had been abusing his parliamentary position for profit. His judgments, legal colleagues confirm, are impeccably argued.

In this case Warby is right that Markle and her husband deserve the same right to privacy as any ordinary citizen, despite their fame. Few daughters would relish their intimate correspondence being splashed all over the news. But context matters and Markle’s use of language in the letter raised enough questions about its purpose to be aired at trial.

This judgment makes me uneasy on another point. Juries have become virtually unheard of in U.K. media trials after recent legal changes, and yet they used to bring their own standards of fairness into play. A layperson’ s view should carry some weight in a legal system built on common law. Sometimes juries would look beyond the letter of the law when the wider context of a case exonerated the defendant or diminished the gravity of the offence. And with a jury present, the evidence would be publicly tested. In a summary judgment there’s no opportunity for even a judge without a jury to hear the full facts in open court.

Hearing of evidence in this case would at least have interrogated the Mail on Sunday’s claims that Kensington Palace officials might have helped draft Markle’s letter and that she knew it was likely to become public. Four royal employees were ready to testify. A version of the contents of the letter had been briefed by some of Markle’s friends to People magazine in the U.S. The Mail on Sunday argued that her father had a right to correct the record.

The paper didn’t help its case by publishing the letter’s contents in full. It is the Duchess’s copyright and it would have been prudent to have trimmed it down to the salient points that corrected the version put out by her camp. But should her version of the facts go wholly unchallenged as this ruling effectively suggests?

Yes, royals, celebrities and politicians should be afforded the same privacy rights as the rest of us. But the risk is that the case of the Duchess’s letter will end up tilting the balance to the rich and powerful over the right to disclose information. It may seem small beer, but that is how restrictions creep in — first in trivial matters , then in larger ones.

 

[liar liar]

This is from Woman and Home website.

So will Michael and Carol Middleton receive honorary titles from the Queen? Or will they simply stay as they are?

If they are not given any titles, the Duchess of Cambridge’s parents will be the first ever grandparents of a monarch not to have titles.

It will certainly be a significant historical moment. The Queen’s grandfather was the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, while the future king, Prince William’s grandfather on his mother's side was Earl John Spencer - and of course, his grandmother is the Queen. It follows a long line of tradition going back to the Tudors, with Anne Boleyn’s father given an earldom before she gave birth to Queen Elizabeth I.

Internationally recognised expert on British royalty and titles, Marlene Koenig tells woman&home everything we need to know about the possibility of the Middleton's receiving titles.

It is a completely stupid piece of journalism. You would think that new kings and queens were swinging through the throne room daily instead of once in a bliddy blue moon. As for the ex-con Doria getting anything - that is completely from another planet of stupid. The nearest I think it could get would be Lord and Lady Middleton.

 

[HaloGirl]

Fabulous thread title @AnderbeauJohnson

I cannot believe H and M still have supporters.
When I hear Meghan, I simply hear noise. Is she really bigheaded enough to think people want to hear her views?