LONDON – In case you were wondering, Meghan still hates the Buckingham Palace establishment and resents her denying her voice, agency and autonomy when she and Harry were still part of the official royal family.
How are you supposed to interpret an extraordinary statement from Meghan this weekend accusing shadowy forces in the palace of ‘dictating’ that she change her name on her son Archie’s birth certificate?
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, the royal couple filed changes to both of their names.
The Duchess’s name was “corrected” to read only “Her Royal Highness Duchess of Sussex”, sparking speculation as to why this had happened.
A spokeswoman for the Duchess said: “The name change 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 The Duke of Sussex.
To see this British tabloid and their carnival of so-called ‘experts’, chose to deceitfully slap this in a calculated family ‘snub’ and suggest that she would strangely want to be nameless on her child’s birth certificate or any other legal document, would be laughable if it weren’t offensive.
“There is a lot going on in the world. Let’s focus on that instead of making clickbait.”
The verb “dictate”, in case you were wondering, is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “as an order ‘or’ to impose authoritatively, pronounce or specify ‘and Meghan’s use of the word in her angry statement certainly conveys the feeling that Meghan’s own wishes were considered utterly irrelevant by the pen-slickers in the palace representing the change.
It is interesting to note that the Sun on Sundays, who broke the story over the weekend, claims they contacted Meghan’s press team about the story but received no response.
It’s a fair comment from Meghan’s team that the paper’s speculation that the name change might have been a pop at Kate Middleton’s was unnecessary – and idiot. This same point was indeed noted by Tim Teeman in The Daily Beast’s weekly royal newsletter on Sunday, in which he wrote: Sun states this as a disapproval of William and Kate, because Kate has her name on the birth certificates of her children. The possibility that the decision was made for personal, totally non-disapproving reasons is not addressed. “
Sussexes’ policy of “zero engagement” with British tabloids such as the Sun seems guaranteed to result in the Sussex side of the story not being put down when those newspapers write about them.
Meghan has often complained that she felt silenced by the palace. For example, in an interview with website The 19th, she said, “I know what it’s like to have a voice, and what it’s like to feel voiceless.”
In one of her few joint performances with William and Kate, she was the last to speak, and when the microphone was not handed to her, she said icily, “Don’t have a voice?”
But it seems, at least from the Sun on Sundays account of events she was asked to comment on the very strange name change on both Archie certificates, which is, after all, public, and has chosen not to.
That hardly counts as the silencing, and that means this is hardly a story of outrageous press abuse that Meghan’s statement seems to suggest it is. It seems to be more of a cautionary tale of the unacceptability of responding in a timely manner to real press inquiries. And since Meghan and Harry have a $ 100 million deal with Netflix and a lucrative podcast deal with Spotify, complaining about the palace’s denial of the agency several years ago seems a bit like fighting yesterday’s war.
As they note, there is “a lot going on in the world” right now.
On Sunday, sources at Buckingham Palace suggested that a “clerical error and nothing more than that” was the cause of Archie’s certificate change.
You have to wonder if, by using this story to pluck at the edge of her troubled relationship with the palace and the press, Meghan is really making things better.
For while it remains unclear why the birth certificate was changed, Meghan’s statement makes it very clear that her hurt resentment against the palace is still not at all in question.