The Telegraph
We’re all living Meghan’s truth now
Like Alice through the looking glass, we are required to believe impossible things before breakfast
MADELINE GRANT
11 March 2021 • 8:42am
Madeline Grant
Just days after JFK’s assassination, Jackie Kennedy crafted a glittering fairytale about her husband’s presidency. “There will be great presidents again,” the grieving widow told Life Magazine in a now-iconic interview, “but there will never be another Camelot.”
Her words soon passed into the cultural lexicon; before long few remembered that the term had never been used during JFK’s tenure. The Camelot myth beguiled America for decades and resonates to this day.
I was strangely reminded of it as I listened to Meghan Markle “speaking her truth” in another famous interview. Certainly, the myth-maker’s hand on the scales was more obvious this time. Instead of King Arthur and his knights, there was Disney, via the Duchess’s ham-fisted reference to The Little Mermaid. In place of Jackie’s delicate breathy tones, we had Harry’s stumbling Estuary English and Meghan’s doe-eyed Californian corporatese.
Yet this was an equally calculated attempt to mythologise the couple and redefine their place in history. Alongside the fairytale references were overt parallels between the Duchess and Princess Diana – perhaps even with Princess Latifa, the captive daughter of Dubai’s royal family. Just as Jackie Kennedy dictated the terms of her interview, Oprah Winfrey proved a compliant interrogator, offering performative expressions of shock at things anyone familiar with Royal protocol would have understood.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/11/living-meghans-truth-now/