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Post by Admin on Sept 30, 2020 19:26:34 GMT
According to Page Six, when Harry and Meghan recently urged Americans to vote in the upcoming Presidential election, they violated their Megxit deal. The couple promised that “everything they do will uphold the values of Her Majesty.”
The royal family remains politically neutral in the UK. Therefore, Meghan and Harry getting political has reportedly not gone over well with other royals. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex told American voters last week to “reject hate speech, misinformation and online negativity.” They also called the upcoming election the most important in our lifetime.
“The [royal] family are all wringing their hands, thinking: Where is this going and does this abide by the deal to uphold the values of the Queen?” a royal aide revealed. “The feeling is it’s a violation of the agreement.”
Buckingham Palace clarified that any comments Harry and Meghan make are “in a personal capacity.” However, an insider noted that if Trump is re-elected and visits the UK, it could get awkward.
“What is the Queen supposed to say when her grandson and his wife have effectively campaigned against him?” the source asked.
Harry and Meghan could have gotten a better deal, claims palace aide The Duke and Duchess of Sussex announced their decision to exit the royal family before they spoke privately with senior royals. If they would have handled things in a more “private, dignified way,” they would have received a more “beneficial” deal, claims a palace aide.
According to Express, a senior palace aide stated that Harry and Meghan could have lived the life they wanted. But they chose to announce on Instagram first that they were quitting the royal family. The announcement and the new Sussex Royal website reportedly “took the royal family by surprise.”
In the biography Finding Freedom, authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand wrote that their insiders also claimed Harry and Meghan made a mistake. They “oversimplified what they were asking for.” And, the couple also “created a lot of ill will” with their website.
“They thought they would give Charles their rider, negotiate over email, rock up to London, give three months notice and fly back to Canada,” the source claimed.
The Duchess of Sussex recently sat down for an interview with feminist icon Gloria Steinheim. And during their conversation, Meghan made a comment that some believe gave new insight into the Megxit decision.
According to Express, Meghan said, “We are linked, not ranked.” This caused some to accuse her of being a hypocrite because she and Harry still use the titles of Duke and Duchess. The comment also echoes what Scobie and Durand wrote in their biography.
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Post by Admin on Oct 1, 2020 5:18:42 GMT
Meghan Markle appeared as a speaker during Fortune's virtual Most Powerful Women Summit yesterday, where the Duchess of Sussex for the first time openly addressed the criticism she's received for her remarks about voting and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Fortune editor Ellen McGirt brought up Meghan's RECENT graduation speech, which included her first big public statement in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, along with some of the criticism the Duchess received from British tabloids and even President Donald Trump for encouraging Americans to register to vote.
"You’re not the only powerful woman even in this community who has had a sitting president take a shot at you, mobs come at you, powerful people, powerful forces try to take you down or try to disparage your message," McGirt said. "This is a tough time for people with power and platform. What is your best advice for other folks with stakeholders with a desire to weigh in on the important issues of the day to take those risks carefully, to access them correctly and then to weigh in?"
Meghan responded thoughtfully, telling McGirt, "Yes, I mean I think, it’s about being authentic. And if you look back at anything that I’ve said, it’s really interesting because it often ends up—what ends up being inflammatory, it seems, is people’s interpretation of it. But if you listen to what I actually say, it’s not controversial. And actually some of it is reactive to things that just haven’t happened, which is in some ways, I think you have to have a sense of humor about it even though there’s quite a bit of gravity and there can be a lot of danger in a misinterpretation of something that was never there to begin with. But that again is a byproduct of what is happening right now for all of us."
"I would say the biggest thing and what I have always stuck to, you know, that high school graduation speech I had done it a week or so before," she continued. "I had pre-taped it for them; it was for high school, 17-year old girls, right, so the tone and the sentiment while it was of course going to be a call to action, was certainly lighter than where we landed after the murder of George Floyd. I knew I couldn’t use that tape. I really struggled, if I’m being honest, about what to say, and I didn’t sit down and write anything, and I didn’t ask anyone for help with how I should word this. I was just in tears thinking about it and I was explaining to my husband why I thought that it was so heartbreaking, certainly for me to be back in Los Angeles and it feeling so reminiscent to the state of Los Angeles with the riots after the Rodney King beating. And so for these girls to be graduating from high school, which should be a really celebratory time, to be plagued with that unrest felt troubling to me. So I just spoke from the heart, and that’s probably why it doesn’t look polished, and that’s why it doesn’t feel perfect and—but that’s also why it’s authentic."
She continued: "I think that is the takeaway that I have found is if you don’t listen to all the noise out there, and you just focus on living a purpose-driven life, and you focus on knowing what your own moral compass is, there are always going to be naysayers, but at the end of the day, you know, I used to have a quote up in my room many, many moons ago, and it resonates now perhaps more than ever ... it’s by Georgia O'Keeffe, and it’s 'I’ve already settled it for myself, so flattery and criticism go down the same drain, and I am quite free.' And the moment you are able to be liberated from all of these other opinions of what you know to be true, then I think it’s very easy to just live with truth and live with authenticity, and that is how I choose to move through the world."
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Post by Admin on Oct 3, 2020 4:39:08 GMT
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle open up in a rare interview with the ‘Evening Standard’ about the Black Lives Matter movement in honor of British Black History Month. The 36-year-old Duke of Sussex explains how Markle awakened him to issues affecting minorities, and how the couple is committed to enacting change.
Prince Harry “realised there was something rotten at the heart of royalness that is not for him” and so found a “new destiny” according to a royal biographer.
Robert Lacey, acclaimed biographer and historical consultant on The Crown, said Buckingham Palace “got it wrong” with Harry and his new wife Meghan Markle, before the couple stepped back from their royal duties.
Lacey was speaking to the Daily Mail ahead of the serialisation of his eagerly awaited book, Battle of Brothers, which tells the story of a rift between Prince William and Prince Harry.
Harry, 36, alluded to a change in his relationship with his brother in October 2019, when he said they were “on different paths”.
Discussing the rift, Lacey said: “Some say, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. It will blow over.’ But that’s not what historians will be saying in ten years’ time.
“If this breach between the brothers is not healed in some way it will come to stand with the Abdication crisis and the death of Diana as one of the traumas that changed the monarchy.
“There is time to change things in a positive direction, but at the moment the Palace is not working in that direction.”
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Post by Admin on Oct 10, 2020 3:47:17 GMT
It is unusual, of course, for a British royal to speak at all about another country’s election. But married to an American citizen and no longer a senior royal himself, Harry is busy undoing all sorts of family norms. And in his frankness he’s confirmed something that has often been written about but never quite nailed down: that the Windsor family really does prohibit itself from voting, even if there’s no specific British law against it.
It turns out that there is actually some debate about whether or not Harry could be allowed to vote, but it’s not a surprise that he never has. During Queen Elizabeth’s 68 years on the throne, maintaining her political neutrality has been one of her main priorities, though she has encouraged the act of voting in the past. That neutrality is something that Prince Charles and Prince William have carried on, though Charles’s environmental activism has veered close enough to politics to garner some criticism. The Buckingham Palace website is open about her role in the British political system. “By convention, The Queen does not vote or stand for election,” it reads, “however Her Majesty does have important ceremonial and formal roles in relation to the government of the U.K.” Though British law doesn’t clearly demand it, tradition seemingly extends her political neutrality to her entire family.
Even British politicians have disagreed about whether or not the royal family is allowed to vote. In his quest to restore voting rights to the members of the House of Lords this February, Michael Morris, who chose the name Lord Naseby when he became a life peer in 1997, mentioned the uncertainty around the matter. “We know that members of the inner circle of the royal family are encouraged not to vote—but they can vote,” he said. “In fact, we do not really know if they vote or not, but all other members of the royal family can.”
It makes intuitive sense that the royals would be disinclined to vote. In a system where a king has autocratic powers, the idea of a monarch’s vote is an oxymoron. Besides, the two chambers of the U.K. Parliament—the House of Commons and the House of Lords—both emerged more than 500 years ago as a check to the power of the monarch, so it’s reasonable to think that most monarchs never even thought to vote. On the other hand, Britain consistently ranks as one of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s top 15 most democratic societies. That a seemingly egalitarian society could disenfranchise a class of people—even if they are from a remarkably privileged class—seems off.
But there are plenty of rights that royals don’t enjoy. As Robert Hazell, coeditor of the new book The Role of Monarchy in Modern Democracy, points out, royal family members are often restricted in their freedom of speech, freedom of religion, right to privacy, and freedom of travel. The European Court of Human Rights has even taken up a few cases about legal restrictions due to royal status. In 2001, Sigvard Bernadotte, a Swedish prince and designer, filed a suit arguing that parliamentary restrictions on whom he could marry were a violation of his rights. (He died the next year, and the court declined to settle the case on its merits.)
In the book, Hazell and his coeditor Bob Morris point out that Queen Elizabeth and her ancestors reaching back to Queen Victoria have overseen Britain’s transition from a government where monarchs wielded considerable power to a social democracy where the queen’s role is largely ceremonial. In fact, the family’s desire to avoid political stances dates back to an era before the vast majority of British adults were able to vote. Because England’s formal constitution is a collection of a dozen pieces of legislation passed over the course of a few centuries, most of the norms surrounding the monarch's involvement in politics come from tradition and scholarly writing. No one has had more influence on the Windsors than scholar Walter Bagehot, who argued the monarch has rights that are more important than voting.
In his 1867 book, The English Constitution, Bagehot coined the oft-repeated idea about the role of a monarch in a representative system: “the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn.” In Bagehot’s formulation, the monarch has to remain above party loyalty precisely because their role is so important to maintaining order and mutual trust in the British political system. When Victoria was queen, this state of affairs mostly stood. Her biographer, A.N. Wilson, described the political system as “representative paternalism,” where a group of elites purport to act in the best interests of the populace. However, Victoria was reported taking sides in political disputes and hoped that the Whigs would win out over their Conservative opponents.
Experts on the English Constitution have noted that perhaps the first monarch to actually practice neutrality of political parties was the queen’s grandfather, King George V. In 1967, the scholar Harry Hearder wrote that George actually read Bagehot’s book closely. The “convention” that the royal family doesn’t vote most likely dates to the end of World War I, when most British adults gained the right to vote just as George implemented changes to bolster the monarchy after watching others around Europe collapse. First, George changed the family’s surname from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor, and changed the names of other peerages to be more English. This is also when the day-to-day of royal work became focused on charitable support and being seen by the public.
These are the ideas about the role of the monarch that the queen was trained on. In his 1977 biography, Majesty: Elizabeth II and the House of Windsor, historian Robert Lacey points out that she was also “raised” on the Bagehot definition of a monarch’s role and became scrupulously nonpartisan when she began her reign. Yet by the end of the 1950s, the queen still became associated with a certain political milieu in the eyes of the public, what Lacey describes as “a grouse-shooting, Conservative-voting oligarchy nominated as the root of the nation’s malaise by the satire industry.” It’s practically a throwaway line for Lacey, but it speaks to the real challenge the family is addressing in their attempts to stay out of politics. In a polarized country, their class background makes them seem like they would support certain political ideas; to keep their popularity with the masses, they chose to divorce themselves from the debate entirely.
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Post by Admin on Oct 16, 2020 4:43:01 GMT
Meghan Markle’s virtual global conference has come under fire at the hands of social media users for its alleged plagiaristic content. Many social media users point out how Meghan’s comments about social media and its drug like pull in her £1,342 conference is eerily similar to the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. Given the steep price tag and general disdain among many towards the royal, the internet left no stone unturned making sure the duchess was aware of her shortcoming. The statement in question which got many riled up included, "There are very few things in the world where you call the person who's engaging with it a 'user'. People who are addicted to drugs and people on social media." In comparison, in The Social Dilemma, statistician Edward Tufte was quoted saying, "There are only two industries that call their customers "users": illegal drugs and software." The main reason netizens became enraged was because they believe Meghan Markle clearly ‘ripped off’ The Social Dilemma, yet possessed the gall to say that she hadn’t been on social media for over four years. One social media user explained the social qualm behind Meghan’s comments, claiming, "Omg, so Meghan paid to speak again for Fortune and ripped off the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma theory about social media users being like drug addicts and had the cheek to say she hasn't been on it [social media] for four years?” Another pointed out, "Meghan has plagiarized her quotes from The Social Dilemma. Someone clearly watched The Social Dilemma recently.."
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