LONDON: Just in case you were wondering, Meghan still hates the establishment of Buckingham Palace and is annoyed that they deprive her of her voice, agency and autonomy when she and Harry were still part of the official royal family.
How else to interpret an extraordinary statement by Meghan this weekend in which she accused the shadow forces at the palace of “dictating” that she change her name to her son Archie’s birth certificate?
In the original certificate, registered 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 submitted modifications to both names.
The Duchess’s name was “corrected” to simply read “Her Duchess of Sussex, Her Royal Highness,” which sparked some speculation as to why this had happened.
A spokeswoman for the Duchess said: “The change of name of the public documents in 2019 was dictated by The Palace, as confirmed by the documents of senior Palace officials. This was not requested by Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. nor by the Duke of Sussex.
“Seeing this British tabloid and its so-called ‘expert’ carnival chose to mislead him into a calculated family ‘mistrust’ and suggest that, curiously, he would like to be anonymous to his child’s birth certificate or any other legal document, it would be laughable if it were not offensive.
“There are a lot of things in the world, let’s focus on that instead of creating clickbait.”
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the verb “dictate,” just in case you were wondering “issue as an order ”or“ impose, pronounce or specify with authority ”and Meghan’s use of the word in her angry statement certainly captures the sense that Meghan’s own wishes were considered completely irrelevant by the palace pushers who imposed the change.
It is interesting to note that the file Sunday Sunday, who broke the story over the weekend, claims they contacted Meghan’s press team about the story, but received no response.
Meghan’s team makes a fair comment that the newspaper’s speculation that the name change could have been a savings to Kate Middleton was gratuitous and brazen. In fact, this same point was pointed out by Tim Teeman in The Daily Beast’s weekly royal bulletin on Sunday, in which he wrote: Ground he postulates this as a fight against William and Kate, because Kate has her name on her children’s birth certificates. The possibility is not raised that the decision was made for personal, totally unrelated reasons.
However, Sussex ‘s “zero engagement” policy with British tabloids such as the Ground it seems guaranteed that it will turn out that he will not side with the story of the Susxes when these papers write about them.
Meghan has often complained that she felt silenced by the palace. In an interview with The 19th website, for example, he said, “I know what it’s like to have a voice and also what it’s like to feel voiceless.”
In one of his few joint appearances with William and Kate, he was the last to speak, and when he was not handed the microphone, he said jealously, “I have no voice?”
But it seems, at least from the Sunday to Sunday account of the facts he was asked to comment on the strange name change of Archie’s certificate, which after all is a matter of public record, and he decided not to do so.
This is hardly considered silenced, and that means it’s hardly a story of outrageous press abuse that Meghan’s statement seems to suggest it is. It seems more like a cautionary tale about the inadvisability of responding in a timely manner to actual press inquiries. And given that Meghan and Harry have a $ 100 million deal with Netflix and a lucrative podcast deal with Spotify, complaining about the palace’s denial of agency several years ago seems a bit like fighting the war of yesterday.
As they point out, right now “there are many things in the world.”
On Sunday, Buckingham Palace sources suggested that a “clerical error and nothing more than that” was to blame for the alteration of Archie’s certificate.
One has to wonder if Meghan, in using this story to pick the crust of her troubled relationship with the palace and the press, is really making things better.
Because, while it’s still unclear why the birth certificate was amended, Meghan’s statement makes it very clear that her resentment harmed by the palace is still in doubt.