In the period when the acquisition of the former Meghan Markle was depicted as little short of a national triumph, much was written in the British press about her various accomplishments. These are, after all, roughly as common in royal spouses as successful independent careers. Meghan, the actress and blogger and charity worker, is also, it emerged, a skilled calligrapher.
“I’ve always had a propensity for getting the cursive down pretty well,” she once told an Esquire journalist, who’d described her writing as “incredible”. “What it evolved into was my pseudo-waitressing job when I was auditioning.”
Now that tormenting the Duchess of Sussex has become a national sport, limited only by the supply of new material, this same incredible handwriting is proving a treasure trove for character assassins. Last week, after her father released sections of a private letter she had written, alleged handwriting experts confirmed what the Meghan pursuit is making increasingly clear: harassment by the press is not over in the post-Leveson era, just different, and not merely because the results are disseminated instantly, with added conspiracy, on social media.
More vigilance over physical privacy still leaves room for intrusive, but undisprovable, speculation; greater avoidance of libels does not restrict dehumanising commentary, volunteered, of course, from a perspective of strictly caring emotional literacy. Body language experts will claim, for instance, to gauge her mental state from Meghan’s deployment of her bump. Since the Ipso code of conduct proscribing harassment doesn’t cover any distress caused by amateur analysis, maybe former phone hackers and laid-off bin rummagers could yet find employment as hired gaslighters of one sort or another.
For the Daily Mirror, Ruth Myers, a handwriting expert, found, in a protractedly unflattering analysis, that the letter exposed Meghan as “emotionally insecure and self-pitying”. Also “easily provoked to anger”. It was further possible for this scholar to deduce, from handwriting alone, “an inability to forgive”, something arguably contradicted by the letter’s existence.
In the same document, Emma Bache, another expert, discovered evidence of a “showman and a narcissist”. Tracey Trussell detected vulnerability: “It’s impossible for her to forget people who have meant so much to her in her life.”
If, having got beyond her conscious, professional calligraphy, these experts could not agree on which facets, out of so many, of the duchess’s character are most concerning, well, perhaps that only confirms, to the trolls congregating on Twitter, that fellow Meghanphobe Piers Morgan is correct to feel (following his defriending by her) generally “suspicious and cynical about Ms Markle”.
Morgan is sympathetic, instead, to the emotionally abusive man who, with the unstinting support of the British press, has committed to destroying Meghan’s pleasure in her wedding, her pregnancy and, by the sound of it, her forthcoming motherhood – “her poor father”. If superficially unalike, the two older men appear to share an incredulous resentment that a young woman might, out of self-preservation, disregard them, no matter many times they misrepresent or admonish her.
The latest example of Morgan’s retribution was among several press retorts prompted by an intervention by George Clooney, who warned: “She is being pursued and hunted in the same way that Diana was and it’s history repeating itself.”
By way of correcting him, a number of royalty authorities seized this opportunity to attack Meghan, for the completely new personality defect of being implicitly compared with Diana, by someone who is probably not – her critics say – a proper friend anyway. Arthur Edwards, who photographed the teenage Diana in a transparent skirt (“the sun came out and revealed those beautiful legs”), told Meghan to “lighten up. You’re not the new Princess Diana.” In the Times, Clooney’s comment was dismissed as “utter fantasy”.
If not exactly fantasy, Clooney’s version of Diana’s persecution does, admittedly, leave lots out. Glossed over is the late princess’s well-documented habit, with the collusion of chosen journalists, of invading her own privacy; her later refusal to use royal protection officers. When secrecy mattered to her, Diana did take holidays or have long relationships, undocumented in the press. Moreover, prior to her first (initially denied) experiment in shared psychodrama, authored with Andrew Morton, in which she detailed Prince Charles’s infidelity with Camilla Parker-Bowles, the young Diana remained, to her husband’s annoyance, a cherished national pet.
So if anything, Clooney surely does not go far enough. Within months of her marriage, with zero contribution from their victim, sections of the UK press had identified Meghan as someone of whom virtually anything malicious might be said, regardless of accuracy, public interest and its potential impact on her health. Neither her advancing pregnancy nor one attempted correction has brought any respite.
Whatever privacy concessions Meghan Markle was willing (however inexplicably) to make in exchange for royal privileges, she could not, reasonably, have anticipated these sustained personal attacks, for which the sole justification is – ludicrously – that they originate in a man who should ideally be rewarded with a restraining order. Would any of this, it is increasingly asked, given the indulgence extended to most royal hangers-on, have happened if Meghan were not, to use her term, biracial?
Plainly, this affluent couple have choices and an exit from royal life could liberate them, at once, from vindictive relations and their press facilitators, to say nothing of their current destiny as lifetime specimens for bodily and other analysis. Plus we’d finally find out if anything would make the Markles happy.
That outcome might be less promising, however, for the reputations of the very news groups that, seconds after identifying Meghan as breath of fresh air, decided she was also a hardened manipulatrix, cruel to her poor stalker of a daddy, with a way of being pregnant that really pisses off newsroom executives. And leave aside plunging trust levels, and journalism’s deepening funding crisis, will no one think of the graphologists?
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
