PLATELL'S PEOPLE: The week the world woke up to Meghan the martyr
PLATELL’S PEOPLE: The week the world woke up at last to Meghan the martyr
Last week, I wrote that I felt increasingly sorry for Harry and his walk-on role in his wife’s never-ending psychodrama. I switched off my computer thinking: enough about the Sussexes!
Yet Meghan’s 6,400-word interview with New York fashion website The Cut this week means I have no choice but to revisit the subject — and Meghan’s strange relationship with the truth.
The Queen famously said ‘recollections may vary’ when it came to Megs’s extraordinary charges of cruelty and racism against the Royal Family. Yet it’s the recollections of those outside the royal fold that are now calling the Duchess to account.
The hashtag #VoetsekMeghan — a rude word in Afrikaans politely translated as ‘get lost’ — has been trending on social media this week
Among the more surprising claims Megs made in her interview was that at the London premiere of The Lion King in 2019, a South African cast member gasped at her: ‘When you married into this family we rejoiced in the streets the same we did when Mandela was freed from prison.’
Really? Dr John Kani, who claims to be the only South African actor in the film, swears he has never met Meghan and says he finds her claims ‘baffling’.
The film’s South African composer, who did speak to her, says he did not recall talking to Meghan of Mandela in their one-minute chat.
So much for the truth. But Meghan’s comments understandably caused outrage in South Africa. Mandela’s grandson Zwelivelile protested at her tone-deaf suggestion that marrying into the Royal Family remotely compared to Mandela’s release after 27 years in prison. Meghan’s ‘long walk to freedom’ was in 6 in Jimmy Choos.
The hashtag #VoetsekMeghan — a rude word in Afrikaans politely translated as ‘get lost’ — has been trending on social media this week.
Dr John Kani (left), who claims to be the only South African actor in the film, swears he has never met Meghan and says he finds her claims ‘baffling’
And that was not the only bizarre remark she made in the interview. Meghan’s claim that no one treated her ‘like a black woman’ until she started dating Harry was ridiculed even by black American TV presenters, with one saying that if Meghan was in her 30s before she encountered racial prejudice, she was one privileged woman.
Judging by the reaction to it, the interview with The Cut seems to mark the moment when much of the planet has finally turned against Meghan.
She has been called the ‘Petulant Princess’ in the U.S., while French media have accused her of continuing to ‘monetise the image of the Royal Family’. Germany’s Bild newspaper has criticised her for ‘shamelessly’ copying Princess Diana — in the week Harry marked the 25th anniversary of his mother’s death.
Even in America, her stardust is diminishing — and the public are more interested in Kate and William anyway.
My gentle advice would be for the Duchess to put a sock in it.
This was the week the world woke up to who Meghan really is. And it seems they didn’t like it.
DiCaprio’s new love with a short shelf-life
You have to feel sorry for Leonardo DiCaprio’s latest squeeze, 22-year-old model Maria Beregova, given the star’s rule that he never dates anyone over 25.
Isn’t there something creepy about a bloated, middle-aged man squiring ever-younger women: the eternal bachelor wearing them as arm candy to prove his dwindling masculinity?
Pictured: Leonardo Di Caprio’s now ex-girlfriend Camilla Morrone, who turned 25 in June
Of all the tributes to Bill Turnbull, one of the most poignant was from his friend and colleague Nick Robinson, who has also battled cancer. Nick remembers Bill — married to Sesi for 34 years — as ‘a modest man with nothing to be modest about . . . with a family who loved and were loved’. No wonder that, as he neared the end of his life, Bill reminded us: ‘The most important medicine of all is to have love in your life.’
After her triumph in the Wagatha Christie case, Coleen Rooney signs a multi-million-pound deal with Disney+ to tell her dreary tale — having conveniently had a camera crew recording her during the trial.
Her antagonist, Rebekah Vardy, is also said to be considering megabucks offers to spill the beans — and now even Vardy’s ex-agent Caroline ‘I dropped my phone in the sea’ Watt is being wooed by streaming giants. What a world we live in when two Wags past their sell-by dates and some nobody assistant can all command riches — and for what?
Wagatha isn’t a whodunnit — it’s a whocares?
Poldark’s Aidan Turner stars as a troubled psychologist with early-onset Parkinson’s in TV drama The Suspect. But the only ‘suspect’ thing about him is that horrible beard: he looks like he is auditioning for ZZ Top.
Poldark’s Aidan Turner stars as a troubled psychologist with early-onset Parkinson’s in TV drama The Suspect
Victoria Beckham is said to be ‘heartbroken’ at having fallen out with her daughter-in-law Nicola Peltz — and has barely seen her son ‘Brook the Cook’ since his over-the-top wedding in April.
Posh made it the hard way: first a spectacular career as a Spice Girl even though she could barely sing, then as a fashion designer.
But Nicola is a spoilt heiress who would be nothing without Daddy’s millions.
As this vacuous girl will discover in time, VB is made of steel.
Emma Raducanu shows admirable humility as she’s knocked out in straight sets in the first round of the U.S. Open. The teenage prodigy seems set to plummet to outside the top 80 in the world rankings — but she’s determined to climb back up again. Good on you, Em! Some are wondering, though, if the ‘finger blister’ that supposedly hampered her game was not a sporting injury — but caused by all those Tiffany diamond rings.
I’ll stick to the champagne, Kate
For years we barely heard a squeak from Kate Moss, but now she can’t stop talking as she plugs her ‘wellness’ brand Cosmoss, promising a ‘transformation’ for all who slap on her face cream.
For years we barely heard a squeak from Kate Moss, but now she can’t stop talking as she plugs her ‘wellness’ brand Cosmoss
Bad timing for Mossy: her £400 daily beauty regime arrives in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. And how hilarious to hear health advice from a woman who used to say the secret of her beauty was ‘three Cs and one V’ — cigarettes, champagne, coffee and vodka.
Just three Cs, Kate? What about your infamous intake of cocaine?
Disappointing that proud ‘gay icon’ David Beckham is now the face of the World Cup in Qatar, where it’s illegal for a man to love a man and where women are chattels. Judas got only 30 pieces of silver for his betrayal — Beckham got £10 million. Golden Balls has lost his shine.
Vladimir Putin pettily refuses Mikhail Gorbachev a state funeral and announces he’s too busy to attend the send-off of the man who ended the Cold War. A relief, surely, for Gorbachev’s family: no fine statesman and peacemaker would want a mass-murdering dictator at such an event.
Westminster Wars
Desperate to keep her job, Priti Patel announces she’s flown a grand total of 32 Albanians home. What a pitiful effort to divert attention from her failure as Home Secretary: 25,000 illegal migrants have crossed the Channel so far this year.
Astronomer Royal Lord Rees of Ludlow says we should stop blasting humans into space and send robots up instead. A perfect job at last for Keir Starmer?
On his podcast The Rest Is Politics, former Tory minister and failed London mayoral candidate Rory Stewart says being a politician was ‘bad for my brain, my body, my soul’.
It wasn’t great for the souls of his Cumbrian constituents in Penrith and The Border, either: the Eton and Oxford-educated Stewart sniffily dismissed them as ‘primitives who hold up their trousers with twine’.
At last, the rail union bosses have done us a favour: calling a strike during this month’s Labour conference in Liverpool. This means many Lefties may be unable to make the journey to Starmer’s unmissable shindig packed with hate-filled whingers calling the Tories ‘scum’.
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