Letters: What really irritates Meghan’s critics

Meghan’s adroitness

Sir: Tanya Gold suggests that people criticise Meghan Markle because she is mixed race and a woman, and states it is because she has dared to attack the royal family (‘In defence of Meghan’, 13 March). I think that misses the point. For a great number of people, her narrative simply does not ring true. Over the past few decades, thousands of media articles have accused the royal household of being claustrophobic, pedantic and antiquated. But unlike the young and naive Diana, Meghan was a thirtysomething TV star with agents and PR people when she met Prince Harry. It’s hard to believe she didn’t know what she was letting herself in for.

As Rod Liddle says, Meghan is a subscriber to the current American view that everything is possible as long as you believe it enough. Maybe she thought the force of her personality alone would change what she calls the British establishment. From her recent comments, she now seems to believe that the power of her compassion can change the world. This is what irritates most of her critics and it has nothing to do with her race. Tanya Gold calls it ambition, but it seems more like narcissism, and is very redolent of a previous American divorcée, Wallis Simpson.

People would instinctively want to sympathise with a woman who says she has been depressed and has had a miscarriage, but Meghan’s adroit positioning and use of unspecified accusations is a turn-off. I predict she is eyeing up a career in Democratic party politics.
Jeremy Tyrer
London SW19

Culture clash

Sir: Surely what the Oprah interview (‘Telling tales’ and others, 13 March) represented was nothing more than a head-on collision between the 19th and 21st centuries.

Natural curiosity

Sir: Even before reading Anil Bhoyrul’s thoughtfully constructed article regarding racism in mixed marriages (‘In