The Great ‘Grabdication’: Saga of the Sussexes Takes a Few Turns for the Worse

What in 2020 I coined “The Grabdication” — the flight to America from the UK by Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, in order to monetise their experiences within the Royal Family — has taken a few turns for the worst recently. For one so obsessed with coming across as an all-round Good Person, Ms. Markle could barely have made a worst fist of letting her sick 80-year-old father crowdfund for a serious medical operation, it transpired this week, while she herself is sitting pretty in a $14 million home with more toilets than the Yankee Stadium. Thomas Markle was reputedly a supportive father who facilitated to an admirable degree his daughter’s expensive education and fledgling career. In contrast, the image of the Sussex roadshow resting up after its Worldwide Privacy Tour — as a rackety vehicle for grasping charlatans — has never been more jarring.Not only were the couple themselves dismissed as “grifters…nobody cares what you have to say about anything unless you talk about the royal family and you just complain about them” last year by Spotify’s head of “podcast innovation and monetisation,” Bill Simmons, after their $20 million deal ended after just a dozen episodes.Now the English journalist Omid Scobie, who has built a media career from displaying the most dogged loyalty to the Duchess of Muchness, has flogged his novel “Royal Spin” to Universal Television. The show promises a feisty American heroine called upon to “breathe new life” into Buckingham Palace. “But in an institution steeped in tradition and strict protocol, change isn’t easy — or welcome …. never-ending culture clashes and risky new love interests, this fish out of water is determined to prove she’s got what it takes.”Sound familiar?That the protagonist is a media-ocrity rather than an actress might imply that Mr. Scobie has introduced an element of sex-change fantasy into this rather prosaic scenario. It’s rude to make personal comments, but Mr. Scobie has built his career on picking holes in the souls of anyone who displeases Ms. Markle. So it would be remiss not to mention that he appears to be wearing a plastic mask fashioned by a short-sighted and rather silly child with absolutely no artistic talent as a vague approximation of a human face.Mr. Scobie claims to have had no cosmetic surgery, but rather as Kim Kardashian once submitted herself to a “butt X-ray” to prove that her greatest asset was real, it would be interesting to see Mr. Scobie sit next to a naked flame for 15 minutes without showing signs of guttering. To make matters more thrillingly strange, rather as it was rumored that Michael Jackson had all that work done because he wanted to resemble his idol Diana Ross, there is a distinct resemblance to the Duchess in her devotee’s uncanny-valley visage.I wouldn’t be surprised if he turned out to be her own personal hair-bank, or performer of some other strange and intimate service. It’s a shame, I wrote some time ago, that the ancient royal-retainer position of Groom of the Stool has been abolished; Mr. Scobie would have been a shoo-in.Though denying that they have ever met, Mr. Scobie was privy to Ms. Markle’s most intimate moments as detailed in his best-selling book about her, 2020’s “Finding Freedom,” incidents, I once noted elsewhere, as trivial as Ms. Markle impressing Harry with her packing skills — “She has always taken pride in being a great packer — going as far as layering dryer sheets in between her clothes to keep them smelling fresh” — and as serious as the “accidental” disclosure in the Dutch edition of last year’s follow-up book “Endgame” that Princess Catherine was allegedly one of the “Royal racists” who made off-color remarks about the Sussexes’ first child’s possible skin color.Catherine, our princess in limbo, is at the heart of the matter. Already popular in this country, she now receives the kind of regard which is reserved for the beautiful and virtuous who have died young. There is every chance that she will recover, but her disappearance from public life — and the hysterical chorus of conspiracy theories whipped up by the rabidly self-righteous “Sussex Squad” on social media — has lent her semi-mythic status.What could, when Catherine was in good health, be portrayed as an amusing cat-fight between two equals now seems a shocking example of bullying by the Sussexes; an accusation that is only slightly less heinous than racism on the charge-sheet of the Woke.It’s salutary now to look back at Ms. Markle’s wildly ambitious project to become the most highly-married American into the British royal family since Wallis Simpson bagged her king, leading to the original Abdication. It’s easy to imagine Ms. Markle not so far into the future, Harry fled back to the UK, her children gone their own way, like a latter-day Norma Desmond getting ready for her close-up that never comes. And at her side, in the Erich von Stroheim role, the strange factotum with the waxen face reassuring her that she’s still big — it’s the podcasts that got small.

The Great ‘Grabdication’: Saga of the Sussexes Takes a Few Turns for the Worse

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