Meghan must put a Royal sock in it
IT MAKES my blood boil when healthy people deign to lecture the terminally ill on how “All Life Is Sacred”. This week 80-year-old retired accountant Geoff Whaley flew to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland to end his life and the torment of motor neurone disease. But not before he and wife Ann had been threatened and hounded by police and social services.
It is to this country’s shame that terminally ill people whose lives are hellish and whose dignity is long gone are expected to die long, drawn out, agonising deaths because of an outdated law and a bunch of so-called “professionals” who presume to know what’s best for them.
Geoff Whaley died in his wife’s arms at a time of his choosing, which is exactly as it should be.
Shame on those who tried to deprive him of that. ■
SO, after her wedding Meghan Markle wrote to her dad and begged him to stop “victimising” her by talking about her in the media. She was devastated when he responded by asking her to do a photoshoot with him: “I’m telling you I don’t want to communicate with the media and you’re asking me to communicate through the media,” she’s reported to have told Thomas Markle.
Now, the reason we know all this is because five of Meghan’s closest friends have spoken anonymously to America’s People Magazine with what looks like Meghan’s consent.
So hang on – the story of Meghan telling her dad not to communicate with her through the media is being told… through the media? Seems like an illogical strategy to me.
Anyhow, these friends – highly unlikely to have spoken out without Meghan’s permission – are adamant that all the bad stuff that’s been said about her is nonsense. They insist she isn’t the “Difficult Duchess”, that she didn’t have a hissy fit over a tiara, or ask for St George’s Chapel to be spritzed with perfume, that she’s grateful to all her royal aides – even though six have resigned since she married Harry last May. As for the row over her firing off 5am emails to Palace staff? Her friends say that was just a misreading of her “organised, diligent, focused and hard-working nature”.
Look, I get that Meghan’s friends want to protect her but this eulogy – that she’s a wonderful person who loves animals and actually cooks for herself – is unlikely to do that. Especially as Kensington Palace’s press team weren’t told it was happening and would have probably done everything to stop it if they had been.
Not just because protocol dictates Royals “Never complain, Never explain” or because all this story is likely to do is restart yet another transatlantic slanging match with Meghan’s riff-raff family who had actually piped
POMPOUS POSTURING OF EU BUREAUCRATS WILL BE CUT OFF IN THEIR PRIME
WHEN EU President Donald Tusk condemned to Hell all those who voted for and promoted Brexit, he actually did us all a BIG favour. Because his spiteful, sneering European elitism reminded us just how much the EU bosses hate us, why we despise them and why there really is no choice now but to get out.
Their contempt for democracy is obscene. And their disdain for electorates – ours, Greece’s and Italy’s, all of which they have sh*t on – is towering.
It’s clear now there isn’t a deal that will ever be acceptable down in recent months. But more importantly you cannot use the media when it suits you and then attack it when it says something you don’t like.
But this was always going to happen. When Harry and Meghan excitedly announced their engagement, I wondered how this beautiful, independent, outspoken Hollywood star would cope with the crippling constraints of royal life. How, having spent her life fighting to have a voice, she’d deal with having that voice censored, sometimes silenced, by the House of Windsor.
But if Meghan’s friends think THIS is a clever way of getting around the diktats of The Firm – they really don’t know how it all works. Meghan doesn’t need her friends to garner public support because, currently, she has it. Her friends claim that she has “sat silently back and endured lies and untruths”.
Well, sorry, but that’s part of the job. And Meghan is smart enough to have known that. FUNNY isn’t it - last week more than 1,300 schools closed their doors due to “extreme weather conditions” (a bit of snow) but the pub near me and most of the coffee shops were heaving with Mums and their kids.
SO far the Royals, particularly the Queen, have bent over backwards to accommodate the woman who has bedazzled Prince Harry and an adoring nation. She has been afforded courtesies other fiancées and wives have not – not least because no one wants a repetition of what happened with Diana. Meghan needs to understand she HAS the support of the British people.
And she needs to forget the negatives of royal life and concentrate on the wonderful, positive, life-changing aspects of it – especially impending parenthood.
Because the snipes and criticism will always be there. It’s the downside of what she signed up for. But for her sake I really hope she doesn’t decide to take on The Firm because she will learn, as did Diana, that she will lose. It would be a sad end to the fairytale. Email me at carole.malone@reachplc.com ● Follow me on Twitter @thecarolemalone ■
MANY people are asking what this new emoji means. I know exactly what it means and those silly little men who troll me on Twitter will be seeing a lot of it to Tusk, Barnier and the idiot Juncker. Their endgame has always been to overturn the referendum and trample us stupid Brits into the dirt for daring to think we can rule ourselves.
But here’s the thing. I think the bullying, the posturing, the intransigence of these two-bob dictators could soon be over because the democratically elected leaders of the other 27 countries (the grown-up politicians) are now terrified about what will happen to THEIR struggling economies, THEIR manufacturing, THEIR trade if the EU’s second biggest in future.
Allow them to die with dignity
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DUNCAN Bannatyne celebrated his 70th birthday last week with a toga party in Barbados. Here he is with his 38-year-old wife, Nigora Whitehorn, who looks drop dead gorgeous in a gold lace dress while Duncan, clad in what looks like an old sheet trimmed with tinsel, looks like her grandad – and is old enough to be. ■
NEWSREADER Moira Stewart, 69, says although she never married, she’s had lots of boyfriends and enjoyed “energetic, athletic relationships with all kinds of people – particularly in the ’60s when you didn’t even bother to shake hands”.
So, how come I never got invited to the kind of parties Moira went to? customer (us) doesn’t get a deal. The fact is the eurozone is hurtling towards its third recession in 10 years and without our £39billion and with the inevitable increased trade tariffs of a No Deal, it’s likely to hit sooner rather than later.
I don’t doubt EU fanatics would like to see everyone who doesn’t want to be part of their loony Euro cult burn in Hell. But it won’t happen. Because if we leave without a deal, the faltering economies of Europe are likely to crash and burn. And I don’t see the leaders of those countries letting that happen – no matter what Tusk says!