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EMBARRASSING FAMILIES

POSTERITY does not judge snobbery kindly. There has been an outpouring of wicked gleefulness about Meghan Markle’s ‘embarrassing’ family, yet not enough speculation, I would suggest, about some of the entitled triple-barrelled toffs Harry will have had to invite to Saturday’s nuptials.

I picture the couple relaxing on honeymoon by playing Terrible Relatives Top Trumps. ‘My love, surely my Princess Michael beats your pot-grower?’

Everyone has relations who embarrass them. My beloved nineyear-old shied away rather than let me kiss him at the school gate last Friday. My mother reminded me that I once told school pals the man who had just dropped me off was ‘a gardener’ and not my doctor father, because he was wearing an orange boilersuit to undertake some tree surgery.

Literature is full of embarrassing relatives. If Meghan was given a reading list on How to Understand the English Aristocracy, she might have come across the rampantly eccentric Uncle Matthew in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit Of Love, who uses bloodhounds to hunt his own children.

Or what about the nation’s favourite upwardly mobile heroine, Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice? She is frequently mortified by her silly mother’s alltoo-obvious efforts to marry off her daughters and the poor judgment shown in letting the barely teenaged Lydia and Kitty socialise unchaperoned. Yet Mr Darcy only becomes a hero when he sets aside his own pride and prejudice to salvage Lydia’s reputation.

‘Marrying up’ is also a perennial theme of American fiction. The Custom Of The Country, by Edith Wharton, tells of Undine Spragg, a Mid-West beauty determined to conquer high society.

The Park Avenue crowd she seeks to infiltrate are shamefully snooty about her family, yet her hardworking father is one of the novel’s few truly likeable characters.

These days, it’s not where you’re from but what you do that counts.