Meghan will make millions but Camilla will make a difference
When, more than a year ago, the Duchess of Cornwall first bravely spoke out in this newspaper about the horrors of domestic violence, I doubt I was alone in wondering: What could she possibly understand about it?
And yet through her quiet and diligent work as patron of the charity SafeLives, Camilla has done more than anyone to highlight the plight of abused women.
Yesterday, writing in The Guardian, she pointed out how lockdown has caused a huge increase in the torment suffered by those trapped in these relationships.
‘Abusers work from home,’ SafeLives chillingly warns. There is nothing self- aggrandising about supporting this cause. Domestic violence is gritty and ghastly: one of the least glamorous subjects for which any royal could campaign.
Yet it could still save lives: and Camilla is clearly sincere when she implores people to ‘reach in’ if they suspect someone is a victim, not to wait for them to reach out. needless to say, there are no multi-million pound TV deals in this line of work.
In her dogged way, Camilla is following a long tradition of royal women — the Queen, Princesses Diana and Anne, the Duchesses of Wessex and Cambridge — who undertake charity work that is mostly unseen and unsung.
how different is the path chosen by the woman who still takes care to call herself the ‘Duchess of Sussex’ and served the Royal Family for all of two years before she decamped to Los Angeles.
As Meghan and hapless husband harry revealed in a toe- curlingly woke statement, their new multi-million-pound deal with netflix will ‘shine a light on people and causes around the world . . . creating content that informs but also gives hope’.
The truth is Meghan knows that if she’d stayed in the Royal Family, she could have done all those things.
But there might not have been such an enormous pay packet for being the self-appointed saviour of the universe. This former ‘briefcase girl’ on Deal Or no Deal has now become a money-grubbing, international laughing stock.
Meg’s ‘friends’ claim she had to flee the UK because this is a horribly racist country that never appreciated her talents as a brave campaigner.
how I wish Meghan had taken the time to learn something from Camilla, who was once the most vilified woman in Britain. Yet through hard work, duty and, dare I suggest, a sense of humour and a level of selfawareness that Meghan can only dream of, Camilla has gradually transformed herself into someone most of us respect and admire.
Is it too late for Meghan to do the same?