June 2022 Newsletter: Meghan Markle's Vogue Interview

Is the Duchess of Sussex considering a career in politics?

The end of June snuck up on me entirely. I was sitting working away this morning when I suddenly realized it was July 1…and the monthly newsletter was late! I enjoyed having an excuse to put work aside this afternoon, though, and dive into analyzing some recent royal happenings.

Meghan Markle’s interview in Vogue is everywhere right now, and it is reigniting speculation she might be planning to run for some elected office. So that’s the topic of this newsletter.

On June 28th, Vogue published a picture of the Duchess of Sussex to its Instagram account. The post announced a new interview/discussion titled: “Gloria Steinem, the Duchess of Sussex, and Jessica Yellin on Abortion Rights, the ERA, and Why They Won’t Give Up Hope.” The piece was interesting. Its first few paragraphs began:

On June 26—two days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade—Jessica Yellin, the award-winning journalist and founder of the independent media company News Not Noise, called the two people she knew could put that seismic event into perspective. The first? Gloria Steinem. The second? Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.

Steinem, the face of American feminism, and Meghan, a vocal advocate for paid leave and fair labor rights for women, have been friends since 2020. After Meghan learned that they were both sheltering in place in Montecito, California, she asked if Steinem wanted to help her make calls thanking voter-registration organizers. Steinem agreed. 

That connection soon blossomed into an alliance, and for the past several months, Steinem and Meghan have been formulating a plan to get the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) ratified. 

There are a number of interesting things to pull from this article.

First, this interview certainly poses a problem for the Royal Family. It demolishes whatever dam remained in place holding back

Meghan’s political activity whilst a royal. I predicted almost from the start that Meghan was not able to remain apolitical, nor did she want to try. I think that is a primary reason she flamed out as a working royal so quickly. Meghan took up the title and the role with no intention of playing by the rules. She was always going to push the envelope until her activity spilled over into the political arena.

When Meghan and Harry left the fold, they “vowed to uphold the values of the Queen,” which everyone took to primarily mean that, because the Queen did not strip them of their HRH status, the couple would remain apolitical as Her Majesty has done for the entirety of her more than 90 years. Even so, I doubted they’d be able to hold to that pledge.

Some would argue the two have already broken that vow with respect to both British and American politics. On the U.K. side of the pond, royal correspondent Richard Palmer pointed to the couple’s complaints that wealthy governments, including the U.K.'s, had failed to provide poorer nations with sufficient vaccination against coronavirus, and argued the pair had broken their vow by commenting on the actions of the British Government.

On the American side, Meghan had already come about as close to the line as possible without fully crossing it. In 2020, she appeared with other prominent Democratic women to remind people to vote. Although they did not endorse any candidate, their support for Joe Biden was obvious—but at least there was the façade of neutrality.

Those are just two examples, and royal watchers will disagree on whether the actions actually crossed the line. But this Vogue piece marked the moment Meghan dropped the façade—probably with a sigh of relief.

We will have to see what the Palace does—if anything. Meghan and Harry have already gone so incredibly rogue with their various interviews and attacks against the royals, the Palace might feel this new foray into politics is less important, since the couple are so publicly estranged from the royal family. Yet, with their recent appearance at the Platinum Jubilee events, I think it still poses a problem. We will dive into this issue more in another post. Today, I am more interested in what this Vogue piece is telling us about Meghan’s current ambitions.

In addition to commenting on the abortion debate, Meghan indicated that she is ready to take on a more activist role when she revealed that she is planning to work with Gloria Steinem to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (“ERA”). I thought this was most interesting, because a lot of people think Meghan is planning to run for some elected office.

I have always been skeptical that Meghan will actually run for anything. Certainly running for office poses a tempting—perhaps impossible to resist—opportunity to grasp a public platform and demand a spotlight. She may well run at some point. Running for a prominent office would certainly draw immediate and sustained media attention and give Meghan something to do—an actual purpose/platform. As we have discussed in previous newsletters, having left the royal fold (which gave purpose to Harry and Meghan’s public activities) the two have been flitting from one project to the next attempting to create that purpose. Running for office would finally give her a legitimate and substantive purpose.

A primary drawback of running for office, however, is that the spotlight is not uniformly kind. Politics is an inherently adversarial arena, and Meghan would have to endure the bad press along with the good. If she found the spotlight and critiques difficult as an apolitical royal, it is difficult to imagine her taking on the rough and tumble of today’s extremely divisive political climate.

Nor would she only have to worry about Republican critiques. Any office Meghan chose to pursue would, almost without a doubt, require her to compete in a primary against fellow Democrats. You have only to pull up a presidential primary debate from either party to see that she’d take plenty of slings and arrows from her own party while attempting to navigate a primary.

And then there is the other problem with running for elected office—there is always the chance that you will lose.

These drawbacks apply to all who pursue public, political life, but I believe they loom as even larger impediments for Meghan. Meghan seems almost incapable of accepting bad press, no matter how small. Politics requires a certain grit, and Meghan withered as a royal—an arena that is charmed and bland.  

A middle path for Meghan could be to take up a political cause, like the ERA. It offers her a platform/purpose and a political spotlight without the stress of the debates, the accountability of elected office, and the reckoning at the ballot box.

Toward the end of the Vogue piece Meghan was asked:

Meghan, is [ERA] an issue you want to tackle?

M[eghan]: Without question. Being home, seeing what’s happening in our country and feeling energized and motivated, if this is the type of legislation that we need pushed through, then this is a moment that I am absolutely going to show up for. Not just because it’s what we need as women, but it’s what we need as people.

G[loria] S[teinem]: The ERA has been ratified by the requisite number of states and we should put the pressure on the White House and Congress to enact it.

M[eghan]: Well, Gloria, maybe it seems as though you and I will be taking a trip to D.C. together soon.

So it seems that maybe Meghan has decided to try her hand at finding fame as a leader of the feminist movement. We will see how this pans out. The truth is, I am skeptical that Meghan will see even this project through. We know that Meghan, in the midst of all sorts of other flash-in-the-pan projects, spoke out in support of paid leave. I think she released a statement, and she certainly revealed that she made some behind the scenes calls to U.S. Senators. I am not sure the nation—left or right—was overly impressed by a lady of leisure, holding a foreign title, making a few calls from her mansion in Montecito, but who knows. Maybe some people felt strongly about it. In any event, whether you applauded her action or not, it was hardly a major effort, yet she somehow got Vogue to describe her in the opening of this interview as “a vocal advocate for paid leave and fair labor rights for women.” That seems to be the modus operandi—minimal involvement, maximum exposure/credit.

Meghan aspires to be an Amal Clooney or a Gloria Steinem or a Michelle Obama, but she has to find that platform/purpose that will rocket her to attention. As I have said before, nothing in Meghan’s track record suggests she is as passionate about any one of the many causes she has briefly addressed as much as she is passionate about being somebody. Meghan seems intent on being a star, and these causes are just the stepping stones to that end.

Gloria Steinem is a “feminist icon” because she spent years focused on this one issue. Her chief rival on the right, Phyllis Schlafly, began her crusade to defeat the ERA in 1972 and declared victory in 1982—a full decade of grassroots activism to end the amendment. Both women won renown in their respective political parties and nationally, but they did so through years of long hard slogging. Grassroots activism at this level is a long grind. I just don’t see that Meghan has that kind of dedication for any single issue. She jumps from issue to issue as the news cycle changes. That will result in her perpetually chasing the headlines but never making them.

So I am interested to see how this pans out. Will Meghan embrace the debate and commit to the cause, or will she show up in Washington with Steinem for some positive press and a photo opportunity and then move to the next issue du jour?