Can you believe that there’s been such a stink about the name of a beautiful, innocent six-day-old baby?!
As I posted yesterday, the British tabloids and royal courtiers can’t seem to stop bitching about whether or not Prince Harry and Meghan Markle properly informed the Queen about naming Lilibet after her and did not get official permission, or something, even though Harry and Meghan have already said that they called Her Majesty after Lili was born and told her what their hopes were and would not have gone ahead with it without her support. What more, really, does anyone need in this case?
Like were they expecting some kind of royal decree? Should a bugler have been trotted out at the palace gates?
Yesterday royal reporter Jonny Dymond claimed on the BBC that he heard from a palace source that the Queen was “never asked”. Harry and Meghan then had their lawyers slap the BBC with a letter, calling them out on the bullsh-t. Since then there’s been even more angsting about the situation, with the Daily Mail going so far as to suggest that the Queen is hard of hearing and may not have been able to properly understand what Harry was saying. This might sound hilarious on the surface but it’s actually quite sinister, heinous, in fact.
Going back to what I wrote yesterday, the tabloids are gonna tabloid, and find any angle they can to keep the royal family feud in the headlines. But they couldn’t do it so successfully if they weren’t being enabled from the inside. Palace sources, royal aides, courtiers, have been feeding the tabloids these stories, therefore fueling them. And these royal staffers, as amateur as their work has been over the years, are not supposed to be novices at this. At bare minimum, they know how to shut down a story. It’s part of their job to shut down a story. Any PR expert will tell you that one of the fundamental skills of a professional communicator is to be able to kill a story before it lifts off. There are a number of ways of doing this – both hard and soft. The soft skill approach is simply to shrug it away, not add gasoline to it but instead to subtly redirect. And the royal aides had a really, really easy out here.
Because… WE ARE TALKING ABOUT A NEWBORN BABY! A baby is a golden ticket in any situation! So if the tabloids are calling all like, hey, can you tell us if the Queen gave her permission or did Harry and Meghan just do it without letting her know?! It’s simple. If you don’t want to contribute to this f-cksh-t, all you need to say is, “As posted on Instagram, Her Majesty is delighted about the birth of her eleventh great-grandchild. This is a joyous occasion and that’s all that matters.” Babies make people happy. That’s it. That’s all. Nobody needs to say any more than, “OMG baby! So happy!”
Which means it was an active, deliberate choice for whoever these courtiers are to not throw up an easy one and instead go low and perpetuate these rumours. Active. Deliberate. Choice. To continue the drama... over a BABY. To generate as much controversy over this NEWBORN BABY’s name. To create a media footprint big enough so that this child, when she’s old enough, will come across all this f-cking mess about whether or not her great-grandmother, the Queen of England, approved of her name.
And what is a name?
It’s an identity.
This is what these people are doing. This is the ugliness that they’re fomenting – and all over an act of love. It was out of the most profound love for both Lili and the Queen that Harry and Meghan named her what they did. When a baby is named in honour, it means that that you’ve given the person who is most precious to you a memory of another person who is precious to you! And it’s every baby’s right to hold that knowledge. This baby, however, might one day know that these assholes couldn’t just leave it at love. They had to go out of their way to try to spoil the perfect first days of her life by pushing forward a lie about how her name was tainted by “protocol”. Or an alleged breach of it (which isn’t true anyway). It’s disgusting. And it’s equally reprehensible that they’re not being called out for how incredibly cruel this all is to everyone involved. Like why isn’t there more outrage about the fact that they’re doing this TO A BABY???
So if it’s just about punishing Harry and Meghan, the latest in their relentless efforts to get back at the Sussexes, this latest move should totally eliminate any moral authority they claim to have in the ongoing battle. Harry and Meghan have made some serious accusations against the royal institution over the last several months. And there are many who don’t believe them. But if these are the kinds of people who put this much energy into undermining the naming OF A BABY, well, what aren’t they capable of?
