Well, kind of. In 1997, protection for ex Presidents was reduced to 10 years after they left office. It took affect with the next President to take office. But in 2012, it was restored to lifetime protection. The only President it even potentially applied to was George W Bush, and it was restored long before his 10 years were up. It never applied to HW Bush , Reagan, Carter, or Ford, the other living ex Presidents at the time it was signed - their protection always remained for lifetime.
We’re those questions actually legitimate to ask about anyone’s private life when the people involved are not your actual relatives?
Well, OK, working about details about compensation if they do perform work for the crown, or who pays for a security detail, and that sort of thing does have relevance to the public but that’s something to be hammered out over the next week.
A bunch of other stuff really is no one else’s business.
Re-read the statement - it says that was a decision of the Sussex’s. I got that even if it’s in a dialect (Queen’s English) foreign to me (a commoner American).
As for what money Charles is providing… Charles is not entirely without his own money apart from the Crown. If a father wishes to send money from his own private stash to his son and his new wife WTF business is that of anyone else?
If the Sussex’s ARE becoming independent they likewise should be permitted to work at something where they’re allowed to keep a portion of the earnings without getting raked over the coals for the “crime” of earning a living (not that I expect them to be treated fairly in the media, as it is VERY clearly Meghan was never given a fair shake to begin with). I fully expect hypocritical types to bitch both about them having received public funds in the past and also for attempting to be financially independent and earning their own income in the future.
No, many of those questions were not our business (especially not the business of those of us not in the UK) but they need to resolved. The announcement did make it clear that they’re going to settle in Canada rather than the US.
Sure, in the media that’s already biased against her, she comes across as a not-so-nice person. Eating avocadoes, fondling her her unborn child. The absolute nerve.
Honestly, what do you know about her that has NOT been revealed to you by the media?
This.
~VOW
In my recollection the British media has always cast the heir to the throne as the face, and the second-in-line and beyond as the heel, and they’re not gonna change. (Although there were times when it looked like Charlie was in fact the heel; he’s a pretty hard sell as a face, to be honest.)
I think Camilla demoted him. He’s probably a more vulgar part of the anatomy.
~VOW
You gotta admit they kinda can’t win. If they make their own way, start a brand etc, they’ll be accused of trading on their celebrity, whether it’s true or not. If they stay on the payroll they’re living on the public’s dime.
If they use their brand to only fund their charitable pursuits, then payout millions for their protection brigade, they’ll be accused of shameful exploitation of monies raised for orphans! If they let the crown pay they’ll be accused of taking advantage, having it both ways.
Makes it seem like it’s the British public want to have it both ways. Don’t want to pay your way, but gonna slag you for wanting something else. They want the monarchy to change but scream when they try. The British press is wild in fanning ALL of these angles for profit. No wonder they want to get away, sheesh.
He inherited enough from his Mom to be set for life. She has earned enough to date to be in a similar position. But they’re still being relentlessly slagged over ‘who pays’ their bills. It’s madness.
Shouldn’t they be applauded for wanting to go a different way?
I’m not sure whether it was her doing or Harry’s, but one or the other or both behaved incredibly disrespectfully in this “Megxit” debacle. A really high-profile change in family and institutional dynamics and your job role, complete with detailed decisions about where you’ll live and who’s paying for your expenses and security, released with ten minutes’ notice to the rest of the family/institution and without clearing those decisions with the folks who are going to be footing the bills? Whoever approved that announcement and the accompanying website showed a mind-boggling lack of understanding of the optics and relationships.
I realize her half-siblings are utter jerks, but there wasn’t one person from her family, other than her mother, who deserved an invite to her wedding? No childhood friends, no cousins, nobody at all from the first 25 or 30 years of her life? The tabs have pushed the angle that she is a social climber, discarding old friends when she made newer and more prominent acquaintance, but that angle got leverage because, as near as I can ascertain, the only person who knew her before about 2010 who came to her wedding was her mother. (If you know differently, please correct me.)
The optics of their trip to southern Africa were bad. That’s a golden opportunity to highlight the work of the charities and causes showcased on the tour, but because of decisions H&M made, the main press takeaways were how awful she was feeling and how mad he was at the reporters. Again, I don’t know whether that was Harry’s doing or Meghan’s (or both), and maybe they’re just getting some really bad advice from their aides, but there’s a time to release a story about suing a newspaper, and it’s not on the final day of your tour unless you want that, and NOT the tour, to be the big story.
I don’t want to get this moved, but what’s interesting to me about this is degree to which one’s politics colored this from the beginning. That’s why it’s getting so much attention.
It makes me cringe when entire news segments are devoted to these two. Not because I dislike them … but I dislike hearing speculation about “Harry and Meghan” by a bunch of strangers who talk as if they are their friends.
I don’t blame them wanting to get away from this and live their own independent life.
Maybe there isn’t anyone - that doesn’t necessarily make her the bad guy. From what little I’ve read her dad’s side of the family look like the sort of relatives my spouse was happy to live 750 miles away from. In my family, due to disapproval of my parents marrying outside their respective faiths, both sides of the family shunned us so no, none of us were inviting cousins to our marriages and it would not surprise me if the distancing is coming mainly from others and not from Meghan herself. Maybe Meghan has not kept contact with people from her school years, is that now a requirement for being a good person? I really don’t know much about her backstory, but nothing she’s done makes me think she’s as bad as portrayed in the tabloids and other press.
I’ll just point out that her father was recovering from a heart attack and surgery at the time she was married, so just maybe his health was the major reason he didn’t attend.
they should pay part of the security costs. Even 50% or whatever agreement they can make.
The security cost thing probably does fit in the ‘no win’ category. They don’t need expensive security because of what they do mainly but because of who Harry was born as. Sixth-in-lines to low profile Continental thrones live much closer to normal lives to begin with, and I assume less is spent on their security, because they’re more obscure figures to begin with (and also from lower profile countries in terms of controversial foreign involvement, though that tends to go on a political tangent). I agree you can’t really blame a particular British royal who in essence says ‘I’d rather be like a similarly placed Dutch or Norwegian royal, ie almost no foreigner would recognize me, some people in my own country wouldn’t’.
OTOH, I think some would be critics are assuming that these two will tend to want to be the level of celebrities Brit royals start out as naturally, yet not really be royals. IOW it’s assumed these royals want to have it both ways. Which remains to be seen, and I’m thinking in general not just the security cost issue.
And celebrity driven charitable work in general has inherent questions. Not that anybody should ‘ban’ it (I’m positively in favor of private charity, even subsidized by income tax deduction as in US, as alternative to total centralization of power under 50%+1 whim of the voting public as to what’s important or not). But there’s frequently some conflict of interest about maintaining a platform and visibility for the celebs v actually helping, as compared to normal people quietly writing checks to charities. Although OTOH maybe a beloved celebrity backing a charity makes more ordinary people quietly write more in total checks to charity. That’s the theory I suppose, but it could also be more of a zero sum game where a particular celeb’s ‘calling attention to this particular need’ just subtracts from a finite pool of attention to other needs, and all you’re left with is the deadweight loss of the celeb’s need for attention and their own costs (transport, security etc) put on the charitable effort. The media also likes to cover celeb charitable work. It’s more interesting to them than high efficiency boring professional charities, so they have a vested interest in not viewing it skeptically unless cases where it’s way out of line.
No, but not keeping contact with ANYBODY for more than a couple of years is to me a warning sign of somebody who doesn’t form or value long-lasting relationships. No school friends, no college roomies, no people from her church or clubs or yoga classes or old neighborhood or previous jobs … she seems to have shed her past almost completely, and nothing I’ve seen leads me to think her past was so awful as to require complete shedding.
True. The fact that he sold photos to the paparazzi probably didn’t help his cause either. However, I’ll also point out that Harry has still never even met his father-in-law. There may be good reasons for that, but it’s another oddity.
Note that much of this is likely to be the press choice of what to publish, and there appears to be a strong bias against Meghan in the British press driving the choices. As an example, it appears that they were in fact talking to Charles and the Queen about this, and the rushed announcement was due to a leak to a tabloid that was going to appear on the front page the next day. Much “shock horror” based on baseless speculation and nasty opinions rather than fact followed.
Anybody with competent PR staff (and who listens to said staff) knows that the decision when to release a story, such as the story about suing the tabloids, will have a major impact on how the press runs with it. Harry and Meghan chose the date on which to announce the lawsuit, and that was the last day of their visit to southern Africa. Releasing the news, and Harry’s accompanying impassioned letter, either before the visit or a week or so later would have given the charities a bigger moment in the sun.
And the evidence does not support the story about “the rushed announcement that the tabloid was going to publish the next day,” because Harry and Meghan chose to leave Archie in Canada when they returned to the UK several days before the announcement, which means they already knew that one or both would be returning right away. They also had a brand-new domain and website fully ready to go; that website wasn’t cobbled up on the morning of the announcement. The current story is that Harry and Meghan were given ten DAYS notice of the leak, and they in turn gave the Queen ten MINUTES notice. That may or may not be true either, but it sure fits the available evidence better than “oh we had to race around that morning to head off the tabs.”
Megan Markle has plenty of friends, including many longtime friends. In fact, one of her friends (whose 3 children were in the royal wedding) is said to have taken care of Archie in Canada while both his parents were in the UK. Just because you don’t hear about them all the time doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
That would be Jessica Mulroney, whom Meghan met sometime after she moved to Canada in mid-2011.