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Post by kathryn on Jan 15, 2023 11:02:03 GMT
Did the media find a queue of people waiting to buy the book, in the end? [/div] [/quote] It’s 2023. No-one needs to queue up to buy a physical copy of a book. If you absolutely must get hold of it as soon as possible you pre-order and it arrives on your digital device at midnight. If the media were genuinely looking for a queue of people at a bookshop, then that just shows that they are stuck in the last century.
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Post by kathryn on Jan 13, 2023 11:02:24 GMT
TK Maxx saying they don’t do sales because they have great prices year round, when they’ve recently been promoting their January Sales, is kinda hilarious. You can see what they were trying to do, but really…
Does *anyone* believe a High St shop doesn’t *do* sales?!
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Post by kathryn on Jan 12, 2023 16:01:13 GMT
]The main thing I'm getting from all this book and TV interview stuff is that after several years of Meghan being blamed for absolutely everything, and Harry being cast as a helpless child with no free will, it's becoming increasingly clear that Harry's the hot-headed, entitled one who explodes, and Meghan was the one who tried to obey the rules and be placatory.. That was noticeable in the Oprah interview as well - Harry was way harsher on his family than Meghan was. Meghan, like a lot of actors, is a people-pleaser. She wants people to like her. She craves the affection of her audience. Harry is firmly in No f***s Given land.
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Post by kathryn on Jan 11, 2023 9:27:18 GMT
Only beaten by a book about another Harry? Yup. For context, pre-release comment from the editor of The Bookseller (industry magazine) was that 50k copies sold this week would make it No1 on the book chart.
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Post by kathryn on Jan 10, 2023 21:45:31 GMT
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Post by kathryn on Jan 9, 2023 16:06:25 GMT
Was anything ever going to come of Leveson? When it was a hot topic and our media were hacking dead girls phones it needed a report. But not sure I ever thought much would come of it, for one of the reasons of the many reasons that our media are quite powerful Well, there were certainly witnesses who were sceptical on the stand at the enquiry about how effective the process would actually be. I think people had hope that if the political will existed that there would be some reform.
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Post by kathryn on Jan 9, 2023 16:04:17 GMT
Oh indeed, Harry is not the place to go if you want a figurehead for dismantling the monarchy.
He wants reform, not abolition - he wants the monarchy to work better than it currently does for the people within it. His argument - if you actually pay attention to it - is that the institution is wasting talented family members like his wife, when they could be making better use of them. That the personal divide-and-conquer approach of having all the press offices competing to throw each other under the bus is damaging to the Institution in the long-term.
It’s actually ironic that their most ardent Royalist critics cannot see that aspect of it. They blame him and Meghan for the damage done and cannot credit the idea that he attributes that damage to a different root cause. His analysis is essentially that it is systemic, not solely to do with any one individual (even though individual family members are complicit in it) but a pattern that has repeated across generations because of the relationship between the two institutions.
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Post by kathryn on Jan 9, 2023 9:32:19 GMT
Haven’t really known where to stand on this whole issue. But Harry’s crusade against the tabloid media is something I’d happily stand behind him and support him on. This country has been totally f*cked by the tabloids for decades. Why hasn't any real reform happened since Levinson? Is Hacked Off still active?
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Hacked Off is still active, but Leveson 2 (which was truly the most important part, looking at how the press and police and government interact) was mothballed and the majority of the recommendations from Leveson 1 have not in practice been implemented. inforrm.org/2019/10/16/new-report-ipso-five-years-on-fails-to-satisfy-25-out-of-38-leveson-recommendations/amp/
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Post by kathryn on Jan 8, 2023 22:55:40 GMT
Apologies if this has all been said before. but life's to short to worry about past mistakes or read 20 PAGES on this SHOWER.. No-one is making you read the thread.
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Post by kathryn on Jan 8, 2023 22:54:31 GMT
. How can you not laugh or mock or despair at a middle-aged man, who, one minute is traumatised by an argument with his brother - who he knows can't reply/defend himself - and the next brags about his Afghan kill total, like some dullard Rambo But neither of those things are true. He has not claimed to be ‘traumatised’ by the argument that he recounted; and nor is the passage about taking accountability for what he did as a soldier in Afghanistan ‘bragging’. To interpret them in that way requires a determination to put the worst possible slant on events, and a total refusal to countenance any interpretation of events that does not condemn him.
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Post by kathryn on Jan 8, 2023 22:43:22 GMT
Haven’t really known where to stand on this whole issue. But Harry’s crusade against the tabloid media is something I’d happily stand behind him and support him on. This country has been totally f*cked by the tabloids for decades. The legal cases are where it will get really interesting.
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Post by kathryn on Jan 8, 2023 20:52:34 GMT
I am interested in how the press works - I have been since I was a teenager and briefly wanted to be a journalist - and I’ve spent far far too much time over the years delving into it.
I do things like actually read full court judgements to libel and privacy trials, and follow the outcome of complaints to IPSO (and formerly the PCC). I watched the Leveson enquiry avidly.
Those Robbie Williams biographies I mentioned earlier - written by journalist Chris Heath - have large chunks of them devoted to individual instances of the press making up stories wholesale or twisting things out of context to make a sensational headline. I actually think something he says in Feel about why Robbie would agree to a honest biography is very relevant to what is going on with Harry and Meghan:
Harry and Meghan ring true to me because what I see in them is totally consistent with other people who have been through similar experiences with the press.
Of course I cannot know anything for certain; I base my judgments on a pretty good understanding of how the press works, and the type of shenanigans they get up to, and the symbiotic relationship between the press and the Royal institution over decades.
To me, many people in this thread appear to be extraordinarily gullible about the Royal family and how they work with Royal reporters. It seems people are in denial.
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Post by kathryn on Jan 8, 2023 9:48:11 GMT
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Post by kathryn on Jan 8, 2023 9:24:12 GMT
thank God the King and William/Kate has the wisdom and grace to stay out if it, but I do know that there is something distasteful about selling your family out for money.. 😂😂😂😂 It’s hilarious that people still think that Charles, William and Kate have stayed out of this, when there has ben a steady drip of stories based on ‘Royal sources’ that can only have come from their press secretaries (ending of course with ‘…. Palace declined to comment’). Some of this stuff had in fact already been briefed to biographers sympathetic to them, in terms flattering to them, naturally - particularly the Robert Lacey book ‘Battle of the Brothers’ www.goodmorningamerica.com/culture/story/princes-william-harry-explosive-argument-meghan-bullying-allegations-78397819Any time you see a Royal Rota journalist write a story from ‘Palace sources’ about the book commenting on how any of them feels, the source will be the Press Secretary. Some examples: www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2023/01/03/duke-sussex-wrong-claim-king-charles-has-shown-no-willingness/www.thedailybeast.com/prince-andrew-is-part-of-the-royal-family-again-but-not-the-firm-sources-saywww.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11593605/Royals-exhausted-Harry-Meghans-stream-misinformation-sources-say.htmlThere will be more of these over the coming weeks. The only difference is that Harry is speaking directly, and making himself accountable for the things he wants to say, rather than hiding behind ‘sources’ or loopholes (like Diana recording tapes rather than speaking directly to Morton so they could deny he had interviewed or met with her). The Observer editorial linked above may be right that this has become a psychological need for him, a form of catharsis after a lifetime of not being able to speak truth directly. That the way the institution has worked in this regard has fundamentally traumatised him - but he is hardly the first Royal to do so. On Radio 4 yesterday Jonathan Dimbleby was saying that Charles had cooperated with his biography back in the 90s because he felt the need to ‘lance the boil’ of his own bad press coverage. His book came out first, before the Morton book, and he did a TV interview for it!
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Post by kathryn on Jan 7, 2023 16:37:20 GMT
]It's irrelevant what the actual passage says - the Taliban have seen the excerpts all over the media (both mainstream and social) which is all they need to take offence and possibly retaliate. Harry's 'kill tally' should never have appeared in the book! Riiiight, so NOW people are worried about the Taliban retaliating for the invasion of Afghanistan. Probably would have been better off getting worried before we sent the armed forces over there, if you’re so terrified of provoking the terrorists. Once upon the time the media insisted that they supported British soldiers who fought in Afghanistan and would not dream of giving space to Taliban commanders making threatening ex-servicemen.
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Post by kathryn on Jan 7, 2023 16:30:07 GMT
Some of the stuff circulating out there literally is a spoof. People trolling the media to see if they can get them to pick up ridiculous stories.
Other stuff will just look very different in context.
I don’t know why people are finding mention of a necklace being snapped and a dog bowl being broken in a physical fight funny, though. All it indicates to me is the amount of force being used during the assault. It ain’t easy to break a necklace when it’s round someone’s neck.
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Post by kathryn on Jan 7, 2023 11:45:52 GMT
Meghan wouldn't have sought him out if he was just some random Brit. But she didn’t ‘seek him out’. He saw a picture of her on a mutual friend’s Instagram and asked to be put in touch. This was covered (including the picture!) in the Netflix series. The whole idea that she ‘sought him out’ comes from the deranged internet stalkers who do things like photoshop pictures of Princess Diana into the background of pictures of her as a child in her bedroom, to make it look like she was Diana-obsessed.
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Post by kathryn on Jan 7, 2023 9:34:03 GMT
How many jobs does one man need? Well, we'll see. I think he has rather thrown away a lot of his USP with this. I think the actual memoir will be very different from the well-poisoning press headlines, and that people who actually read it will feel very differently about him than the people who don’t. We’ll see.
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Post by kathryn on Jan 7, 2023 9:23:47 GMT
Several prominent military officers, nothing to do with Harry have said he should not have said what he did and the way it was said. He has been so poorly advised as to wording etc in areas of his book. Except they were not actually reacting to his wording in the book, they were reacting to press headlines. Which were based on the quickest possible translation of the Spanish-language edition they could make and then spun further to make him look as bad as possible. For the record, Peter Hunt has now gotten hold of the actual passage in the English edition:
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Post by kathryn on Jan 6, 2023 18:28:23 GMT
He and Meghan are senior leadership for Archewell archewell.com/about/It’s a management position, essentially - strategic decisions about the direction the company should take. He’ll be an executive producer on Archewell productions - they have a whole partnership with Netflix to produce programming and Spotify to produce podcasts. Exec producers are not necessarily creative themselves, they are often more about persuading creative people to partner with them and jump on board. It’s a lot of networking - which he is obviously very good at. They’ve already demonstrated what they call ‘convening power’ with the Global Citizen vaccine effort. Multiple people who worked on the campaign said that their ability to get big companies to agree to sit down for a meeting was pivotal. Live to Lead is an example of that www.netflix.com/gb/title/81406763They are co-producers - they struck a deal to get involved once the production was already conceived and under way. Their profile was valuable to the production and that is primarily what they have contributed to it. archewell.com/productions/archewell.com/audio/He is also CIO of Better Up: www.betterup.com/en-gb/about-us/leadership-team/prince-harry-the-duke-of-sussexAgain, part of his job there is his profile, bringing attention to the company. And of course he is still involved with the Invictus Games and Africa Parks and Travalyst and Sentebale, which were pre-existing. How many jobs does one man need? People seem to have this weird thing of not recognising how successful he has been in his career. The reason that he can still be involved with Invictus Games and Travalyst and Sentebale and Africa Parks is that they were not ‘Royal’ projects - they were not ‘engagements’ that he carried out on behalf of the Crown. They were his own projects. And his Army career - he really was commanding missions, he really did have responsibility, he really did earn his rank. He has transferable skills just like any other veteran.
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Post by kathryn on Jan 6, 2023 15:44:58 GMT
Going by what I've heard on the radio, it seems more like a Californian Hollywood 'therapy' thing - dig deep and let it all come out, including the sex behind a pub and the number of people he's killed in combat. I can't see how he can come back, in a UK, being taken seriously sense, from this - and from a Hollywood pov maybe has killed the goose that laid the golden egg. We were discussing this last night and I wondered if his ghostwriter was consciously sabotaging him - details like the dog bowl are so Alan Partridge. People thought that Charles would never be taken seriously again after the tampon thing. He also collaborated with a memoir that criticised his parents for how they raised him. Princess Diana was very unpopular after her Panorama interview, and was continually being attacked by the press up until the day she died - which is why they were quite so taken aback by the public response to her death. Fergie is somehow still living with Prince Andrew despite being snapped getting her toes sucked while married to him, and accepting money from someone who wanted to be introduced to him when he was a trade envoy. She gives chirpy interviews to the press saying that he is still her Prince, despite all the Epstein stuff. Prince Andrew is somehow still allowed at Royal events, despite it all. I think you’ll be surprised in the long term - despite all the noise and thunder, people are fascinated by this kind of insight into other human beings’ lives, and forgiving of human foibles when they feel they understand them. That’s why the memoir genre exists. That’s why people publish diaries. That’s why I read 2 biographies (of Robbie Williams) and 2 autobiographies (of Gary Barlow) over the Christmas holiday. (And boy, is that an exercise in conflicting points of view on the same events. But they’ve made up now and are proper friends and collaborators; happy endings are possible!) Plenty of ex-soldiers write memoirs detailing their experiences in war. Plenty of famous people write memoirs describing their issues with drinks and drugs and sex. Harry in America no different from any other famous person. And it looks rather like being just another flawed famous person in America is a lot more comfortable for him than being held to an impossible standard over here. I don’t think he is ever expecting - or wanting - to be back in a Royal role in the U.K.
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Post by kathryn on Jan 6, 2023 12:15:52 GMT
Several ex military on the radio this morning saying that talking about who/how many people you’ve killed is simply not done. It’s not a badge of honour. I agree. It seems crass and desperate. Context is everything. Just because the tabloids are writing screaming headlines and claiming it’s ‘bragging’ doesn’t mean that’s how it actually comes across in the book. The tabloids are of course going to put everything in the worst possible light.
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Post by kathryn on Jan 6, 2023 12:11:51 GMT
He needs to look to his predecessors. If Harry has a problem with his family then he needs to persuade the French to fund him, raise an army, invade and seize the crown. A book and a Netflix documentary is not in keeping with our great history of Royal insurrection. I’ve been having fun on Twitter telling people about Emma of Normandy (Edward the Confessor’s mother):
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Post by kathryn on Jan 6, 2023 9:54:51 GMT
It's a terrible, terrible thing when a brother shouts at you. In other news, Harry also says he's killed 25 people. People’s reaction to this snippet have been doing my head in. He was an Apache helicopter gunner. His job as a gunner was to shoot and kill people on the missions that he was commanding. The gunner needs tactical control and so is in command. The people he was killing were the Taliban - who in return were trying to kill him. This has been public knowledge for years, and - as I’ve been saying since forever - one of the reasons why he has a heightened security risk. The Taliban are very well aware of his military service. And yet people are losing their minds now that he talks about the experience. As if this wasn’t already known - or, I don’t know, as if they never quite believed that he was an actual soldier who fought in an actual war and actually killed people while doing so.
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Post by kathryn on Jan 5, 2023 9:59:10 GMT
No they shouldn’t have but copywrite law is very specific and you are libel if you print over a certain percentage. They were always at fault but in the end they ended up embarrassing Meghan. As for the rest it’s just more stuff. Where is the proof in any of this. Your ignorance about the actual legal issues involved is either so profound or so wilful that this comment is nonsensical. It’s not even worth attempting to unravel it to explain. Hopefully others reading have enough basic knowledge of the laws around privacy, data protection and copyright to understand the point I am making. I must admit, when I made my earlier comment about William having an anger management problem I did not expect to see such startling confirmation of his temper and problems managing it as has been reported this morning. It’s very sad. And goes some way to explaining why a private reconciliation seems to have been so impossible for them.
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Post by kathryn on Jan 5, 2023 0:29:49 GMT
Jason Knauf was a witness in the court case. He wasn’t leaking to the press. It was a court of Law. Of course he was helping H and am with that book Finding Freedom. Yes I’m sure the employees that were sacked did talk…that is their right. The journalists all said that the two couples were very easy sneak with eachother and I have doubt when relations broke down that they were. I wouldn’t be listening to an American journalist though, what do they know. I don’t see any of it as dark and twisted and conspiracy as you seem to. I see it for what it is. Family relations broke down. There was manipulation of the media, no doubt by both sides. One continues to out in the open but I do not think they set out to destroy Meghan and ai doubt they have a What’s App group. The press get briefed sure on the story someone wants to send out but doesn’t mean they write it. Meghan and a Harry brief, The absolute worst at all this skull duckery is Charles. Who was quite frankly unbelievable around 20 to 25 years ago but that seems to have levelled out. the media should not have published that letter. They won because they published too much. But it was her friends who leaked its existence. It wasn’t Thomas Markle. Once the media knew about it they hunted it down. Of course the royals give stories to papers….does Harry not. It’s not necessarily against anyone else just putting the point across. Everyone knows when they read them. Every public figure does that. Is it nice. No. Is it the way it works. Yes. Do you have to grow up and work with the system. probably. [br The denial here is amazing. You think American journalists can’t have British press sources send them information? Ellie Hall made it very clear that she got her story by doing basic journalistic work and following up a tip, and that the people she contacted and the production company confirmed that no British journalist had bothered to even contact them for comment. Knauf was briefing the press. That was in fact his job as press secretary. He briefed the press on the bullying story under his own name, and offered to be a witness for the Mail - again, briefing the newspaper’s editor on confidential correspondence, which the judge actually ruled made no difference to the case in the end but was used to smear Meghan in the press. The Mail had no right to publish private correspondence at all. Its existence being mentioned by a third party does not change that. The judge made it clear that the mention did not actually disclose any significant part of the letter itself - indeed the description of what it contained was inaccurate. The appropriate response would have been to seek a correction from that publication that mentioned it. *Someone* briefed the press on Meghan’s mental health struggles who had seen her email to HR. That person was clearly not authorised to share that information by Meghan. No-one has the ‘right’ to share that kind of deeply personal medical information about someone’s mental illness to a journalist without authorisation. If that briefing had not been authorised Kensington Palace should have hunted down the culprit to fire them for gross misconduct and take civil action against them for breaching their NDA, and made it abundantly clear that further such breaches of confidentiality would receive the same response. Which would have been a big news story. They did not do so. That indicates that the briefing was authorised. This is not rocket science.
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Post by kathryn on Jan 4, 2023 17:21:55 GMT
Low got that story the employees who went to him. No doubt people talk with loose lips they always do but to claim it was systematic bullying…there is simply no evidence. I can’t believe I missed this bit earlier. Yes, Low got that story from the employees who went to him. The ‘employees’ *are* the press secretaries. Because they are the ones authorised to speak to journalists. Otherwise the minute he admitted he had been sent that story the HR department should be sacking someone for gross misconduct. There’s a record of whoever that email was sent to, and they are not allowed to breach confidentiality by revealing it to *anyone else* who might go to the press with it, let alone speak to the press themselves. Obviously, that is gross misconduct. It’s a breach of GDPR! The only way that an internal investigation did not take place over *any* of these leaked stories, is if they are tacitly authorised by Kensington Palace. People act as if the normal laws governing data protection and privacy don’t apply to Harry and Meghan. They do! Which is why Meghan won a summary judgement against the Mail over the letter to her father
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Post by kathryn on Jan 4, 2023 10:46:17 GMT
Mmmm one journalist apart from Dan Wooten or Scobie because most say that isn’t how we get stories? Low got that story the employees who went to him. No doubt people talk with loose lips they always do but to claim it was systematic bullying…there is simply no evidence. Lots of journalists. Did you miss the whole thing with Jason Knauf and the Mail on Sunday?! It was in court documents that he was a source for the Mail! Or are you just ignoring it? And the BBC documentary The Princes and The Press, where several journalists talked about briefing on the record? Or this comment on the Jeremy Vine show from a journalist who says that she used to work in newsrooms and ‘it’s a fact’ (which I can only find clipped and shared in a tweet) Or the article that I already posted in this thread about the actual Netflix ‘we weren’t contacted for comment’ debacle: www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/ellievhall/royal-family-press-office-harry-meghan-documentary-changeEllie Hall, the journalist who wrote it, confirmed that she’d been sent screenshots of said WhatsApp group. The amount of denial going on from some here is ridiculous. I know it’s disappointing to have your illusions about how the Royal Family operates shattered, but honestly, there’s so much independent confirmation that what Harry has said happens does happen. And frankly, it’s been obvious for years that it’s how the Royal Reporter system operates - it has to be, because the alternatives are that the reporters at supposedly reputable news organisations are just making all of their ‘Palace sources’ up or that the Royal Court has comprehensively failed in their due diligence when it comes to security of personal information and the integrity of the staff they hire to work for the Royal Family - which is absolutely mind-boggling when the monarch and heir to the throne both have access to confidential government papers.
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Post by kathryn on Jan 3, 2023 20:32:04 GMT
Do people actually think the royal family launched a sabotage mission of Meghan by briefing journalists? Why. Because they hate her? This is Diana territory. She was paranoid too. Thought they were all out to get her. Turns out not in any way, they were just getting on with life. Meghan didn’t fit and didn’t deal with what is a horrendous media system. They do treat women horrendously. Perhaps are eye should be on the fact that we sustain the media. There was a briefing spree against Diana - Charles, as heir, very much needed to get public opinion on his side. Many journalists from the time will confirm that there was briefing against her going on. Diana wasn’t ‘paranoid’ about everything; she was simply wrong about the mechanism by which *some* of those stories were obtained. It’s quite obvious now, Post-Leveson, that she was a victim of phone hacking. And it’s quite obvious now, Post-Bashir revelations, that she had concrete reasons to believe that she was being betrayed by the people who worked for her, because evidence had been manufactured. Obviously that will have a negative effect on someone’s mental state. Many phone hacking victims have said that their trust in their nearest and dearest was destroyed by it. And there was a briefing spree against Meghan, because William and Kate needed to get public opinion back on their side. The accusations of a lack of work ethic have never quite gone away (and when you look at how many fewer public engagements they do than other Royals, it never will do) and they were already suffering from a relative deficit of glamour and enthusiasm, even before the affair rumours started circulating. There have been multiple journalists saying *on the record* that they were briefed against Meghan by their ‘sources’ at Kensington Palace. In fact whenever the displays of press racism became too blatant and the criticism of press behaviour too pointed, you’d get journalists throwing up their hands and saying ‘but the stories came from Kensington Palace!’ Valentine Low even said that he’d been told about Meghan’s mental health struggles and her email to the HR department seeking help, but the lawyers vetoed the story because it would have been a blatantly illegal invasion of medical privacy. How the hell do you think *that* story got to him without an investigation of the HR personnel taking place - leaking confidential information like that would normally get an HR professional fired for gross misconduct!
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Post by kathryn on Jan 3, 2023 17:24:05 GMT
[. I have so over this whole drama. I don't give a damn about anything that Harry and Meghan have to say. They chose to step aside from a life of public service. Let them be private citizens. This is obviously not true: 1. You’re still posting in this thread. So you are clearly not over it and are still interested. 2. They did not ‘step aside from a life of public service’. They were explicit in saying that they would continue to be public figures and that ‘service is universal’ - that they intended to attempt to live a life of public service outside the Royal Family. And given that they have been involved in several high profile public roles - not just the continuing work with Invictus Games and SmartWorks, but also the Global Citizen work on COVID-19 vaccine equity - www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/topics/prince-harry-and-meghan - they have demonstrably done so.
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