It’s an issue the Duchess of Sussex wouldn’t have necessarily been able to comment on had she still been a working senior member of the British Royal Family. Royals don’t typically weigh in on political moments or elections.
But now Meghan is free of ‘The Firm’, she’ll be able to make political comments in time for the upcoming US elections. Royal commentator Katie Nicholl tells 9Honey she believes Meghan will make carefully considered political remarks.
“In the past and before she married into The Royal Family, she was an outspoken critic on Trump. But while she is not a working royal, she is still the Duchess of Sussex and I think she will be very careful about what she says when it comes to the election and making any kind of political statement.
“Meghan is very clever, she’s articulate, she knows what she’s doing and as we saw with the Black Lives Matter campaign, she didn’t rush into making that speech. She thought about it carefully, she chose her words very carefully, she chose a really clever opportunity to use it as a platform, to speak out.”
While Nicholl expects we’ll hear the mother-of-one get political during the upcoming election, Meghan won’t go on any kind of Twitter tirades like some politicians do. “I don’t think you’re just going to hear her sounding off about Trump, she’s too clever to do that,” the author adds.
However, don’t expect Prince Harry to comment on the US elections, either — and that’s got nothing to do with him being British or Royal. “Don’t forget Harry had his fingers burned with that fake call that he thought was from Greta Thunberg,” Nicholl says.
“So, I think he’s probably still hurting from that and he’ll have his defences up – he’s not going to fall for that again. “I think he’s probably quite mindful that any comments he makes are going to be seized upon, so I think he will be careful about what he says.
“I don’t think you’re going to see either of them making sweeping, potentially controversial political statements because they know that will get them into hot water and get them headlines they don’t want.”
While they’ll be wary of the words they use, Nicholl predicts we’ll see more comments from the couple in the future about political topics. “I think now that they’re free of the royal family, they do have a greater latitude. Meghan is able to speak more freely on subjects that might be deemed too political for the royal family to comment on,” she says.
“I think as we’ve seen with the Black Lives Matter campaign, which we’re going to very much see her and Harry get behind, she is now speaking out about issues that are very important to her, and I think she would have had to have been very careful even touching on if she was still a working member of The Firm.
“Even speaking as the Duchess of Sussex but not with her HRH title, she admitted to being nervous about speaking out, she knew she was making herself a possible target.
“There were those who trolled her on social media but she feels that she has a voice, she feels she’s now in a position to use it and this is something that really matters to her, so we’re going to hear her speak about it more in future,” Nicholl says. That’s the ultimate icing on the cake for the Duchess, who was rumoured to have left the royal family after feeling constrained by the palace in what she could and couldn’t comment on.
“One of the greatest challenges for Meghan, having always been a human rights campaigner, a feminist, a well-known voice and authority on racial equality, I think having to… keep a lid on that or perhaps not express herself as freely as she was once used to doing, I think at time was definitely frustrating and challenging for her,” Nicholl tells Dc, adding: “I do know that she felt like she had lost her voice.”