I was slightly too young to grasp the drama of Princess Diana’s divorce from Charles but I remember sitting at the dining table at my Nan’s house as she poured over tabloid photos over her breakup holiday.
Looking lonely and lost in thought she perched precariously at the end of a diving board on a yacht so big it made her look miniature. Those images of her wearing a high cut, low back leopard swimsuit are now iconic. I wanted to know what she was thinking then, I still do now.
I also remember being glued to the rolling news coverage of her death, aware that something unspeakably sad had happened to someone we all felt we knew intimately. The British Royal Family, despite being about as far removed as you can be from most people’s existences, enthrall us.
When Meghan Marklemarried into it, she was hailed as a modernising influence. The news was a positive breath of fresh air at a time when headlines were otherwise full of Brexit, providing us all with a moment’s respite. Royalist or not, it was, at least, something else to think about.
And then, the Murphy’s Law of celebrity gossip kicked in. Markle was berated for not speaking to her father despite the fact that he is, quite clearly, problematic. She was surrounded by a toxic miasma of gossip before she even walked down the aisle.
Fickle a nation as Britain is, Meghan was simultaneously hailed as the saviour of the royal family and a threat to it as soon as she appeared on the scene. Some commentators were quick to set up a comparison between her and Kate, willing the later to be jealous of her new sister-in-law.
It wasn’t long after her marriage, naturally, before ‘palace sources’ were reporting that the duchesses were at war. You’d think pitting two women against one another like this would be a bit hackneyed by now but no, it’s still a thing. Apparently it’s easier to believe Kate and Meghan are at war than to buy into the idea that, while they might not have become instant BFFs, they’re probably totally fine with each other. Women are just so ridiculous, aren’t we.
Shortly after that, sources were condemning Meghan for asking that the chapel she got married in should be scented, admonishing her for being a Difficult Diva Duchess who ‘bombards aides with texts and gets up at 5am!’ and blaming her for the supposed split between Princess Diana’s sons.
Her departed aide ‘worked happily for Robbie Williams’ don’t you know?
It feels sexist when Meghan is criticised for having ‘an opinionated personality’. Isn’t that, after all, universal code for any woman who dares to ask for anything, let alone challenge the status quo. I can’t help but feel that there are also racist undertones in the criticisms levelled at her - every negative article implies that she is too pushy, too ambitious and too confident. I don’t remember anyone suggesting anything similar about Kate Middleton.
The diffusers thing was extra, sure, but if you’ve ever been to the loos at London restaurant Sketch where they burn money constantly in the shape of Diptyque candles you’ll know that she’s onto something. I can’t afford to do it but, let’s be clear, if I could I absolutely would.
And, who cares if she gets up at 5am? I sometimes do, it’s the only time of day I can find true peace, have a bath, collect my thoughts and write anything without being interrupted. I’m sure Meghan has her reasons too.
What if the reason aides are quitting is not, in fact Meghan, put the pressures that come with working for the royal household?
Meghan Markle is being torn down for the very things she was initially being celebrated for. It seems like she can’t win. So much of the gossip about her seems spurious at best and, TBH, I think we can all agree that these HRHs Wills and Harry have, respectively, been through enough. I feel grubby after reading about it all but, still, I read on. All of this has made me wonder why I, and so many other people, seem to care so much about the produce of this rumour mill. Why, with Meghan in particular, are we so keen to see her fall from the pedestal we only just placed her on?
Gaelle Ouvrein has the answers. She is a PHD student at at the University of Antwerp where she studies communication science and specialised in celebrity bashing. Earlier this year she conducted a study which looked at people’s motives for consuming celebrity gossip.
There were, she tells me, three main reasons: it’s entertainment, it’s an information source and, most interestingly of all, it gives people an opportunity to bash those who are, on paper at least, more famous, more successful and wealthier than them.
‘People like to follow celebrity news because they like to hear about the failures of famous people’ Gaelle explains ‘it’s a sort of vindication – schadenfreude – when we see their flaws’.
‘Gossip’ Gaelle tells me ‘makes normal people feel closer to celebrities. People are attracted to this kind of negative news because these people are so high up compared to the rest of us, so if you see that they also have fights, that they also have family trouble then they feel more real, more normal.’
More than this, humans have long gossiped by sharing information about one another. It’s easy to dismiss gossip as frivolous but ‘we learn from talking about other people’ Gaelle points out. ‘We use gossip to learn about how people deal – well and badly – with certain types of situations. We are always learning from the failures and mistakes of others.’
‘Projecting our feelings onto celebrities’ Gaelle adds is what we’ve always done in our communities but ‘on a bigger scale’.
The worrying thing about celebrity gossip, then, is not so much its existence, Gaelle says, but that in its current iteration it can sometimes take the shape of readers/fans bashing famous people in the comments under and article or on their social media.
Meghan Markle no longer has Instagram or Twitter which, perhaps, is a blessing because the conversation surrounding her does seem to be particularly toxic right now given the state of the comments under articles about her
‘There is more celebrity gossip now than before – it’s everywhere’ Gaelle says ‘it has exploded in the last 10 years fuelled by the fact that you can directly interact with celebrities’. And while she thinks that ‘in some ways celebrity gossip has a good function because it gives us information and it can provide escapism’ the boundaries are more blurred than ever’.
‘As a reader you shouldn’t just accept everything that is said about a celebrity’ Gaelle says ‘everything you read is a story, written by a journalist to entertain you. There is a thin line between fact and fiction and we have to remember that celebrities are human too’.
Some might argue that celebrities waive certain things when they enter the public eye knowingly – a degree of privacy being one of them but, as with Jennifer Aniston, I wonder whether we’re in danger of forgetting that Markle is a human being, a woman just like any other. I mean, obviously aside from the fact that she is married to a prince.
Celebrity feuds are the sort of seismic events that break the internet and keep the sidebar of shame in business. I could sit here and pretend to you that I’m above them, that I don’t succumb to heavily spun tales of high drama, heartbreaks and hubris but that would make me a liar.
I stopped being apologetic about any of this a long time ago and maintain that there’s nothing wrong with being allbrow in your interests. As Gaelle points out, famous families are like a canvas onto which we all project our own emotional lives and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
At this time of year in particular, the idea that even members of the Royal Family are warring over where to spend Christmas and who with is oddly comforting to anyone currently embroiled in their own family politics.
I’ll always be here for a good gossip. I will not be made to feel superficial for watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians but, as Gaelle says, there’s a line and we should all think very seriously about crossing it