Princess Catherine didn’t hug back.
Great-aunt Michael wore a racist brooch to lunch one time.
And Meghan, the international human rights campaigner and philanthropist, felt compelled to dim her light of truth and compassion by wearing beige.
Occasionally camel. Sometimes cream.
“Most of the time that I was in the UK, I rarely wore colour,” said the Duchess, softly draped in a pale grey jumper and skirt despite the fact she is now liberated from that monochrome prison.
“There was thought in that. To my understanding, you can’t ever wear the same colour as Her Majesty if there’s a group event.”
(Lime green and orange were out, then.)
“But then you also should never be wearing the same colour as one of the other more senior members of the family.”
(Wicked sister-in-law Kate strikes again. First the Pantihose Incident, now the colour bar. Cue hissing from the stalls).
“So I was like, ‘Well what’s a colour that they’ll probably never wear?’ Camel? Beige? White?” the Duchess said.
“It also was so I could just blend in. Like, I’m not trying to stand out here. So there’s no version of me joining this family and trying to not do everything I could to fit in. I don’t want to embarrass the family.”
Heaven forfend.
For those of us who tuned into all three hours of the Netflix special hoping for some fresh evidence of institutional racism, Thursday night’s first ‘volume’ was a little … muted.
Meghan – who, we learned, was only using Hollywood stardom to facilitate her preferred lifestyle of refilling water bottles in Uttar Pradesh – has presumably saved up the juiciest allegations against the House of Mountbatten-Windsor for next week’s Volume II.
We saw her on screen wearing a suite of earth-toned outfits in those oppressed early days as one of the most privileged people on earth.
Not, you understand, because these are her preferred colours, but because the pinch-faced people of the Palace just could not handle a Woman Of Colour, in any sense.
Curiously, we didn’t see Meghan in that stunning bright purple dress and red trench in Birkenhead in 2019, paired with fire-engine stilettos.
Nor that electric yellow summer Brandon Maxwell sleeveless shift for a Commonwealth reception at Marlborough House in 2018.
Forgotten was the bright pink floral silk gown at the Fiji market (the one where palace aides say she flounced out because she didn’t like the UN’s display booth).
Deep green Givenchy in Dublin – the Netflix producers must have overlooked that one.
Ditto the Windsor castle engagement in 2019 when she famously wore a ruby red lambskin pencil skirt, again with red six-inch heels.
Does anyone else remember all this? When Meghan Markle was hailed around the world as a fashion icon – the most influential woman of style since Jacqueline Kennedy? When she had the designers of the world begging her to wear their pieces?
Yes, she wore a lot of neutrals. But that’s because she knew she looked a knockout in them – and lo, she sold out camel trenches and white trousers around the globe. Thanks to Meghan, the luxury department stores of the world were suddenly stuffed with soft fawn overcoats with tied belts. Deep jewel-toned leather skirts and matching silk blouses. Towering Aquazzura pumps.
The freshly crowned Duchess of Sussex was universally celebrated as the beauty of the age, incidentally ensuring everyone else in the family, including her conservatively elegant sister-in-law, looked uncomfortably naff by comparison.
But Meghan must now speak her truth, and show us her palatial Montecito freedom, where she celebrates her escape by draping everything, including herself, in those very shades of oppressive smoke and dust.
The Netflix special skilfully, and fairly, brought a more human and endearing side to this much-maligned couple.
It was lovely to see them in love.
But the shame is in the self-delusion; the relentless ploughing up of the past in search of buried slights.
In the Sussexes’ self-justifying sorrow, nothing from that old life can be allowed to lie dormant. No moment of success can be allowed to just be.
Everything – even Meghan’s own choices, must be interrogated and revised; added to the articles of indictment against the family she has only ever wished to support.
As someone once said, recollections may vary.
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