Glaring detail in new report reveals royal family needs Meghan Markle back

Buckingham Palace’s annual report has come out, detailing just how badly they are still doing, four long years after Megxit.

It’s Saturday, so let’s talk about some percentages. (Never let it be said I don’t know how to have a good time!)

So, 18 per cent. That’s the percentage of Brits who are from black, Asian, mixed or other ethnic groups. (Want a really wild night? Delve into British census data. Rock. And. Roll).

Now who wants to take a wild guess at what percentage of Buckingham Palace staff are also from black, Asian, mixed or other ethnic groups? Not that far off half that, at 11.4 per cent.

Now before this starts sounding too much like I’ve been reading Nigel Farage’s unicorn-covered dream journal, my point is, London, we have a problem. A major one. And one that a certain duchess could help fix.

Recently, the annual Sovereign Grant report came out, 136 pages of sustainability targets

and light bulb counts, and it makes two things clear. On the subject of diversity, the Palace is not exactly in tip-top shape. And the Crown Inc? Gosh darn it, but they need Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex back.

Queen Elizabeth II sits and laughs with Meghan, Duchess of Sussex in 2018 – two years before Megxit. Picture: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

The report states that one of the Palace’s key objectives is to “continue to develop a diverse team of well-led, trained, motivated and adaptable professionals”.

Leaving aside the “continue” bit, something a particular titled Montecitan ratepayer and her husband might take issue with, but … didn’t the Palace have exactly all of this gift-wrapped in bespoke Givenchy only a few years ago?

Diverse? Motivated? Adaptable? I couldn’t think of three adjectives that better describe Meghan.

The “change of reign”, the Grant report details, has led to a “focus” on “ensuring that the Royal Household is a modern, inclusive, purpose and values led organisation”.

To help them do this, over the last year, they have been conducting “surveys, focus groups, leadership development and all-staff training sessions”.

All of which sounds like something that you’d find in the annual report of some major accounting firm who are busy doing their “best” for women by putting out neon pink cupcakes every International Women’s Day and then herding female staffers into a conference to be told they need to speak up more.

But unlike our imaginary accounting firm, the Palace has quite the past on this subject and a hardly flattering one at that.

What does not sit comfortably is the idea that Crown Inc is busy beavering away to encourage “diversity” and “inclusivity” when their most high profile recruit of colour found it all so inhospitable that she yanked the rip chord after less than two years.

Charles wants a diverse line up full of pep and vim and motivation and a willingness to try new things? He had it in his daughter-in-law. Picture: Oli Scarff/AFP

Fundamentally, the royal family has a serious blot on their copybook on the diversity front and their efforts on this, as spelled out in the report, hardly seem likely to redress things any time soon.

Charles wants a diverse line up full of pep and vim and motivation and a willingness to try new things? He had it in his daughter-in-law who has transformed herself from decorative game show ornament to blogger, philanthropist TV producer, podcaster, children’s book author and soon to be entrepreneur with her American Riviera Orchard lifestyle brand. (Though four months on since ARO’s Insta unveiling, the public is still being denied the chance to spend their hard earned ducats on Meghan-made jam).

The House of Windsor has only ever had one member who is a person of colour and she found the whole box and dice so unappealing that ultimately she was jetting back across the Atlantic in the wrong direction while the Household Cavalry were still paying off the new silver trumpets they had splurged on for the wedding. (It was just eight easy payments …)

Then, Meghan famously went on the telly to charge an unnamed member of the royal family with having had “concerns” about their unborn baby’s skin colour. The palace, reportedly spurred on by Kate the Princess of Wales, responded with a brutally economical 61-word response, including the line “recollections may vary”.

It didn’t take long for the cracks to show. Picture: Tolga Akmen/AFP

The following year, in late 2022, Harry & Meghan landed on Netflix and it all came roaring back to the fore when the duke told the cameras that there is a “huge level of unconscious bias” in the royal family. He also said that when Meghan was facing a media deluge and he was told that it was a “rite of passage”, what Crown Inc failed to grasp was “the race element”.

The next chapter in all of this came in late 2023 when the Dutch version of Omid Scobie’s dramatically named Endgame, a title that sounds like he found it on Tom Clancy’s cutting room floor, outed King Charles and Kate as the so-called “royal racists” who had “concerns and conversations” about the Sussexes’ first baby’s skin colour.

The proper full history of this subject would require six volumes with a separate folio for footnotes, but what it boils down to is an institution famous for having been unfriendly and resistant towards a woman of colour – and which is now saying one of their key objectives is to build “a diverse team”.

It’s a bit like throwing out all your Christmas presents and then complaining you don’t have any lovely packages to unwrap.

Charles wants to to build ‘a diverse team’. Picture: Euan Cherry/Getty Images

But he already had one in Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. Picture: Saeed Khan/AFP

Dig further in the Grant report and the numbers don’t exactly paint the Palace in any better light. For the third year, Crown Inc has had to admit that they are still failing to meet their diversity target of 14 per cent of their workforce coming from ethnic minorities. (Though it is up on last year’s 9.7 per cent).

Not only that, the percentage of senior palace staff from ethnic minorities has fallen over the last year (from 12.2 to 11.4 per cent) and there is an ethnic minority pay gap of 3.9 per cent.

What all of this amounts to is, Charles needs Meghan. He wants “a modern, inclusive, purpose and values led organisation”? He’s got the mobile number of just the gal who personifies all of that.

If a wand could be waved or magic beans bought next time Princess Anne does her Aldi shop; if there was some way that bygones could be bygones and enmity and hurt and teary TV revelations could be miraculously forgotten, the perfect solution to all this would be simply to get Meghan back. (Oh, and that bloke she’s married to too).

Sadly, there cannot be a sentient human who even thinks this is the remotest of possibilities, though.

So for now, all we can do is wait. Wait another year for the next scintillating Grant report and wait to see if those focus groups might actually achieve anything, and wait for the day that the ARO jam production line chugs into gear.

Royalty was hard, but conserve-making is yet to prove to be a cakewalk either.

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.

Originally published as Glaring detail in new report reveals royal family needs Meghan Markle back