And another point about views of Meghan and her conspicuous consumption following her engagement and marriage - this has always struck me as a culture clash in the purest of senses.
If you’ve never read social anthropologist Kate Fox’s excellent book “Watching the English” I would highly recommend it. She set out to discover the hidden, unspoken rules of English behaviour – the unofficial codes of conduct that cut across class, age, sex, region, sub-cultures and other social boundaries.
One of the rules that she spoke about was the well-established distaste for money-talk in everyday social life. She says “you never ask what someone earns, or disclose your own income; you never ask what price someone paid for anything, nor do you announce the cost of any of your own possessions. In social contexts, there is a sort of ‘internal logic’ to the money-talk taboo, in that it can be explained, to some extent, with reference to other basic ‘rules of Englishness’ to do with modesty, privacy, polite egalitarianism and other forms of hypocrisy”
She also says that “The English are no less naturally ambitious, greedy, selfish or avaricious than any other nation – we just have more and stricter rules requiring us to hide, deny and repress these tendencies”.
I have always found this to be very true. It is a culture that American/Hollywood raised Meghan was always going to run smack into - the woman who openly held a “Sayonara Zara” party when Suits was renewed, to mark the fact that she’d never have to buy high street clothes again, was not likely to understand that she was moving into a society where this was something quite extraordinary, and where her (natural) desire to demonstrate the impact of her newly enhanced budget on her wardrobe and lifestyle would not be celebrated, but criticised. It’s interesting that she didn’t seem to want to make any effort to learn and adapt to this (or rather she did at first I think, wearing a a few M&S pieces, but she gave up on this pretty much as soon as she was married).