Is Harry & Meghan’s choice of Lilibet a subtle insult or mean little jibe?
THE World’s Most Private Couple have emerged from their seclusion in Hollywood to announce the birth of a daughter.
Given that Harry and Meghan could give Moses a run for his money in the portentousness stakes, we should have known that this would be no normal child, and that its name would be like some mystery of Holy Writ, replete with meaning.
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But even I bent double when I heard the Sussexes had chosen to call their daughter Lilibet Diana Mountbatten Windsor.
Diana, as the name of Harry’s beloved and much missed mother, is a natural choice of course. But Lilibet is the Queen’s intimate family nickname, used only by her parents, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, her sister Princess Margaret and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh.
It is not exactly something the monarch carelessly flings around while greeting foreign dignitaries or signing statutes. No doubt, however, there will be many who will see in Harry and Meghan’s choice of names for their newborn a tribute to a beloved grandmother, even a touching, tentative attempt at reconciliation.
To which one would counter, isn’t it a little late? I mean, that poor olive branch must be a dried up, barren twig by now? The gulf between Harry and his family is so wide that even if the child has been called Lilibet Catherine Charlie Wilhemina (the feminine for William) it could not be bridged.
In any case, if such a tribute was intended, wouldn’t it have been more suitable to have called their daughter plain Elizabeth? It seems presumptuous, and even distasteful to appropriate a term of endearment that must have been used by Prince Philip during the more passionate moments of married life.
Indeed, Lilibet is not even a name at all. Meghan and Harry might just as well have chosen ‘Doll Face’ , ‘Cutie Pie’ or ‘Tootsie Wootsie.’ My father called my mother ‘Buttercup,’ but had he attempted to christen me that, I would have thrown the Holy Water in his face.
Moreover, it should be duly remarked by historians that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have spent much of the last years traducing and hectoring the Royal Family, including the Queen, who was accused of ‘bad parenting’. Is Lilibet then, some sort of subtle insult or mean little jibe? It may not be intended as one, but in the present circumstances, it is a little clumsy.
I wonder if Her Majesty had a rather mirthless chuckle when she was informed of this latest turn of the Sussex PR wheel. Only the day before Meghan had found herself and her husband downgraded on the Royal Family’s website.
For someone who likes to gild and fresco her life, this must have been bitter gall – perhaps enough to provoke the rather pointed naming of her daughter.
It’s curious that both Lilibet and Diana come from Harry’s side of the family, which makes me suspect that Meghan’s true feelings tend toward the direction that her own family is intolerably vulgar and common.
The multiplicity of the relatives she falls out with leaves little room for choosing baby names. Samantha is a pretty name, but obviously, given her relationship with her half sister, it was not one that Meghan wished to consider.
More curious still that with these names the couple have chosen to honour an institution that not so long ago, they damned as a hotbed of racism. But Meghan is not one for self examination; when she looks in the mirror, she sees only an ingratiating proposition.
As for the Prince of Sighs, he is increasingly the man with no qualities, and may one day disappear into a tiny vortex somewhere in space.
Both the Sussexes have gone the way of tawdry celebrities, as opposed to royals, and chosen a life of increasing pretension and emptiness. Only minor rock stars or reality TV ‘personalities’ christen their children with nicknames.
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But in Meghan’s belligerent hands, a name is a weapon; a statement; a piece of politics. Lilibet must have seemed like the trumpets of the cavalry in her continual battle for advancement through victimhood, and though Lilibet Diana is the first British Royal to be born on American soil, it is unlikely that her parents will regard her as ordinary.
Amongst the gullible and the rustic, Meghan is still a heroine wronged by English tyrants. Her traps and baits have been cleverly set. How forgiving and magnanimous a creature Meghan must be to pay tribute to the horrid Queen in the naming of her daughter!
The trouble is, as another humbly born American, Abraham and Lincoln, once said; you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. The British public became weary of her shenanigans, and her supporters in the US are beginning to see through her too. Lilibet indeed! Who does she think she’s kidding?