Could The New Royal Book Divide And Rule Finally Challenge The Kate Versus Meghan Machine?

You would think that after all the breathless build‑up, the Daily Mail would have put Peter Phillips and his new wife, Harriet Sperling, on its front page. A royal wedding! The Queen’s grandson! A beautiful bride in a white lace gown! Surely that would sell papers?

But no. Instead, the cover featured Meghan Sussex. Yes, Meghan, the woman who did not attend the wedding. The woman who lives 5,000 miles away. The woman who, according to the Mail‘s own reporting, has “not spoken in years” to Peter. And yet there she was, front and centre, with a knowing grin and a headline linking her to, wait for it, the Royal Navy’s submarine problems? (Because of course, Meghan is now responsible for military procurement failures.)

The actual reason for the cover is a new book by feminist writer Catherine Mayer, titled Divide & Rule: Royal Women and Their Battles, which profiles figures from Anne Boleyn to Meghan, Kate Middleton, Princess Diana, and Queen Camilla. It is due out on June 18, and the Mail used the occasion to run a teaser, and naturally, they chose Meghan as the visual hook.

Frankly, the Daily Mail cover could have featured any of the women from Catherine Mayer’s book. They could have used a photo of Diana, a regal shot of the Queen, or even a flattering picture of Camilla. Instead, they picked Meghan and Kate. Their headline reads: “Meghan… the warning signs that everyone missed” – while Kate gets the more neutral “Kate: The Royal Enigma” on the same cover.

Here is what the Mail on Sunday published as an extract from Mayer’s book:

IT LOOKS like a fairy tale – and, in many ways, it is, for this turns out to be a story full of jeopardy. Deceptively traditional in silk and tulle, Meghan pauses on the steps at St George’s Chapel and waves to the cheering crowds. Inside, royalty lines the pews.

The Tudor Henrys are buried here, so too Jane Seymour, Edward VII, and, in an annex, George VI and Princess Margaret. Over bones and dust Meghan glides toward her groom: does she take Harry for richer, for poorer? The new Duke of Sussex turns pink with happiness.

A hereditary monarchy is an unlikely engine of change, but the family’s first biracial member, first declared feminist and, in a sign of institutional shift, the first divorcee permitted to marry a Windsor in the Church of England, seems to hint at progress. Maybe Meghan will be able to use her new position for good.

I click on the screen, scroll back, study the footage again. To revisit these scenes is to peer down the wrong end of a telescope, the optimism of that day as distant as the moon, or at least California, where the Sussexes have lived in exile since 2020.

How did the dream crumble? Even those of us who warned, ‘Don’t do it, Di’ back in the 1980s somehow dared to imagine a better outcome for Meghan Markle when she married into the Royal Family in 2018.

She is different, we told ourselves. We weren’t wrong – but that difference would count against her. How on earth did so many people who saw what happened to Princess Diana fall for the princess myth yet again?

I remember the day Diana died in 1997. After a colleague woke me with news of a car crash in Paris, I headed to Buckingham Palace. A hotel worker pointed to the building and told me: ‘They killed her.’

Over the following days, that accusation gained currency, but few meant it literally. Anger centred on perceptions that the Royal Family had hung Diana out to dry.

Back then, and throughout my years as a writer and editor at America’s Time magazine, frequently covering royal matters, I agreed that the Windsors had contributed to Diana’s vulnerability.

But it was only recently, researching my new book – which looks at the lives and roles played by eight royal women, from Anne Boleyn to Kate, the current Princess of Wales – that I finally grasped the nature of the most significant forces that placed Diana in the back of a speeding limousine.

These forces were not the scenarios imagined by conspiracy theorists; rather, they were the reflexes of patriarchal systems – including the ‘patrimonarchy’ – to defend their power structures and hierarchies.

In 1997, I remained dry-eyed. Now I weep for Diana and the damage such forces continue to inflict. Prince Harry has spoken of parallels between Meghan and Diana. He is determined to protect his wife – in a way he could not protect his mother – from what he sees as the twin threats from within the palace and the media.

To be a royal woman in any age is to be endlessly scrutinised and judged. Some smile silently and bear the attention.

It is when women attempt to define themselves that things get interesting. As Princess Diana declared in her controversial BBC Panorama interview, she ‘won’t go quietly, that’s the problem’. Meghan’s exit has been at least as noisy, and you don’t have to look far to find echoes in history.

Consider the following description: ‘A commoner raised to royalty, she is a heroine to some, a hate figure to others. Her adherents trumpeted her potential to refresh the monarchy. Her enemies disparaged her as an interloper… Still the wedding went ahead – accounts differ on the number of ceremonies – but soon she was gone, her exit brutal. Fans maintain that prejudice and plotting did for her. Critics hold her solely responsible for her own downfall.’

If you assume this to be a description of Meghan, you’re right – but here’s the thing: the same details apply, word for word, to Anne Boleyn.

A series of patterns marks royal women’s lives. Great queens such as Elizabeth I break or reshape moulds but the safer path to popularity, currently personified by the Princess of Wales, is to perfect the conventional role. Meghan never could have done that even if she wished to do so.

Now she languishes in British opinion polls, the least popular royal except for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

But if your feelings for her go beyond disinterest to active dislike, even hatred, ask yourself why. Might it be that, like royal predecessors, she has been damned as a strumpet, and pitted against other royal women by insidious palace briefing and a culture hostile to women with opinions?

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Royal Women And The Myths We Project Onto Them

Catherine Mayer’s book sounds genuinely interesting. Her central argument, that royal women are often set up as rivals, from Diana versus Camilla to Kate versus Meghan, is worth examining. But those comparisons are not identical. Diana and Camilla were placed in opposition through a marriage, an affair and a succession crisis. Meghan and Kate are both women who married into the same family, and there is no known romantic triangle between the couples. In fact, Harry has said that William and Kate were fans of Meghan when she appeared in Suits, and that William could hardly believe Harry’s luck.

That is why I will be interested to see how Mayer handles the deeper dynamics: race, hierarchy, gender, class and the attention economy. Because with Meghan, the story is not simply “two royal women were pitted against each other.” Meghan represents something historically significant. She is a biracial American woman who entered one of the oldest white institutions in the world, became globally visible almost overnight, and then became a lightning rod for anxieties about race, class, femininity, empire and modernity.

As a student of history, I am always fascinated by royal women and how society treats them, fairly or unfairly, because that treatment tells us so much about the world around them. Royal women are never just individuals in pretty dresses. They become symbols. People project values, fears, fantasies and resentments onto them. That is what happened to Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I, Queen Victoria, Diana, Camilla, Kate and Meghan in very different ways.

Final Thoughts

Mayer has previously acknowledged that the racism directed at Meghan was real and that the abuse was wildly disproportionate. That gives me some hope that her analysis will be more nuanced than the usual royal commentary. But I will also be watching carefully to see whether the book falls into the same trap that Black feminist thinkers have warned about for generations: treating womanhood as if race does not change the terms of the conversation.

Sojourner Truth made that point in her 1851 speech, Ain’t I a Woman?, when she challenged a mainstream women’s rights movement that failed to account for the compounded realities of being both Black and female. Any serious analysis of Meghan must acknowledge the central fact: the press and the palace did not treat her simply as a royal woman; they treated her as a Black royal woman, and that distinction reshaped every attack, every comparison and every so-called scandal around her.

The irony is that the Daily Mail now wants to sell a book about how power divides women, while its own royal coverage has spent years fuelling “Kate versus Meghan” narratives, manufacturing female rivalry and trying to turn Gwyneth Paltrow and Meghan into lifestyle-brand enemies. Paltrow shut that storyline down immediately instead of letting the press weaponise her, which only made the contrast sharper.

Any serious analysis of Meghan must acknowledge the central fact: the press and the palace did not treat her simply as a royal woman; they treated her as a Black royal woman, and that distinction reshaped every attack, every comparison and every so-called scandal around her.

So while Mayer may be trying to critique “divide and rule,” the Mail will almost certainly do what it always does: extract the most inflammatory lines, frame them as a feud, and ignore the systemic argument. That is how divide and rule actually works. I will review the book once I have read it. The real test will be whether Mayer challenges the machine that pits royal women against each other and, in Meghan’s case, confronts the blatant racism within that machine, or whether the extracts become another tool that helps keep it running.