In my world of investigating white collar crime, there is a Eureka movement when you can prove that a company has told one slam dunk lie. It does not matter how small the lie, it is the act of lying that matters. And that brings me to Meghan Markle. We can dissect her interview in detail as I started to do HERE but let us focus on what is the most glaring and obvious and serious lie she told.
Lies can be terribly small. There was a company I exposed called Milestone which did all sorts of naughty things but what was the first big lie? It signed a partnership with a company making great claims and run by a chap who made great play about how he had attended Oxford University. But something did not ring true and, having attended University in the City of Lost Causes myself, I knew where to check. I was soon able to establish that he was lying about his CV.
If you are prepared to take the risk of lying once when running a public company knowing that this could bring ruin, dismissal, possibly even jail, the odds are that there will be numerous other lies. Look hard enough and someone like me will find them and it is game over. Which brings us to Meghan.
Princess Anne would never tell a lie to the media as she does not have to. She has no story to concoct, no image to spin. Thus if a celeb or member of the Royal Family is caught telling one lie, the odds are that they are telling numerous others and your job as a journalist should be to uncover and prove the other lies. It is sad that folks like Dan Walker seem to have forgotten that, instead falling for the line that anyone who questions Meghan must be a lacky of the Palace, a racist or both. The racist assumption is surely to assume that non whites are incapable of lying and thus to suspend your critical analysis in the face of an obvious lie on that basis. Whatever our skin colour we are all human beings and so all capable of lying. Our willingness to lie has nothing whatsoever to do with skin colour but is just part of who we are as human beings.
It may not have been the biggest lie from the Oprah interview but it was the most demonstrably mendacious and also the most hurtful as it smeared the Royal Family as racists. The porky I refer to is that Archie was not going to be made a Prince because he was not white. This is demonstrably false. Archie is not a Prince because of 100-year-old strict rules about who gets called what. Since Harry is not heir to the throne his sons will not be Princes just as the son of Princess Margaret was not a Prince. Harry knew that. Meghan would have had that explained to her. Yet she threw out a slur and a lie anyway.
Tens of millions of credulous yanks and too many credulous Brits have swallowed that lie but it is nonetheless a demonstrable lie and since it has very serious implications, the job of all critical journalists is thus to assume that others were told too and to ask questions. Is Meghan really saying that the big wedding we all paid for was a fake as the couple were already married? Is she really saying that despite knowing his cousin she had never heard of Harry before they met? Really? Having established that the woman is a liar, it is surely likely that these claims may also be lies.
It is a sad day when the penny share pump & dumping phone hacking scumbag Piers Morgan remembers what it is to be a journalist yet all too many in our profession, including Mr Walker and most of his BBC colleagues, appear to forget.