Meghan Markle suits the modern Royal family

I don’t know how many of you bothered to watch the American legal drama Suits. It’s the one, set in corporate Manhattan, that co-starred Meghan Markle … I mean Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Sussex, as rookie lawyer Rachel Zane.

Suits is less a drama than a soap opera. A bit like Brexit or the House of Windsor. It has more entrances and exits than a Whitehall farce. No sooner has an angry client burst in to one of the attorneys’ offices to express his or her outrage at the way in which a case is being handled than there is a stand-up row that ends with the client flouncing off. Sometimes, it is the lawyer who storms out, leaving the client marooned, and just occasionally the altercations result in actual fistfights, usually in the men’s room, with the winner issuing a warning of more to come while the loser rubs his chin.

Bear with me. I will get on to the royal baby in a moment.

One of the most notable things about Suits is that none of the characters – and there are lots of them – is married or has children. This is increasingly normal in American tv drama. Just last week, the latest incarnation of Star Trek ended with the highly-advanced USS Discovery making a permanent leap 950 years into the future. The entire crew was okay with that, apparently. None of them appeared to have any family ties, apart from Commander Michael Burnham – a woman, needless to say – whose mother, it turns out, already existed in the future. The rest just thought, “What the heck! No one’s going to miss us anyway.”

But in Suits, Rachel Zane – Her Royal Highness – is the one who, uniquely, has parents. She has a black father, Robert Zane, the managing partner in a rival law firm, and a white mother who shows up from time to time to give her daughter sage advice before disappearing in the general direction of Bloomingdales. At the conclusion of season seven, Rachel ends up marrying Mike Ross, a brilliant but bogus lawyer with whom she’s had an on-off relationship ever since she was an ambitious paralegal back in season two, and the happy couple, we are told, plan to leave New York for Seattle, no doubt to take on Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Boeing and Starbucks on behalf of the little guys while simultaneously making themselves very rich indeed.

Every time I watched Rachel and Mike, from season six on, I wondered when she would tell him she had met this other guy, a tall-ginger-headed Englishman, who claimed he was a grandson of the Queen of England. But she never did. Instead, wearing a simple, sleeveless wedding gown, she shamelessly walked up the aisle with Mike, whispering to anyone who would listen that he was “the strongest man I’ve ever met”.

Tell that to Prince Harry.

Back in her fictional life, as the now-royal wife of the sixth in line to the throne of the United Kingdom, Rachel/aka Meghan Markle wasted little time before becoming pregnant. She had read the script and knew royal babies were what ensured that The Monarchy, Britain’s longest-running drama, would be picked up for yet another season.

And so it was that the Earl of Dumbarton (for it is he) was born, becoming seventh in the order of succession to his great grandmother, the Queen, and the first of his line, so far as we can be certain, to be not only the son of an actress but also one-quarter a baby of colour.

Meghan Markle’s father, who is white, provided the tabloid press with much amusement in the lead-up to the Windsor nuptials. Thomas Markle, a resident of Rosarito, Mexico, is a retired tv technician who once worked on the long-running sitcom Married … with Children. He enjoyed considerable professional success and in 1990 won three-quarters-of-a-million dollars in the California State Lottery. Sadly for him, he ended up bankrupt. Sadly for his daughter, he decided to cash in on her marriage to Harry and, after an unedifying spat over staged photographs, ended up a no-show at the wedding.

But it is the Duchess’s mother – long-since divorced from Markle – who is much the more interesting. Doria Ragland, descended from slaves, is the daughter of a nurse and a flea-market worker and the granddaughter of a hotel bellhop and lift operator who worked at a whites-only hotel in Cleveland, Ohio.

Ms Ragland was a big hit at the royal wedding. A former make-up artist who later ran her own small business, she made it to university in mid-life, ending up with a master’s degree in social work, and was employed in a mental health services unit in Culver City, California, until May of last year.

She has remained close to her daughter, accompanying her on a number of overseas engagements, including the Invictus Games and the Fourth World Conference on Women.

British royals have been known in the past to “dally” with women of an ethnic minority background. But this is the first time that a woman not one hundred per cent white has actually joined the real-life cast of The Crown. The new Earl of Dumbarton, in the event of a Red Wedding misfortune, (for those who don’t watch Game of Thrones, a wedding scene in which a whole royal family, the Starks, is butchered) could yet end up on the Iron Throne, and the British people, it seems, are thrilled to bits about it.

What is perhaps strange – or at any rate untypical – about the Former Suits star’s Ragland to riches story is that there never were in fact any rags. The young Meghan was educated privately, attending, among others, Hollywood’s famous Little Red Schoolhouse, before winning a place at the privately funded Northwestern University, outside of Chicago, with its endowment of over $11 billion. There, she was accepted as a member of the exclusive Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority (motto “Dream Boldly. Live Fully”), before going on to complete her studies in Madrid and working as an intern in the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires.

Not Hollywood royalty exactly, but solidly upper-middle class. As my mother would have said, there was nothing “common” about Meghan Markle. The Duchess’s maternal grandparents, for whom upward mobility meant pressing the button for floor 9 of the Hotel St Regis, would have been thrown by the thought of their great grandson being a direct descendant of the Queen of England. But they would also have been taken aback by her diplomatic connections and starring role in a hit television drama.

The infant Earl will doubtless star in dramas of his own in the years ahead. As for Mike Ross, played by Patrick J. Adams – a Canadian and thus himself a subject of Her Majesty – we have to hope that his marriage to the Duchess’s alter-ego Rachel Zane leads equally to fame and fortune.

They say you can’t make it up. But actually they can. Cue baby in cot. Lights, camera … action!