Seventeen years ago, I was pregnant in New York and some lovely friends held a baby shower. One American mate bought me some tiny Gucci bootees: I still have them, pristine and boxed, as a memento of a lovely, mad time.

I remembered them when I read some of the reactions to the trip to New York by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, when her not just generous, but wildly wealthy, friends – such as Serena Williams and the Clooneys – coughed up a reported £330,000 for a baby shower in a top Manhattan hotel. No public money was spent on Meghan’s party, unless you count the security detail for members of the royal family. Yet Libby Purves, in a fabulously damning piece in the Times, wrote that while such “daft flaunting of wealth” was to be expected among stars, “the clash comes when a free-spending American TV celebrity, the independent Ms Markle, becomes the British Queen’s granddaughter-in-law”.

Just consider the adjectives in that sentence; Markle is not just flashing the cash (free-spending) but foreign, famous and, possibly worst of all, an “independent Ms”.

For hire: the former royal hangers-on who are hounding Meghan Read more

It has all underlined the growing sense in much of the British media that Meghan is somehow just not “one of us”.

The relationship between the royals and the press could, perhaps, withstand the relentless scrutiny of Meghan’s body – last week we learned, courtesy of Mail Online, that her belly button has been pushed “out” by the baby – but not the publication of a five-page handwritten letter written from Meghan to her father. Kensington Palace is now considering legal action against the Mail on Sunday similar to that brought successfully by Prince Charles when the paper published his diaries in 2006.

Yet less than a year ago the marriage of Harry to this mixed-race divorcee with a successful career was being held up as a joyous coming-together of old and new. The event was heralded as the start of a “new era” by the New York Times and a “breath of fresh air” showing just how progressive and open British society could be. How clever of “The Firm” to reinvigorate itself in this way with a sprinkling of Hollywood glamour.

Now it seems that a woman praised for modernising the monarchy is perhaps just a bit too modern, a bit too full of herself, a bit too independent.

Piers Morgan, a man never known to avoid a social dog fight when he sniffs one, condemned her for “acting her way to the top” after she refused to return his calls, as if she needed an excuse.

Even Janet Street-Porter, a woman who has made a career out of speaking up, wrote in the Mail: “Couldn’t Meghan learn to act a little bit more (dare I say it) regal? Keep her mouth shut.”

In the space of a few months, Meghan has gone from teaching the royals new ways, to apparently finding herself in breach of royal protocol by showing too much shoulder. Kate, once dismissed as an airhead oik in search of a rich husband, lest we forget, is somehow allowed to show some shoulder, a double standard seized on by the US press, of course, as it allows them to lambast their hidebound British peers, while benefiting from the ensuing sales lift provided by the most photogenic royals.

For anyone who believes Meghan’s media treatment is no different to other royals, I give you Mike Tindall. While the former actor has been forced to drop her online blog and acting career, the member of a World Cup-winning rugby team, and another outsider to marry a royal grandchild, has continued with his former career and appeared on TV survival programmes since marrying Zara Phillips. What’s more, his treatment by the press appears overwhelmingly positive despite two lengthy drink-driving bans.

The “racial undertones” first mentioned by Prince Harry in a letter asking the press to desist in its treatment of his then girlfriend in 2016 also bedevil the coverage.

This was brought home to me last week when I was told by a tabloid sage of rumours that Meghan was no longer using skin-lightening lotions because she was pregnant. In all seriousness. About a woman who said magazines which change her skin tone or airbrush out her freckles are her “pet peeve”. In a moving 2015 piece for Elle magazine about growing up the daughter of an African-American woman and Caucasian man, Markle described the hateful online reaction to the decision by the producers of Suits to cast a black man as her father. One she cited was: “Ew, she’s black? I used to think she was hot.”

She moves to the UK and, as well as spiteful Fleet Street gossip, Kensington Palace has to moderate comments on its official online feeds to stop racist and sexist abuse.

A respected Times journalist, meanwhile, described any suggestion that Markle was being “pursued and vilified,” as her dead mother-in-law was, as “utter fantasy”. “No one is spying on her in the gym,” he opined. “No one is listening in on her phone calls.”

Post-Leveson, much has changed, but it seems the bar is still quite low.

Owning our independence

When it emerged last week that a Saudi investor had bought a 30 % stake in the Evening Standard for an estimated £25m to match his 2017 investment in the Independent, there was little fanfare. The Financial Times identified the investor as Sultan Mohamed Abuljadayel, an employee of NCB Capital, the investment banking arm of Saudi Arabia’s National Commercial Bank, which is majority owned by the Saudi government; the regime which dwells at the bottom of press freedom league tables and is implicated in the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Oh, and that the investment was made via a Cayman Islands offshoot long beloved of thriller writers looking for signs of covert ops. Move along, nothing to see here.

The Standard, now edited by the former chancellor George Osborne, insists its editorial freedom is safeguarded. They point to the paper’s coverage of Russia since it was bought by the former KGB officer Alexander Lebedev and his son Evgeny in 2010.

The younger Lebedev, who now has British citizenship, has spent some time with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, and shows an interest in the Middle East, posing on Instagram with Saudi-backed militias in Yemen while accompanying Evening Standard journalists there on assignment for his birthday last May.

The Independent can be rightly proud of its history of journalism about the Saudi regime, while the Standard can argue that the actions of Vladimir Putin are not really its core area of concern. It did, however, publish pictures of the Russian president greeting the Saudi crown prince just weeks after the Khashoggi murder at the G20 with a very smiley high five.

And yet, does it not seem odd that, at the same time as the UK legislators and media executives are rightly concerned about the rise of bots directed by hostile states and their impact on our democracy, so little is said or done about the ownership of the actual news organisations that we’ve long believed were the bulwark against state control?

The argument, made by David Puttnam among others, that British newspaper owners should all be domestic taxpayers, has largely been dismissed for failing to understand that, without foreign ownership, newspapers would have died. The Barclay brothers-owned Telegraph, already accused by a former columnist of killing stories critical of advertisers, has a £750,000-a-year deal to include a supplement from the Communist party of China’s daily newspaper.

One newspaper executive said last week there was no difference between the Saudis or Russians owning a newspaper and a football club.

Which would be true if the British media was just a vehicle for identity politics, fun and games rather than a time-honoured way of holding the powerful to account.