Meghan Markle is using those royal connections she married into, now to the hilt, for politics.

Far from being the aloof royal family member she said she'd be when she married Prince Harry last year, she's diving in.

According to the Daily Mail:

On Tuesday Meghan secretly invited former First Lady Hillary Clinton to visit her at Frogmore Cottage, her Windsor home, the Mail can reveal.

According to sources, the two women hugged during what was described as something of a 'fan girl' meeting.

Prince Harry and six-month-old Archie were there and Mrs Clinton, 72, even got to have a cuddle of the royal baby and told Meghan about Chelsea's new baby son, Jasper, her third grand-child.

'Both women have a lot of admiration for each other and it was a very sweet, warm meeting,' the source said,' they are mutual fan girls!"

This, Hillary being a Clinton, means that the claimed conversation wasn't about grandchildren.  It was probably about politics, same as Bill Clinton's surprise and spontaneous meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on that famous tarmac in 2016.

Markle has already made it well enough known that she hates President Trump by her pre-royalty statements, and she has made it since clearer by refusing to meet with Trump on his state visit, which was otherwise quite cordial with the royal family.  (Trump wasn't, after all, handing the queen iPods of his own speeches, which was probably all it took for things to be polite and courteous.)  Class?  Not from Markle.  She demonstrated for us what lack of class is, from that duchess perch of hers, no less.

She's also dragging the British royal family down.  They've got a family mission, for better or worse, of being the upholder of British tradition.  British tradition is that the royal family does not engage in cheap politics, no matter what the side, good, bad, or ugly.  They'd be the height of courtesy to a rabid leftist like Jeremy Corbyn if he ever got elected prime minister.  The royals are above that, and up until now, as the royals say, "rule holds."

Now we have Markle's latest act, which breaks that tradition, putting the royal family down in the gutter of foreign politics alongside herself.  It's a sign that she not only doesn't respect British tradition, but doesn't respect the family that took her in, either.

And cripes, they've gone out of their way for her.  In the past, a royal could marry only another royal, so she's a significant exception on that alone.  It actually wasn't about race, either, or her being of partial African heritage.  Race was not that big a deal for royals so long as a person seems royal — the Swedish royal family is intermarried with Brazilians, for instance, and aristocratic Russian poet Alexander Pushkin had African ancestry on one side.  Nope, the royal family bent over to accommodate her because it was mostly about her being by trade an actress, a profession that historically has been considered too trashy for anything but a royal concubine spot.  They broke their own rules and traditions to take her in as one of them, and now she's showing them how bad an idea that was, dragging them into U.S. politics, where they probably don't want to be.

It's selfish, too, in that Meghan's act uses the royal family's name to draw in Clinton to whatever political project she might have.  Would Hillary Clinton have given Markle the time of day for that grandchild act if Markle had never married Prince Harry and instead remained a second-tier television actress? 

It also places the royals in a pretty dangerous spot.  Once they are seen as political players, it's only a matter of time before the other part of Britain decides it's time for them to go, and sure enough, that will be the end of it.  It raises questions, then, about how long she's really going to last.

It's being packaged for us now as a cute little discussion about babies and grandchildren, but it's doubtful anyone — here, there, or way over here — is really fooled by it.  She's just dragging the family that took her in into the mud of politics, and it's not a pretty picture.  As Markle's own sister has said, she's a user.  Maybe there's something to that claim after all.

Image credit: Northern Ireland Office via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.