Meghan and Harry

by Lady Colin Cambell

  Make no mistake about it, Meghan is clever. She intended to use the blog to boost her profile as well as her bank balance. Thereafter, she approached celebrities who crossed her path and offered them a platform to air their views. It was a masterful move, one which elevated her and gave her ballast, for while the stated objectives of the blog were lightweight, she also roped in writers, artists, activists as well as celebrities. It quickly became successful, and by the time she ended it in 2017 just before her marriage to Harry, it had some 2m followers.

  Because Meghan was intelligent and a quick learner, absorbing as if by osmosis all the lessons gleamed from the talented people who crossed her path, she was polishing her act at the very moment that the blog was growing in importance. Being a lifestyle blog, it covered everything from tennis with Serena Williams to stars like Elizabeth Hurley and Heidi Klum, with just enough coverage of serious issues such as gender, race, activism and poverty, to balance the overt superficiality of its otherwise aspirationalism.

  The Tig proved instrumental in another area of Meghan’s life. She had fancied the celebrity chef Cory Vitiello ever since she had first seen him in his downtown Toronto restaurant, The Harbord Room. He was a highly desirable man-about-town who had enjoyed a series of high-profile romances, including with the former Member of Parliament, businesswoman and philanthropist Belinda Stronach, whose billionaire father Frank is one of Canada’s richest men, and television personality and humanitarian Tanya Kim, who co-hosted a popular talk show with Ben Mulroney. Cory would be a feather in her cap if she could somehow contrive to bag him, which she did through the simple expedient of publishing a glowing review of his restaurant in The Tig which contained an even more glowing regard for the chef himself.

  According to one of Meghan’s childhood friends, who wishes to remain anonymous, she is extremely seductive when she targets people she wants to impress. ‘It doesn’t matter whether it’s a man or woman. If Meg wants to suck you into her orbit, she pulls out all the stops. She learnt a long time ago that flattery works, especially if it’s dished out with lashings of self-abnegation along the lines of, “You’re so marvellous, everything you do is so great, I want nothing from you except to admire you.” She’s wonderfully spontaneous. No one is more enthusiastic, especially when she wants to ensnare a man. She envelopes him in a miasma of adoration. She makes out that his every mundane action is a unique gift to humanity. Few people and even fewer men can resist an onslaught of such positivity from someone as appealing as Meghan. ‘This makes her very seductive. Men don’t want to resist the outpouring and, because she seems so sincere, they end up hooked on her.’

  Meghan has tremendous charm, apparent vulnerability, sweetness, and personability. She has a great deal of sex appeal, most of which emanates from her personality and those big brown eyes which beam with delight when she wants to bedazzle. She is also highly intelligent and excellent company. Above all, however, she is self-confident. By her own account, she found leaving Trevor behind an ‘empowering’ experience. Once she shed that skin, and discovered how strengthening it was to be liberated from many of the anxieties and insecurities she had suffered from previously, she became a far more potent and powerful person than she had ever been. ‘She knows her power and she enjoys wielding it,’ someone who knows her well told me.

  Meghan believed that once she got her foot in through the Vitiello door, the establishment was hers for the taking. And so it proved. Before too long, Cory had moved into the three bedroomed house at 10 Yarmouth Road in Seaton Village where Meghan had replicated the stylish pale colours, modern paintings and contemporary furniture of the cosy, yellow-painted marital home she had shared off Sunset Boulevard with Trevor. ‘She lived here very quietly,’ said Bill Kapetanos, a Greek native now in his late seventies who was her next-door neighbour. They had a cordial relationship, and he occasionally helped her out when she needed neighbourly assistance. When he met Doria, she did not merely thank him for being such a good friend to her daughter. She thanked him for helping out ‘her angel’, which shows the level of parental adoration Meghan was used to receiving.

  Meghan’s quiet lifestyle lasted ‘until Harry came on the scene.’ Only then did she start to entertain, having dinners, throwing large parties, and generally having a social buzz going that was actually uncharacteristic of the way she normally functioned.

  In reality, Meghan was a homebody who loved hunkering down with her man when they were not out on the town partying. Her main company on a day-to-day basis was her two rescue dogs from LA, Guy the beagle and Bogart the Alsatian/Labrador cross and, ironically enough, her blog, to which she dedicated so many hours that it was like a living companion.

  This homely, loving side to Meghan’s personality meant that the parents of the men with whom she was involved invariably liked her. Trevor’s parents David and Leslie Engleson had treated her as their own daughter, which was quite something when you stop to think that Jews often want their sons to marry Jewesses. So too did Gerry and Joanne Vitiello, who described her husband as ‘my high school sweetheart’ and declared that ‘family is everything.’ They hosted their son and Meghan, whose relationship Joanne Vitiello would later characterise as ‘serious’, during Christmas 2015, at their home in Brantford, two hours outside of Toronto. She believed that Meghan ‘was very interested in being with the people she was with. She has a good sense of humour and is very personable.’ Meghan and Cory ‘were living together. They were in their thirties. They weren’t kids,’ and while she never actually said it, she intimated that marriage was a possibility.

  Not everyone, however, had a rosy view of Meghan as she was ascending the greasy pole. The social columnist Shinan Govani regarded her as ‘just a cable actress’ who ‘didn’t mean much’ when she met Cory Vitiello. He, on the other hand, was a huge star locally. He was known by everyone and well liked too. ‘Within the confines of the city, being with him was definitely a useful platform for her.’ He was much bigger ‘in terms of the Establishment in Toronto. He was leverage for her.’ He was also friends with people like the Mulroneys and Markus Anderson, global membership director of the elite private club Soho House, which has a branch in Toronto. Although Meghan’s path had crossed theirs, she now became close friends with all of them. Their homes, and Soho House, became like her second home. Govani believed if she had never come to Toronto, she would never have married Prince Harry. ‘There was something about coming to Toronto, becoming friends with the Mulroneys, and having a high social cachet. It was the perfect storm that created the opportunity.’ Govani thought that there was an element of deliberateness about the way Meghan advanced herself socially, and that ‘she took advantage of the opportunity that came her way.’ He also felt that she ‘wasn’t content with just being an actress. I mean, what would happen after Suits? She wasn’t getting any younger.’

  Through Cory, Meghan’s star ascended exponentially. Not only were they a glamorous couple who functioned in the most elevated circles, but the power of two, and the connections she made through him, allowed her to spread her wings in a way that a cable show like Suits never could have done.

  While Cory was vital to Meghan’s progress, it would be a mistake to ignore the role her effort and ambition played in her growing success. The Tig was her creation. It was, in some ways, her baby as well as her platform, and it was proving invaluable in raising her profile while giving her gravitas and access that she would otherwise not have had. She ensured this by shoring its content up with features that were heavyweight as well as aspirational.

  According to Meghan, a part of her new-found ascendency was the realisation that she had been standing in her own way by failing to jettison her misgivings and just let herself rip. She had decided to do just that and had, in the process, strengthened herself. Having consciously resolved to let go of all the negativity that had been holding her back, she began embracing aspects of herself that had previously been problematic. Chief amongst these was her racial identity.

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nbsp; In Canada, Meghan had been discovering that being bi-racial was more advantageous than it had been in the US. Canadians are much more relaxed about issues like race and status than Americans, and aside from using her race in a way she had never done before, she began using her sex through the blog to branch out into areas where race, gender, and activism could be utilised positively. Meghan was on a mission, and the mission was to ‘thrive rather than survive’. She would use everything she had to make her life better and richer. She would flourish.

  In September 2014, Meghan was due to have a week off work. She decided to offer her services as a volunteer to the United Nations in New York. There are few bigger names in the humanitarian world, and Meghan rightly saw that if she could associate herself with that organisation in some capacity, considerable benefits would accrue to her down the line. She was careful with the UN to utilise such starriness as she possessed - and there really wasn’t very much: Suits was still a relatively minor cable TV show - in such a way that she came across as modest and willing. She therefore told them she would be happy to serve coffee and answer ‘phones, though once she was there, she shadowed Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the Executive Director of UN Women, and Elizabeth Nyamayaro of the HeForShe movement, for the one thing above all that Meghan had going for her was her dynamic personality. Within moments of meeting her, people realised that she was exceptional, and while this did not appeal to all tastes, it was enticing to sufficient for it to work in her favour.

  Having put her charm and networking skills to good use and acquired a reputation for brightness and cooperativeness, the following year, Meghan was back at the UN, this time giving a speech before the Secretary General of the UN to a packed house as the United Nations’ Women’s Advocate for Political Participation and Leadership. For nine and a half minutes she spoke eloquently, engagingly and movingly about the airing of the now-infamous Ivory Dishwashing Liquid commercial, telling how it had set her on the path of feminist activism. Her speech was a tour de force which garnered her much respect in the political circles in which she now moved. It reinforced her aim of being taken seriously, not only as an influencer through her blog, but as a political activist. To the Suits audience she might have been merely Rachel Zane the ballbreaker who couldn’t pass her law exams but nevertheless had the legal practice and Mike Ross eating out of her hand, but to the Mulroneys and Trudeaus, who were the audience she really wanted to impress, she was growing into a heavy-hitter whose humanitarian credentials established her as worthy of their attention and friendship.

  Despite the spectacular way her public profile was progressing, Meghan’s need to be noticed was beginning to affect her relationship with Cory. Although Cory has always been careful to only say positive things about his ex-girlfriend, friends of theirs, who did not wish to be identified, said, ‘She was extraordinarily pushy beneath the soft and sweet exterior. She was always angling for the best table in a restaurant, wanting to sit in the best seat, reminding everyone not so subtly that she was this huge star, when she really wasn’t. Suits wasn’t that big a deal and Toronto is full of actors and actresses. The city gives tax breaks to film companies, so film and TV stars of a far greater stature than Meghan Markle are two a penny. It was just embarrassing. Cory’s not that sort of guy, and I think after a while it began to get on his nerves and he started to lose respect for her.’

  Although Meghan could be very loving, she was so impassioned that she sometimes came across as a prima donna. Friends believe that Cory had become increasingly disenchanted as a result of that aspect of her conduct, but what ‘did it for him’ was when she started snatching credit from him for recipes that he had created. ‘Meghan is a good cook, but she’s also extremely vain and always wants praise,’ one of the Vitiello circle said. She and Cory had hosted a dinner party at which she had served pasta with courgette spirals. Upon being complimented on the dish, she tried to take credit for its invention. However, it was Cory’s creation, and ‘this pissed him off royally. No matter how loving you are, once your boyfriend realises you’re a phoney, that’s it,’ someone who liked him but had never liked her, said.

  Shortly after that incident, Meghan left for England to watch her friend Serena Williams play tennis at Wimbledon. One of the attributes which friends of hers find endearing is her willingness to cross the world to support their efforts. Her detractors do not regard this as a virtue, suggesting that she promotes herself under the guise of supportiveness. They question why her support is always for the very rich or the very poor, and defile her motives with the observation that a camera is often present to record how marvellous Meghan is. One person who had no such reservations was the tennis ace. They had met in February 2014 when the satellite television channel DirecTV threw a huge, televised party on a man-made beach, created out of a million tons of sand, in a heated tent at Pier 40 on the Hudson River in Manhattan. According to Meghan, ‘We hit it off immediately.’ On The Tig, she described their first meeting, ‘Taking pictures, laughing through the flag football game we were both playing and chatting not about tennis or acting but about good old fashioned girly stuff.’ Serena confirmed that their friendship had grown from strength to strength by saying, after the royal wedding, ‘We have known each other for a long time, but we really kind of are relying on each other a lot recently.’

  Meghan’s relationship with Serena would prove to be pivotal in more ways than one. Aside from the fact that she would never have met Harry had she not gone to watch her friend play at Wimbledon, it was the tennis star whose dextrous use of the media inspired her to develop The Tig in the way she did, and even more importantly, whose presence in her life helped Meghan overcome the hurdles she had faced all her life concerning her racial identity. Had Meghan not become as friendly with Serena as she did; had she not seen how positive an advantage being a woman of colour could be if she embraced her African-American identity the way Serena did, she might well have continued sitting on the fence, the way she had done all her life.

  It was fortunate that Meghan had finally made the leap from the areas of uncertainty which she characterised as ‘greyness’ to embracing her bi-racial identity, for this would prove to be yet another of the pivots which saw her make an even more important leap, from actress on a cable television show to member of the British Royal Family.

  There is some doubt as to whether the relationship between Cory and Meghan had actually ended before Meghan met Prince Harry. Although Meghan would later claim it had, Cory has refused to be drawn, which leads one to suspect that it had not. Overlap or not, it was definitely limping to an end and if Meghan was fortunate enough to replace one handsome and celebrated Adonis with an even more famous and important hunk, she would have been crazy not to seize the moment.

  Amongst the many things Harry and Meghan had in common was a checkered romantic past. Shortly before entering Sandhurst, he had started a romance with Chelsy Davy, a bright, bouncy, blonde Zimbabwean whom he had met the year before through Simon Diss, one of his Gloucestershire friends who formed the circle known as the Glosse Posse. She had been educated in England at Cheltenham College before transferring to Stowe School to do her A Levels, but, when they met, she was about to return to South Africa, where her family lived, to read PPE (politics, philosophy and economics) at the University of Cape Town. It was while he was in Lesotho and in need of diversion that Harry reconnected with her.

  Chelsy Davy is a very attractive girl and bouncy, as I can attest, having met her at polo. She is bright and sociable. Harry joined her and a group of her friends for a night out at a nightclub called Rhodes House, and the evening went so swimmingly that they ended up spending most of their time on the dancefloor, entwined in passionate embraces. It was the beginning of a romance that would last, on and off, for seven years. They had much in common. Both were fearless physically. She was a superb horsewoman who could ride bareback and had been known to wring the life out of a snake with her bare hands. Both she and Harry loved Africa, whether it was going on safari
in Botswana or just chilling at her family properties. Her father Charles Davy was one of the largest white landowners in Zimbabwe, with properties covering 800,000 acres, while her mother Beverley nee Donald had been Miss Rhodesia in 1973. Upon discovering that Charles Davy was also in business with Webster Shamu, Minister of State for Policy Implementation, at a time when Robert Mugabe’s government was being reviled internationally for its policy of land grabbing, not to mention the intimidation and abuse of power which were characteristics of the Mugabe regime, the British press created such a monumental hue and cry that Davy ultimately had to sever his connections with Shamu. This cannot have been easy for either Chelsy or Harry, who were innocents caught up in a game not of their own making. Once news of their relationship broke in the Mail on Sunday, with staff at the lodge in Argentina where they had gone for a romantic weekend tipping off the newspaper that ‘Harry and Chelsy were like any young couple in love, kissing and holding hands, and he seemed quite besotted. They looked madly in love and at one point Harry admitted that she was his first true love’, the publicity proved an unwelcome pressure on the relationship.