Meghan and Harry

by Lady Colin Cambell

  Although Jessica thought Harry was a perfectly nice person, she couldn’t see herself having a relationship with anyone who started out on that footing. The loss, I can tell you, was Harry’s, not hers. She is a beautiful, blue-eyed blonde with a perfect figure. She is stylish and tasteful and, more to the point, the real article. She would have made the most wonderful Duchess of Sussex.

  Then Harry met Meghan.

  As stated earlier, Meghan had flown to London to watch Serena Williams play tennis at Wimbledon. This trip would be pivotal and the way it came about gives a real insight into how Meghan has scaled the heights she has.

  Nearly two years before, she had acquired a powerful British manager named Gina Nelthorpe-Cowne, who had been upping her profile and getting her assignments while making connections Meghan would never have been able to make on her own. Because Meghan would never have met Harry without Nelthorpe-Cowne’s assistance, and the business manager is one of the few people who were witness to what actually happened, her input is vital, not the least of which being that her outstanding success in her chosen field indicates that she is an authority on the traits that make for success or failure in public life.

  It is through Nelthorpe-Cowne’s observations that we can verify the qualities that made Meghan the success she became. The main tools, she decided, were a charming, seductive and charismatic personality allied to physical beauty and powered by a fierce intelligence and a unique determination to succeed.

  The two women met in Ottawa in 2014 when the managing director and co-founder of the prestigious Kruger Cowne Talent Management company was in that city to promote the One Young World Summit, a conference for 18-30 year olds opened by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with such stars as Emma Watson and Kruger Cowne client Cher in attendance. Meghan was there not only as a successful if still minor actress, but also as the founder of The Tig. On the blog, she wrote about how she had come to be a Counsellor and how “One Young World invites young adults from all over the world who are actively working to transform the socio-political landscape by being the greater good. They are delegates who are speaking out against human rights violations, environmental crises, gender equality issues, discrimination and injustice. They are change.”

  The two women had spoken on the ‘phone and emailed each other a number of times before meeting in person. They had already ‘clicked’ with ‘an instant connection’ before the South African-born, London-based Nelthorpe-Cowne had even set eyes on Meghan, whom she first met when she showed up at the hotel room in Ottawa that Meghan was sharing with Cory Vitiello for the duration of her stay. ’I could immediately tell she was special, that she had star quality. I’ve been in the business a long time and I know that’s not something you can train someone to be. You’ve either got it or you haven’t. She just has it.’

  Had Nelthorpe-Cowne considered the circumstances of the meeting, she might have understood that Meghan was inadvertently giving her an insight into how she viewed others relative to herself. Cory is the one who opened the door while Meghan, unprepared for her pre-arranged appointment with her visitor, was dressed in a towelling bathrobe with her hair tied back. Without displaying any compunction for what could have been interpreted as a discourteous display of disrespect, Meghan advanced effusively and ‘we hugged as if we had known each other for ages. She was delightful: warm and personable and hugely charismatic.’

  Meghan’s social skills now completely sucked Nelthorpe-Cowne in. She made perfect ‘eye contact and then the connection. She instantly brings you right into her world.’ She also makes you think that there is no one else in the world with whom she would rather be. ‘What people don’t realise about Meghan is that she is ferociously intelligent.’ And so ambitious that she is in a class of her own.

  Frank about the desirability of capitalising upon every opportunity, Meghan used the Summit and her blog to advance both The Tig and herself while also giving it the attention it deserved. She had done her homework so knew that the Kruger Cowne Talent Management company represented 300 top names, in more than 70 countries, including Cher, Bob Geldof, Sir Richard Branson, and Elle Macpherson. Their specialty was drumming up corporate bookings, public speaking and appearances for their clients, while negotiating literary, publication and brand endorsement deals in areas as disparate as sport, design, fashion, media and broadcasting. If Meghan could get Nelthorpe-Cowne to take her on, she would have climbed the next rung on the ladder to becoming the towering success she wanted to be. Moreover, she would have made the leap from North America to England, which, she would later confide to the English socialite Lizzie Cundy, was where she wanted to go.

  Meghan and Nelthorpe-Cowne immediately became what Diana Wales used to call ‘fast friends’. The business manager soon asked Meghan if she would like to be represented by her. Meghan’s technique, as described by others and confirmed by Nelthorpe-Cowne’s account of how they came to be involved both personally and professionally, is to make the first move, go in gangbusters, let everyone realise how marvellous she is, then step back and let them make the running. It is a brilliant way of operating, for the other person thinks they’re in control, while in fact Meghan has been the driving force and remains in control.

  Nelthorpe-Cowne ‘became her commercial agent, helping her obtain endorsements and sponsorship deals with leading brands.’ In her opinion, Meghan ‘is first and foremost a businesswoman. She was razor-sharp - creative and meticulous, with a good business brain and an American entrepreneurial attitude towards life.’ As the two women developed ‘an easy friendship after only a few meetings,’ Nelthorpe-Cowne developed ‘a deep affection for her and was under the impression that she felt the same: she said as much.’ They even travelled together, enjoying their time as more and more recognition came Meghan’s way.

  In June 2016, Meghan flew to London for a PR junket which allowed her to watch her friend Serena Williams play at Wimbledon. She struck up one of those immediate friendships, which are a talent of hers, with Violet von Westenholz, the well-connected director of public relations at Ralph Lauren. Violet was a childhood friend of Prince Harry’s, her father Piers, Baron von Westenholz being a former Olympic skier who is one of Prince Charles’s oldest and closest friends. As a result, Violet and her siblings Frederick and Victoria grew up with Princes William and Harry. The families had remained close and Violet knew how desperate Harry was to meet someone. A royal told me, ‘she set him up on a blind date with Meghan Markle. The rest is history.’

  Violet has never confirmed that she played Cupid, but then, as the royal says, ‘she wouldn’t, would she?’ By the time the public found out about the relationship, the word in aristocratic circles was that the Royal Family was tearing its hair out as a result of the background checks having provided very mixed feedback, with some people praising her and others suggesting that Meghan Markle was known in Hollywood and Toronto as an ‘operator par excellence’. ‘It was like introducing Typhoid Mary to New York.’ But Meghan had one redeeming feature: her bi-racial identity was an answer to the family’s prayers.

  As Nelthorpe-Cowne has stated, Meghan is ‘ferociously intelligent’ and she played a flawless hand from the time Violet suggested introducing her to Harry until they were about to be married. By Meghan’s own account, ‘When she wanted to set us up, I had one question: is he nice? Because if he wasn’t kind then it didn’t seem like it would make sense.’ Meghan was displaying just the right degree of reluctance, and it reassured Violet that she was truly the lovely, sweet, personable and loving young woman that she appeared to be. She continued to be seen like this until she and Harry were about to get married. It was only then that cracks began to emerge in the perfect facade she had hitherto presented to the royal world, but no one is perfect and few people believed that Meghan would be anything but a positive addition to the Royal Family, while none could have imagined that within a year of matrimony she was laying the ground for her and Harry to step down as senior royals.

  Beyond the royal wo
rld, however, the fissures were forming as Meghan and Harry’s romance gathered pace. The first to fall through the cracks was Piers Morgan, whom Meghan had cultivated on earlier visits to London. They had a last drink before she left for her first meeting with Prince Harry, and, as Piers says, thereafter she ‘ghosted’ him. While she doubtless felt the need to err on the side of caution and protect her budding relationship from the prying eyes of the press, the fact remains, she made a tactical error. Piers Morgan is an honourable man. For all his rhetoric and controversialism, he would never have betrayed her confidence. By behaving as she did, she was laying the ground to make herself an enemy if anything went wrong. And when it did, the chickens came home to roost.

  Another of the friends Meghan had made in the last couple of years, as she jetted back and forth while Nelthorpe-Cowne raised her profile and added to her bank account, was the former WAG, model, television presenter and socialite Lizzie Cundy. They had become friendly enough for Meghan to confide that she wanted to leave Suits, move to London, join the upper-class cast of the reality show Made in Chelsea, and marry a Brit. The fact that she was neither upper class nor British seems not to have entered into Meghan’s calculations as she confided her ambition to join the cast of the reality show about upper class Brits living in Chelsea, and before long she was imploring Lizzie to find her a ‘rich and famous Englishman’. Lizzie suggested introducing her to the multimillionaire footballer Ashley Cole, but Meghan declined the offer once she realised who he was. Lizzie thought it might be because both their marital pasts had been checkered, but one of Meghan’s critics suggested that ‘it was because Meghan’s taste doesn’t run to men of colour. You only need to look at her history to see that all her significant others have been Caucasian.’ There is, of course, no reason why a woman of colour should limit herself to men of colour, and one of Harry and Meghan’s English circle believed that Lizzie’s suggestion would have offended Meghan, who was sensitive about her racial identity. Was Lizzie trying to say that she was fit for fixing up with only mixed race men? To Meghan, that would have been a putdown, but she met Harry shortly afterwards, so had no need of any further fixing up. When Lizzie heard the news, she texted Meghan saying what a ‘catch’ he was. Meghan replied, ‘Yeah, I know!!’ then ghosted her too.

  The next to be cut out of her life was Nelthorpe-Cowne. Despite being such close friends that they confided in each other about their personal lives, had travelled together and formed what the business manager though was a genuine bond, when Meghan informed her after her third date with Harry that they were ‘serious’, that they were planning a ‘future together, and that she and Harry had said to each other, “We’re going to change the world.” Nelthorpe-Cowne tried to warn her of the reality of being a member of the Royal Family. ‘I had real misgivings when I realised she wanted Harry to propose to her. It wasn’t just the media attention. I distinctly remember explaining as we sipped wine in London’s West End that she must cope with the enormous expectations of the British public, the Royal Family and their courtiers. I told her, “This is serious. This is the end of your normal life, the end of your privacy: everything.”’ Meghan’s reaction was to hold up her hand and silence Nelthorpe-Cowne. ‘ “Stop,” she said in a steely manner I had not noticed before. “I don’t wanna hear any negativity. This is a happy time for us.”’ The end had begun. It arrived shortly afterwards, a week before the news about Meghan and Harry’s relationship became public. She wrote an email ‘saying that she was giving up her career and we had to terminate our contract.’ Thereafter, Meghan ignored Nelthorpe-Cowne’s existence, acting as if they had never had a productive professional relationship or a close personal friendship, or indeed had even ever met.

  For all her ‘fierce intelligence’, Meghan seems not to have realised that cutting people out of her life the way she was doing made them feel that she had been using them and, when they had ceased to be of use to her, she had discarded them as if they had never existed. One can make a case for the fact that Meghan was being cautious and self-protective, but the fact remains, she was building up trouble for herself. She was arming people who had been her friends, who had wanted to continue to be her friends, and no matter how successful she was or how grand she became should her relationship end in marriage, as both she and Harry already felt it would, the day would come when those chickens would come home to roost.

  And roost they did. Although Meghan would later claim to Tom Bradbury during her controversial South African interview, that she had been ‘naive when friends had warned her against the dangers of the media,’ Nelthorpe-Cowne regards her as being anything but naive, and made a point of letting the world know it. ‘She is a very ambitious woman, and when it is time to move on in her life, Meghan has a way of closing the door on the past, as she did with her father, her siblings, her first husband and me.’ Although she has tried to present herself as an innocent, ‘she was no ingénue, but a worldly-wise woman on the mission of her life, the mission to bag not any old prince, but THE PRINCE.’ Nelthorpe-Cowne stated that her experience of Meghan was that she is ‘disingenuous’ and has no compunction about spinning the greatest yarn so that she can hide her calculatedness behind a veil of non-existent innocence. She rejects Meghan’s assertions of purity of heart and purity of purpose when she met Harry. Meghan claimed that ‘being American, she didn’t even know who Harry was.’ This made Nelthorpe-Cowne ‘laugh out loud’, for not only did the young Meghan have books about Diana and she had watched her funeral repeatedly and thereafter used her as a role model, but Meghan had confessed to her when they were having a drink at the Delaunay the day she was due to meet Prince Harry for the first time that she had googled him. She not only knew exactly who Harry was, but had been very excited to meet him, knowing that he would be her ticket to international fame if they clicked. ‘I looked at how stunning she was and I just thought: ‘There’s no way he’s going to be able to resist her.”

  Of course, Meghan would’ve had to be blind and stupid, neither of which she is, not to have seen how Harry could change her life for the better should they bond. But what really made her irresistible to the lonely prince wasn’t really her looks, though they helped, but the fire which burnt bright within her. She possessed a warmth and determination to make her mark that scorched the earth as she travelled over it to her destination. With each rung that she had scaled up the ladder of success, her personality had become stronger, her social skills greater, her presentation more polished. As it did, her patina of softness and vulnerability shone evermore brightly.

  In the nearly seven years that she had gone from failed actress to being on the cusp of worldwide celebrity, Meghan had indeed shed all the ‘negativity’, as she put it, which had once held her back. Nowadays, whenever she turned on the heat of that outstanding personality with the goal of melting someone’s defences, she usually managed to do so. She was utterly convincing in her displays of care and sincerity. If there was a hint of the steel beneath the surface, that was a positive, not a negative, for it indicated her tremendous strength of character and purpose. Meghan was so open about being ambitious, about her desire to put her imprint on every situation that was to her liking, about her ethics, that people supposed that the gentleness which she displayed was the only Meghan, and that all the evidence of toughness masked a soft and noble heart. While those Meghan left behind had a cynical view of her, those with whom she remained involved were convinced that she was a truly wonderful, selfless, delightful, loving and giving person, as friends such as Jessica Mulroney have stated. And strong. ‘She is the strongest person I know,’ Serena Williams said.

  Upon meeting Harry, and deciding that she liked him, he became the latest in a long line of people to experience her gravitational pull.

  They first met for a drink in early July 2016 at Robin Birley’s private club, 5 Hertford Street in Mayfair, and clicked. Harry said, ‘I had never even heard about her’ until Violet von Westenholz mentioned her name. He asked that Violet gi
ve him ‘a bit of background. I had never watched Suits. I had never heard of Meghan before, and I was beautifully surprised when I walked into that room and saw her and there she was, sitting there. I was like, okay, well I’m going to have to up my game.’

  If you analyse what Nikki Priddy and others, who have known Meghan well over the years, have said, a pattern emerges. Meghan is so controlled but so vivid, even when she is silent, then so enthusiastic and apparently spontaneous and warm when she is not, that she brings out the best in everyone she wants to impress. But her control conveys the unspoken message to men that they have to ‘up their game’, as Harry put it, without realising that he was confessing that from the very beginning he understood that the name of the game would be pleasing Meghan. She is proudly and overtly a feminist, and one who not only advocates the joys of empowerment but also makes no pretence about wishing to retain control over her destiny. This is not possible without commanding her relationships as well as the other circumstances of her life.

  When Meghan had said, after leaving Trevor, that she did not find separation frightening but empowering, she was actually saying that she would never again be involved with a man who didn’t fulfill her demands as and when she wanted them to be fulfilled. All those years of swallowing her resentment while Trevor clung to his integrity and refused to find her parts, had taught her that a man was worth having only if he gave her what she wanted in the here and now. If he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, she would move on to someone else who could and would. This attitude gave her a degree of autonomy that was attractive to men who like powerful men. They interpreted it as strength and independence, not callousness or opportunism.