This was not the only aspect of Meghan’s personality which captivated Harry right from the outset. She was open about her need to have ‘a voice’, not only with the man in her life but with everyone else. He was transfixed by how opinionated she was. She also made it clear that she must remain in control, and that she had no time for those who do not please her. ‘I think very quickly into that we said, “Well, what are we doing tomorrow? We should meet again,” she said. Not for a nanosecond did she convey the slightest degree of deference. To a prince used to it, but hungering to be accepted as a man, this was an extremely attractive quality. It was, ironically, the very quality that had won Wallis Simpson the former King Edward VIII’s heart. It had also worked for Richard Burton when he treated Elizabeth Taylor, who was used to being revered as a movie goddess, as just another woman.
Harry and Meghan both left 5 Hertford Street knowing that something special had happened. The following evening, an excited prince, flying high with anticipation as only someone who is genuinely emotional can, met up with the supremely confident but very warm and responsive Meghan at Soho House. Her friend Markus Anderson had arranged a discreet space for them where they could knock back the wine undisturbed.
‘Back to back, two dates in London,’ Harry said. ‘It was three, maybe four weeks later that I managed to persuade her to join me in Botswana, and we camped out with each other, under the stars.’ They were together ‘for five days out there, which was absolutely fantastic. Then we were really by ourselves, which was crucial to me to make sure that we had a chance to get to know each other.’
Meghan said, ‘Everything that I’ve learned about him, I’ve learned through him, as opposed to having grown up around different news stories or tabloids or whatever else. Everything that I learned about him and his family was what he would share with me and vice versa. So for both of us it was a very authentic and organic way to get to know each other.’
Although Meghan’s critics would accuse her of being disingenuous, in that she had done her homework and knew much more about him than she claimed, the fact remains that they jelled. If her motives were more mixed than his, it does not alter the fact that they patently had something special between them. This they now set about nurturing, creating a bubble which allowed the relationship to develop with speed. It was after the third date that Meghan told Nelthorpe-Cowne that she and Harry were so serious about each other that they were already plotting their future.
The couple would later claim that they had five or six months of privacy before their relationship went public. That was not so. They had met only a handful of times over a period of less than four months before the news of their relationship broke. This shows the intensity which they shared. Meghan was filming Suits in Toronto, so Harry flew out to see her a few times. She also came to London once or twice, staying quietly with him at Nottingham Cottage, which was then his home in Kensington Palace.
This cottage is small and quaint, and used to house retired Private Secretaries such as Sir Alan ’Tommy’ Lascelles, whom Princess Margaret rightly blamed for destroying her chances of marrying Group Captain Peter Townsend. Whenever PM saw him walking in the Kensington Palace complex, she would tell her chauffeur to ‘run the bastard down’, an instruction he wisely avoided implementing. But the cottage was discreet, so Meghan and Harry were able to have the privacy they needed to take their relationship to another level.
Then, on the 30th October 2016, the Sunday Express blew the lovers’ cover. The world now knew that Prince Harry had a girlfriend called Meghan Markle. He was actually staying with Meghan in Toronto when the story broke. Within hours, she had become a household name for the first time in her life.
Meghan had finally arrived where she wanted to be and the fun had really begun.
CHAPTER 4
Nowadays, news travels almost at the speed of light. Pre-internet, stories that broke on a Sunday had to wait until the Monday for other newspapers to pick them up. Afternoon papers were never published on weekends. The result was that the public always had to wait until Monday morning for the full account only newspapers provided. This was true even when a major event, such as the death of the Princess of Wales, occurred.
The internet changed all of that. Within hours of the Sunday Express revealing Meghan’s existence in Harry’s life, all the major publications had cobbled stories together and posted them on to their web pages. The degree of information, all positive, was impressive. At the time, no one thought anything of it. The producers of Suits were expected to have an efficient publicity department, and Meghan had positioned herself with the practised eye of the true professional in such a way that she would emerge glowingly. Nevertheless, publications as disparate as People Magazine in the US and the Daily Mail in England had access to such flattering, in-depth information about Meghan within moments of the story breaking that it begged the question: Who was fashioning the narrative behind the scenes?
The existence of The Tig did not trigger the suspicion that Meghan herself might be pulling the strings for the marionettes to jump the way she wanted. Most journalists assumed that actresses are too dumb to write their own lines, much less fashion their own narrative. The Tig, they assumed, was written by someone else, and always had been.
Yet there were clear clues that the timing might not be completely accidental. Meghan had dumped Nelthorpe-Cowne the week before, and Monday 31st October 2016, the day after the Sunday Express leak, the Vancouver Sun ran a story about her promoting her five-piece collection of spring dresses, all items under $100, for the Canadian chain-store Reitmans. Although Meghan was too canny to mention Harry by name, her profile had surged so exponentially in the previous twenty four hours that when she said, ‘my cup runneth over, and I’m the luckiest girl in the world’, she was verifying her status as Harry’s girlfriend. This point was driven home that same day by People magazine, which would soon be revealed to have special access to her, as it delivered the message to the world that ‘Prince Harry is so serious with actress Meghan Markle that an engagement could be in the not-so-distant future, insiders suggest.’ The headline stated, ‘Prince Harry Has Already Introduced Meghan Markle to Prince Charles…’ meant that the information could only have come from Harry or Meghan or someone very close to them.
The question to ask was: Whose interests were best served by confirming that Meghan was Harry’s girlfriend and they were involved in a serious relationship? Having myself been a victim of leaks to the press, and having lived through the extraordinary nineties when Diana Wales would tip various writers off, then present herself as the victim of hounds, I have developed a nose for a plant. Sometimes, the information imparted in a story is so personal that it can only have come from one of the people involved. As soon as I saw the personal details in those stories, I could tell someone very close to the couple had been the source. Knowing how Harry hates the press, whom he blames for his mother’s death, and knowing that he had no motive for leaking the news of his relationship with Meghan, I tried to get to the bottom of things. I therefore rang up Adam Helliker, then the social columnist of the Sunday Express and someone I have known, liked and respected for decades. Adam told me, ‘the tip off came in the age old way. From a servant.’
This did not explain the detail in the other stories, but for the moment I was content to let matters rest. Until you have enough information to come to a considered conclusion, it is always best to keep an open mind.
Unsurprisingly, Harry and Meghan’s romance became worldwide news, with publications everywhere digging for the nuggets which would give each of them an edge over their competitors now that the Sunday Express had broken the story.
There can be no pretence that some countries looked more favourably than others upon the potential of a mixed-race American actress marrying into the British Royal Family. Her colour was always going to be an issue. Even though it was a plus in Britain, the US, Canada and many other Commonwealth countries, in other, less progressive states, especially
in cultures where there was little intermingling between the colours, classes and creeds, it was always going to be viewed through another prism.
There was also the issue of Meghan’s past as well as her position as an actress. Although the British press chose to present her as a major star, and one moreover covered in respectability, the press in many other countries took a more jaundiced view. Their reservations might have seemed outdated to us, but to them, they were valid. These were based upon the traditional values they still held dear, even if we no longer did. In their scheme of things, it was unseemly for a man of one class to consort with a woman of another, unless she is a tart with whom he is having an affair, in which case it is conducted out of sight. Anything more serious would be unacceptable. If you added the difference in colour into the mix, this created a whole new dimension.
While we in the West took the view that these were old-fashioned and offensive viewpoints, and that relationships such as Harry and Meghan’s could only advance the cause of interracial inclusivity as well as social cross-pollination, the more bigoted view was that there were disparities beyond class and colour which the Western media were obfuscating. There was also the issue of status. According to this line of reasoning, Meghan was not a major star. She had not been a household name. Two weeks before, no one had been able to identify her as a star even of Suits. That show was of such minor significance that even now, few people knew the names of any of the other cast members despite hers having become so memorable. Why did the Western media have to exaggerate her status if she was truly a suitable match for a British prince?
Journalists from these sceptical societies soon discovered a wealth of treasure about Meghan that lay scattered, like so many disused relics, on the plains of her past. In this hunt, they were joined by many of their British and European colleagues from countries such as Germany, whose media have a vigorous tabloid element. These are not tame publications. They never were. Although in tone and content some of them are akin to The National Enquirer in the United States, many others are more serious and solid publications. The very word tabloid connotes something of the sleazy supermarket variety to Americans, but in the rest of the world, it lacks those pejorative overtones and is simply a description of the more has popular end of the press. Nevertheless, all these publications share one aim with the sleazier element of the American market. They aim to unmask, and will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of a story as long as it is topical enough.
Meghan was in her mid-thirties. She had lived a full life. She had had a series of men. She had tried her hand at many different activities. There was never any doubt that there would be layers to unfold, newsworthy stories to dig up. The only question was, how dirty would the dirt be?
Speaking as someone who has had to sue every major newspaper company in Britain for libel in the course of the last forty five years, I can confirm that even relatively reputable publications seldom resist the temptation to put a sensational spin on perfunctory incidents in a celebrity’s past, so that the most anodyne features are represented as appalling flaws. Alan Frame, onetime Deputy Editor of the Daily Express, sister paper of the Sunday Express which broke the Meghan story, once told me that his paper had received so many contradictory accounts of my past, from so many people claiming to be my best friends, that he would have thought me the most popular woman on earth had they not been so vitriolic. Many of the informants, naturally, wanted financial recompense for their tales, tall though they were.
The corrupting influence of filthy lucre also travels in the opposite direction. British newspapers especially are renowned for paying handsome sums to informants who might, but equally might not, have a firm handle on the facts. Many publications are cynical enough not to let the truth get in the way of a good story when they wish to present east as west and north as south. It takes no imagination to see the meal journalists of this persuasion will make of sensational and verifiable facts.
It took very little digging to discover that the beauteous, A-lister of the 30th and 31st October had a back story, and one, moreover, that there was no need to embellish. Before the week was out, half of Fleet Street knew through their investigations in Hollywood and Toronto that Meghan had a history of cultivating, captivating, denigrating, and discarding both men and woman in her ascent to the top. A Mail journalist told me, ‘As she climbs up the next rung of the ladder, she plants the soles of her shoes on your head. And, when you wipe your face off, you see that it’s covered in cow dung.’
Meghan, in other words, had discarded a whole load of friends of both sexes, aside from men with whom she had been involved, and done it in such a way, that they had become enemies. These people were happy to talk to the press and, when they were not, to direct journalists to someone else who would. Throughout the first week of November 2016, reporters from all over the world were offering huge sums of money for some of these discards to talk. And some did. Even when they did not, a capable journalist would have enough of a whiff to know that there was a body buried somewhere nearby.
So rich were the pickings that the Mail journalist told me, ‘It’s not often that we find ourselves having to downplay instead of exaggerate. But with Meghan, that’s what we had to do. From the outset. It was the only way to get stories past the legal department.’
There was another and rather more touching dimension to the way the British press approached this scenario. A journalist from the Mirror encapsulated the whole thing perfectly by saying, ‘No one wanted to hurt Harry. He was truly popular, and if that was the girl he wanted, and if she could make him happy, which she certainly seemed to be doing, no one wanted to rain on his parade. Almost by common but silent consent, we all took a soft line.’
The line, however, wasn’t soft enough for Meghan, who wasn’t used to an enquiring press but to a tame one which slavishly reported whatever she or her representatives fed them. By the end of the first week of real fame, she was so perturbed over the possibilities of what might be said that Harry issued a statement:
‘Since he was young, Prince Harry has been very aware of the warmth that has been extended to him by members of the public. He feels lucky to have so many people supporting him and knows what a fortunate and privileged life he leads.
‘He is also aware that there is significant curiosity about his private life. He has never been comfortable with this, but has tried to develop a thick skin about the level of media interest that comes with it. He has rarely taken formal action on the very regular publication of fictional stories that are written about him and he has worked hard to develop a professional relationship with the media, focused on his work and the issues he cares about.
‘But the past week has seen a line crossed. His girlfriend, Meghan Markle, has been subject to a wave of abuse and harassment. Some of this has been very public - the smear on the front page of a newspaper; the racial undertones of comment pieces; and outright sexism and racism of media trolls and web article comments. Some of it has been hidden from the public - the nightly battles to keep defamatory stories out of the papers; her mother having to struggle past photographers in order to get to her front door; the attempts of reporters and photographers to gain illegal entry to her home and the calls to police that followed; the substantial bribes offered by papers to her ex-boyfriend; the bombardment of nearly every friend, co-worker, and loved one in her life.
‘Prince Harry is worried about Ms Markle’s safety and is deeply disappointed that he has not been able to protect her. It is not right that a few months into a relationship with him that Ms Markle should be subjected to such a storm. He knows that commentators will say this is “the price she has to pay” and that “this is all part of the game”. He strongly disagrees. This is not a game - it is her life and his.
‘He has asked for this statement to be issued in the hopes that those in the press who have been driving this story can pause and reflect before any further damage is done. He knows that it is unusual to issue a statement like this, but ho
pes that fair-minded people will understand why he has felt it necessary to speak publicly.’
This statement was a masterstroke. Not only did Harry breach boundaries, but he also waded in to protect Meghan in a way he had never done with Chelsy Davy or Cressida Bonas, both of whom had had to endure years of press attention with never a word from him to protect them. This revealed that Meghan was in a class of her own. The statement also showed both of them in the most positive of lights, garnering them sympathy from the legions of romantics and admirers who were rooting them on to long- term happiness. Furthermore, it stymied further enquiry. In so doing, it muzzled not only unfair critics but also fair ones, who could thereafter be unfairly accused of racism if they did not back off. It brilliantly confused the role of valid enquirer with the trolls, by the expedient of apportioning equal blame between those who write valid stories and those who use the internet as a forum to vent their dubious opinions.
Speaking as a public figure that has many friends in the public eye, I can tell you that no one ever reads the comments made about them on the internet unless you’re in the mood to have a good laugh. All public figures are regularly trolled. It goes with the territory. Only when there is a genuine legal issue do publications monitor their comments’ sections. Otherwise, everyone takes the view that the crazies who haunt the internet are such a tiny albeit vociferous proportion of the newspaper-reading public, that they should be dismissed rather than acknowledged. But in his statement Harry had conflated responsible writers with crazy opinionists, using the latter to silence the former. It was a commendably effective technique, and certainly bought him and Meghan enough time and space to develop their relationship in peace.
Meghan and Harry Page 14