These complaints did nothing to improve the atmosphere surrounding the couple, but some of the wording was so alien to anything royal or aristocratic, and so characteristic of someone of Meghan’s type and background, that listeners concluded that she was writing the script even though both she and Harry were voicing identical concerns. A few words, in particular, were viewed at the palace as giveaways as to who was really the architect of the dissatisfaction. Meghan and Harry were vociferous in using the word ‘exploit’ to describe the failure of the palace to capitalise upon what they described as their ‘unique’ or ‘special gifts’ and ‘star quality’. Aside from the fact that the deployment of terms such as ‘unique/special gifts’ and ‘star quality’ are redolent of Hollywood but alien to the British tongue, Harry and Meghan were using the word ‘exploit’ in a purely American way. In Britain, the word exploit has pejorative connotations that include taking undue or unfair advantage, being mercenary, or milking something to excess. Had Harry and Meghan complained that the palace were not ‘utilising’ their talents, the question of who was the source of the dissatisfaction might have been blurred, but their deployment of so many Americanisms led everyone to suspect Meghan.
Both Meghan and Harry are headstrong. There was no doubt at the palace that they were both sincere in their desire to achieve their goals, but there was also no doubt that they had become troublesome. He has always taken skilful handling. Volatile and emotional, he is very much both his parents’ son, for Charles and Diana shared explosive and at times doggedly temperamental personality traits. Meghan was equally impassioned and determined. Even in Hollywood, where pushiness is often regarded as a virtue and being called a hustler is complimentary, Meghan had acquired a reputation for being in a class of her own. While her admirers commended her for her tenacity and toughness, one producer told me that he regarded her ‘an odiously pushy, voracious piece of work’. She was ‘greedy’, had ‘far too high an opinion of herself’, and was ‘a player who has a compulsion to always push for more. If you offered her California, she’d demand Arizona as well, and, if you didn’t give it to her, you were victimising her.’ Meghan was proud of living by her mother’s advice, ‘Don’t give the milk away for free’, but she had now reached the stage in life where her old habit of requiring more and more might have outlived its usefulness as a tool for further success. Such conduct only got many people’s backs up unnecessarily, and made them question her suitability for the role of royal duchess or even as a Hollywood sophisticate.
It seemed to those of us who were rooting for Meghan to be a huge success that she and Harry were throwing up obstacles, instead of keeping them to a minimum. One hurdle which they had introduced to keep everyone at arm’s length, and which began to acquire a life of its own, was their ever-increasing demand for privacy. As this was often directed at the most surprising and unexpected of sources, it caused consternation within their social and family circle. It was also articulated against a backdrop of conflict and controversy in such an inconsistent manner that those close to them were left wondering against whom they were protecting themselves, and to what purpose. A case in point was the way they behaved at Princess Eugenie of York’s wedding to Jack Brooksbank, brand ambassador of George Clooney’s Casamigos tequila. ‘Who knows whether there was an element of payback because Meghan hadn’t been allowed to pinch Grand Duchess Xenia’s tiara from Eugenie for her own wedding, or whether they were now so wrapped up in themselves that they couldn’t think beyond their own immediate concerns,’ a royal cousin told me. ‘But they found the perfect way to steal Eugenie’s thunder’, and to drive home the point that they were a unit beyond the reach of everyone else. ‘They spent the whole time going from person to person sharing the news that [Meghan] was pregnant. This from the couple who had only a few short months before caused grave offence, when, asked how their honeymoon had gone and where they had been, had responded, “We’re not telling anyone. We’re keeping that for ourselves.”’
It was as if Meghan and Harry had decided that they had to protect themselves against all sorts of people who wished them well and were cheering them on to success. By creating walls, they were deliberately excluding people, who were deeply offended to be shut out.
This created antagonism, and the royal cousin observed, ‘You should’ve seen her expression (when they refused to say where they’d spent their honeymoon). She was just so smug, like a twelve year old in the school yard scoring points over everyone else by keeping secrets from them. Just preposterous.’ Since Meghan and Harry had been married for only a few months, and the first year of marriage is customarily viewed as a period of adjustment, everyone erroneously marked down the increasing signs of alienation to something it was not. Had they known that Meghan was either unwilling or unable to make the compromises necessary to fit into her new role as a royal, they would have been horrified. But no one knew.
What was rapidly becoming apparent, however, was how trying the situation had become for all concerned. Despite the increasing hostility that seemed to be emanating from Meghan and Harry’s quarter, the palace remained eager to take full advantage of their attributes, hers in particular. Both she and Harry were outstandingly popular. Even before their marriage, plans had been afoot for them to open the Invictus Games on the 20th October 2018 in Sydney, following which there would be a sixteen day tour of Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Tonga. There were high hopes for it as it was being organised, to include Meghan and Harry doing so well that they would be pleased by their place in the scheme of things.
On the 15th October, three days after Eugenie’s wedding and just before they were due to fly out of Britain, Kensington Palace announced, ‘Their Royal Highnesses The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are pleased to announce that The Duchess of Sussex is expecting a baby in the Spring of 2019.’
There was genuine delight that the Royal Family would soon possess progeny of colour.
Before their ‘plane had even taken off, Meghan and Harry had the world at their feet. They landed in Australia to mass adulation. They drew huge crowds wherever they went. Unlike Harry’s previous visit, when there had been friction with the press, this time there was nothing but approval. It has been said that every time there is a royal visit, the cause of republicanism is set back years in Australia. Their popularity bore this out. The only red flag throughout the whole of the tour occurred in Fiji, where Meghan gave a speech to youngsters, ostensibly inspiring them to educate themselves. She used the occasion to take a swipe at her father. It rankled with her that Tom Sr and sister Samantha from time to time gave interviews stating that he had been a good father and had paid for her education. She disliked the implication that she was an ungrateful daughter who should be mending fences with him rather than a put-upon VIP whose public profile was being sullied by her garrulous relations. She had also contradicted Tom Sr and Samantha’s version of events privately, including with Harry. One of the things he especially admired about her was how she had pulled herself up by the bootstraps from a life of little into a world of a lot. He not only took pride in how she had surmounted the many obstacles she had told him about, but how pained she was that her father and sister would proffer an alternative version of her history which effectively denied her claimed accomplishments. Fed up with her image being defaced the way it was being by them, she took advantage of the opportunity the speech in Fiji gave her, to shoot down her father’s claims of having put her through Northwestern University. She categorically stated that she had done so herself, by taking part-time jobs and resorting to student loans. Honour and her image were restored.
Depending on your point of view, this was either a terrible mistake on Meghan’s part, or it was a tactically clever move which went some way towards shoring up the sympathy she deserved and thrived upon from her supporters. Nonetheless, royals do not use official tours to further their own personal vendettas. They are there to represent the nation, and to further its objectives, not their own. Mixing up the roles pollutes the po
nd and distracts attention away from the true purpose of the visit. Which is what Meghan now did.
Although it was not yet generally known, her father had the bills to prove that he had put her through college. All he would need to do, and as he would ultimately do when she embarked upon her lawsuit against The Mail on Sunday, was to give a newspaper sight of them. This would prove that Meghan’s struggles, though real enough, were mostly within herself and not external the way she was claiming they were. That, of course, is not to denigrate them. A woman who struggles with her identity the way Meghan has confirmed she struggled with hers is deserving of sympathy, and the fact that she surmounted her complexes and achieved what she did was commendable in anyone’s language.
But, by mixing up the struggles, she opened herself up to all sorts of interpretations and misinterpretations, few of which were comfortable to hear. By far the most unfortunate consequence was that she had reopened an old wound that was best left to heal on its own. Most of the damage to her reputation had been caused by her troubled relationship with her father. Although the consequences seemed to have been very slight in the United States, where pride in Meghan as an American princess was still pronounced, and few people seemed to understand why she was not being relished in Britain the way she was on the other side of the Atlantic, here her estrangement with her father had been particularly damaging. Her critics were noisome in their assertion that everyone makes mistakes. They expected her to forgive her father for what, after all, struck them as a relatively trivial offence; a source of embarrassment rather than something serious. Failure to forgive a stranger was one thing, a friend another, but a parent? That degree of harshness did not sit well with the average person in Britain, and, unsurprisingly, sister Samantha then waded in, accusing Meghan of being a liar and an ingrate for having denied their father’s generosity. The internet came alive with what they had dubbed the Markle Debacle, and while Meghan’s failure to respond might have come across as quiet dignity to her admirers, to her critics it was affirmation of callousness allied to haughty indifference.
It was not yet as apparent as it would subsequently become, but a turning point had been reached. No matter what Meghan did thereafter, her troubled relations with her father had put her in such an unflattering light that, as far as half the internet and a goodly proportion of the general public in Britain were concerned, she was now singing to the deaf and dancing for the blind. This was not an enviable position to be in, and one would have had to possess a heart of stone not to be concerned for Meghan, Harry, and her father, as well as for her reputation. Could the first acknowledged woman of colour in the British Royal Family have become such damaged goods that the chances were that she would fail in the role of royal duchess?
Because much of my life is lived in the public eye, and I deal with the general public with a frequency known to few private individuals, and because in Britain most people know who I am and want to speak to me about the Royal Family, I now learnt from Mr and Mrs Joe Public how catastrophic a fall from grace Meghan and Harry had suffered. People were now dismissing him as a ‘pussy-whipped’ ‘weakling’ who was ‘brain dead’, ‘pathetic’ and being ‘led by the nose’ by a stronger and brighter woman and by his nether regions. Catastrophically, most of them thought that Meghan was a ‘phoney’ who was ‘on the make’ and an ‘avaricious opportunist’ to boot. As far as they were concerned, she was a ‘hypocrite’, a ‘sanctimonious, pretentious, affected fraud’, a ‘liar’ and a ‘hard-hearted, self-seeking bitch who had treated her father in a manner they wouldn’t treat a rabid dog’. Repeatedly, they reiterated that ‘they had seen through her’, and ‘no matter how many hoops she jumped through’ or the ‘cacophony of righteousness’ emanating from her, people had made their minds up about her and weren’t going to change them.
This was not a desirable position for any public figure to be in, especially one who embodied the hopes of hundreds of millions of people all over the world. Not only would all those who were cheering her on be disappointed, but their hopes would be dashed and a golden opportunity lost. I hoped then, and I hope now, that she will find a way to retrieve her position and with it, the goodwill and respect with which she was endowed as she stood on those steps in May 2018 and exchanged vows to become the Duchess of Sussex. But I also know from personal experience that the British public has a nose where public figures are concerned, especially after it has seen them on television a few times and had an opportunity to get their measure. While the press can bury public figures in misrepresentations which are not easily dissipated, once the British public decides that it has seen through someone, there usually isn’t much that figure can do to alter their opinion, for the British public, unlike the American, do not like resurrections. As far as they’re concerned, once a corpse, always a corpse. In Britain, there are few second acts in public life.
Although things had not yet come to the pass where Meghan and Harry were so unpopular in Britain that they had crossed the Rubicon and been relegated to Has Been status, they were now in danger of approaching it. Then came even more negative reports from people close to her and Harry to further lessen her popularity. It was now being whispered that she was acquiring a reputation for treating staff in a manner most Britons disapprove of.
The one inexcusable in the upper reaches of society has always been treating staff in an untoward way. No matter how charming you are to your equals, no matter how apparently philanthropic with good causes, if you get a reputation for treating employees unacceptably, it is akin to a man being known as a wife-beater. You can be as rude as you want to your friends, family or social equals. If you want to mistreat them, and they are dumb or weak enough to let you get away with it, that’s between you and them. They are your social equals, and therefore they are in a position to defend themselves. However, staff are not your social equals. They are therefore at a disadvantage from the word go. Treating them indecorously breaches every code of noblesse oblige, and as that matters greatly to people who regard nobility as a commendable aim in life, once you acquire a reputation for mistreating those who work for you, you lose a lot of respect and are viewed with suspicion.
It had been one thing for Meghan to acquire a reputation for being unfriendly towards Harry’s friends and family, but it now became quite another as word began to spread that she behaved dubiously towards people who were not in a position to defend themselves. Prior to the marriage, people had cut Meghan some slack when they heard about how she gave vent to her frustrations when her expectations were dashed. All brides lose their rag. She’s nervous. She’s only human. Give her time, she’ll settle down. She’s in a strange country.
Sometimes, the line between compassion and gullibility is a fine one. Most people prefer to give someone the benefit of the doubt. But when the doubts reverberate symphonically, the sound carries. So it now proved in Meghan’s case as first the elite, then the press, got wind of various incidents which she and Harry would be at pains to deny, but which did her reputation no good.
One incident which is meant to have taken place shortly after her marriage did not bode well for the future if it was not invented. Meghan, who is well known to be something of a perfectionist, was accused of hurling onto the floor a dress that had not been ironed to her exacting standards with the imprecation, ‘You call this pressed. This hasn’t been pressed. I want this pressed. Properly. Now.’ Could this be true? Could anyone with aspirations to civility speak to staff like that? Hopefully, this was nothing but Chinese whispers.
The next incident involving staff was even more astonishing. I only hoped that it too was apocryphal, though the more apocrypha there were, the more likely it was that the tales were rooted in the truth, even when exaggerated or twisted. This time Meghan was on tour. She lost her temper and threw a hot beverage in the direction of someone who had annoyed her. This had resulted in the member of staff resigning and being paid £250,000 to leave without disclosing the incident.
In a way, whether the i
ncident had taken place or not was almost beside the point. If it had, it was appalling, and if it had not, it was equally appalling that stories like this were being spread about someone who had not behaved like that. Meghan and Harry were supposedly of the opinion that all the negative stories about her were racist or snobbish in origin, but this seemed unlikely for several reasons. Firstly, most of the people who were spreading these stories were not racist or snobbish. Many of them were frankly concerned with the way Meghan and Harry had been conducting themselves. They wanted them to behave in a less aggressive, assertive, and demanding manner. They felt the Sussexes’ attitudes were antagonistic and patronising when not being dogmatic and insulting. They wanted Harry and Meghan to conduct themselves the way William and Catherine did. They were often and openly at a loss as to what they could do to improve the situation, but Harry and Meghan were so caught up in their own bubble that they had become unreachable.
Meghan and Harry Page 23