Meghan and Harry

by Lady Colin Cambell

  In the light of such disapproval, it was symptomatic of the deference and latitude with which Meghan was being treated, that no one in the Royal Family or at the palace read her the riot act. This had not been the case when Diana and Sarah York used to step out of line. They would be called to order by the Queen’s Private Secretary, who was the brother-in-law of the former and the first cousin once removed of the latter. Diana Wales once complained to me about how Bobby Bellows, as she called Sir Robert (now Lord) Fellowes had carpeted her for not wearing tights. Although times had changed, society’s concept of decorum had not to such an extent that Meghan’s sheer attire was broadly acceptable to the average Briton. Because I was rooting for her to succeed, I felt that it would be in her best interest if someone pointed out to her that this was causing disquiet where one would have hoped to find approval. I therefore suggested to a royal cousin that someone sympathetic have a quiet word with her and point out how important it was that she clean up that aspect of her act, if none other. I was told that that would never happen. She was so opinionated, so calculated and deliberate in all her actions, so sensitive to criticism, so resentful of anything but the most fulsome praise and displays of approval, that she would ‘eat off the head’ of anyone who ‘dared’ to say anything to her. Then she’d ‘dump’ them.

  This was sadly reminiscent of the past. ‘It’s Diana all over again,’ I said. To which the royal cousin bitterly replied, ‘You said it, not me.’

  Knowing that the Queen had once invited the Fleet Street editors to Buckingham Palace when Diana was pregnant with William to ask them to lay off her, and that the press had also kept its distance from William and himself when they were growing up in a compact agreed between the editors and the palace, Harry approached both his father and grandmother. He wanted them to intervene on Meghan’s behalf, to put an end to the critical commentaries. She was very upset about the backlash her behaviour was causing. She was especially put out about the comments about her belly clutching. She felt everyone was being ‘mean’ and ‘cruel’ to her and wanted a stop put to it. It hadn’t occurred to either herself or Harry that the way to achieve closure was to stop behaving in the way that was triggering the objections. They genuinely felt that Meghan should be able to clutch her belly as much as she wanted, and that the entire British press should be muzzled rather than she desist from the practice that so many found noteworthy.

  As far as Harry was concerned, it was his duty to ‘protect’ his wife, who was very ‘sensitive’ and ‘took things very much to heart’. He had become as obsessed with the concept of ‘protection’ as she was, and they used the word all the time. It was one of the catch-alls, along with ‘change’, ‘the greater good’, ‘humanitarianism’, ‘negativity’ and ‘progressive’ that littered their language. As far as they were concerned, if she wanted to clutch her belly till the cows came home, he would defend her right to do so to the death. No one had the right to upset her with their negative responses. Hyper-sensitive to criticism and hyper-emotional in their reactions, they claimed that their lives were being ‘destroyed’ by all the ‘negativity’. It was up to his father and grandmother to help him ‘protect her.’ He really didn’t know how much more of this ‘torment’ they could ‘endure’. Unless Charles and the Queen assisted him in ‘protecting’ her - the word he kept on using - they would be preventing him from fulfilling his role as a husband. ‘His and Meghan’s lack of proportion was breathtaking,’ a royal cousin said. ‘The Queen and Prince Charles heard him out and expressed regret but said there was nothing they or anyone else could do. Effectively they pointed out in as gentle a manner as possible - Harry is extremely emotional, and it’s almost impossible to get through to him when he has the bit between his teeth - that this is a free country and the Royal Family values a free press even when they don’t like what it’s saying. They made it clear that they could not interfere with the freedom of the press when it is making what it believes to be fair comment on the behaviour of a member of the Royal Family. Harry was very unhappy with their lack of support, as he put it. Neither he nor Meghan could see that their personal comfort did not come before the freedom of the press, but both the Queen and Prince Charles did.’

  Little did anyone know at the time, but in refusing to join forces with Harry, the Queen and Prince Charles had triggered unforeseen consequences. Thereafter, Harry and Meghan would be looking for ways to break the back of their critics. And they didn’t care if there were constitutional consequences either, for they were in the process of working themselves into the uniquely contradictory position of being royalty when they wished to swathe themselves in that cloak, and private citizens when that mantle suited them better.

  By this time, the mainstream public were beginning to pick up on some of the concerns that were feeding the rumours at grassroots level. ‘She isn’t even a good actress,’ the Nigerian who alluded to stoning said. ‘If you’ve seen Suits, you’ve seen the act. Sometimes she’s acting out a scene from one episode, sometimes another. There’s nothing real about that woman.’ I pointed out that Meghan might merely be projecting how she genuinely feels, and was silenced with, ‘Then someone ought to tell her to stop all the projecting.’ With that, I had no argument, though I could see how her admirers would be disappointed if she stopped beaming them her subliminal messages.

  Matters of sartorial taste aside, the real danger was what would happen if the wider public came to believe, as a vociferous segment of the internet commentators and the press did, that Meghan was faking a pregnancy. Because the palace were alert to the danger, there were teams of people working behind the scenes to shut down some of the internet sites and shut up the more extreme commentators.

  Buckingham Palace has traditionally had a very competent bureaucracy. They may be colourless compared with savvy, aggressive American media management specialists like Sunshine Sachs, but they do know their business, and they go about it quietly and efficiently. The courtiers who run the monarchy direct not only royal operations but the Royal Family itself. All royal diaries are agreed six months in advance. If the Queen is doing something in Aberdeen that warrants press attention, the remainder of the family undertakes pedestrian duties that will not make the papers but will address the needs of the community the royal is serving. The same rule applies across the board. One royal does not steal another’s thunder. Doing so undermines the whole system and defeats the long term goals of the monarchy, which are to further various initiatives in a meaningful way so that the public appreciates what is being done in its name. The only person who ever bucked that system before Meghan and Harry started to was Diana. She used to compete, at first with her husband, then, in the run-up to her separation and thereafter until her death, with the entire Royal Family. ‘She delighted in causing discomfort up at Balmoral,’ the diarist Richard Kay said, giving away only part of the reason for her mischievous behaviour. The truth is, Diana liked being the centre of attention. She was also competitive and addicted to the attention she got from the press, and the only time she was satisfied was when she rather than any of the other royals was the item of the day.

  Although no one at the palace yet suspected that Meghan might be Diana’s reincarnation, they did feel that there were discomfiting resonances between the two women. Both were troublesome in that they did as they pleased, refused to take direction, and had a talent for whipping up controversy. ‘The bad old days are back,’ a courtier said during the pregnancy. ‘We waste so much time dealing with the fallout from all that’s going on around the Duchess of Sussex that some of us have time for little else. There’s a sinking feeling of déjà vu.’

  One consolation was that the rumours surrounding the falsity of Meghan’s pregnancy would come to a natural end once she gave birth. There was an established regimen for royal pregnancies and births, and these would silence the doubters. Royal mothers-to-be invariably used Court gynaecologists and obstetricians, leading men in their field whose reputations were beyond reproach. There would
therefore be no doubt as to who was carrying the baby, or who had given birth to it, once it was delivered so transparently.

  The birth of royal babies used to require the presence of the Home Secretary, who would remain in attendance throughout labour until the infant was born. This custom had arisen following the birth in 1688 of James, Prince of Wales, son of King James II and Queen Mary of Modena. Because James II and his consort were Roman Catholic, once they had a son to supplant the king’s two non-Catholic daughters from his first marriage to the Earl of Clarendon’s daughter Lady Anne Hyde in the line of succession, the possibility of Catholicism being reinstated as the nation’s official religion became the hottest topic of the day. This was intolerable to the Protestant lobby, who overthrew the king, in what is known to history as the Glorious Revolution, by accusing him and his queen of smuggling in a male baby in a warming pan into the palace as a ploy to secure the Catholic succession to the throne. This was a farcical notion, for the custom was that all royal accouchements were witnessed by countless courtiers aside from physicians and family. Nevertheless, the ploy worked, James II, his queen and heir were driven into exile to the Court of his first cousin King Louis XIV in France, and a law was passed requiring the Home Secretary to be present at each royal birth thereafter, to prevent the passing off of infants. James II’s elder daughter Mary was then invited by Parliament to take the throne with her husband and paternal first cousin William, Prince of Orange, who reigned as King William III, while the rightful kings of England remained in exile abroad.

  The custom of the Home Secretary bearing witness to the delivery of all royal infants was only discontinued after the birth of Princess Alexandra in 1936, by which time it was deemed to be redundant, qualified Court physicians being seen as equally safe preventatives to the smuggling in of illegitimate babies.

  Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, royal infants were born at home rather than in hospital. The Queen’s four children were born at Buckingham Palace while Princess Margaret’s son was delivered at Clarence House, home of the Queen Mother, and her daughter at her own home, Kensington Palace. There was no secrecy. The medical professionals in charge were all known to the public.

  This tradition extended into the next generation but for one important difference. Royal babies started being delivered in hospitals. The Lindo Wing of St. Mary’s Paddington in London became the favoured place. Once more, there was no secrecy. The royal mother was surrounded by medical staff, the senior doctors’ names being made public as a way of eliminating any suspicion of subterfuge. Although it is unlikely to have been common knowledge, this was an extension of the age-old practice whereby royal births were always publicly verifiable through unimpeachable witnesses. The public, after all, had a right to know that their potential monarch had a right to the throne, and both sets of rights were respected through the reinforcing presence of witnesses. This was true even under absolutist monarchies, hence why Marie Antoinette’s room was so stuffed full of courtiers at the birth of her first child that she grew faint from the lack of air, necessitating the removal of several of the witnesses. This might have been an extreme example, but the reality is, potential monarchs are living representatives of the people and, as such, a form of public property. Their provenance needs to be beyond doubt.

  It was therefore contrary to all known custom for Harry and Meghan to decide that they would not be revealing the names of her medical team. This, they stated, was private. Their argument was that they were private individuals and, as such, entitled to the same degree of privacy as anyone else. This premise, of course, was simply not factual. Harry was sixth in line to the throne. A child born to him and his wife would automatically be seventh in the order of succession. William and Catherine sometimes travelled with their three children in the same aircraft something which no other heir to the throne had done before. Should the ‘plane crash’, Harry and Meghan would be the heirs assumptive after Prince Charles. As the Queen was in her nineties, there was the presumption that sooner or later Charles would be king. But if he should die before the Queen, and the Cambridge family had been wiped out in an accident, that meant that Harry and Meghan would become the next Prince and Princess of Wales, with their child third in line to the throne. Once the Queen died, they would become King and Queen, their child its father’s immediate heir. The possibility was not so remote as to be beyond contemplation, which meant that their demands for privacy were spurious and unconstitutional.

  Moreover, by creating a degree of opacity that had never before existed, Harry and Meghan were, whether through ignorance or obduracy was beside the point, feeding the rumours that she was not pregnant and that their expected child was being borne by a surrogate. Had Buckingham Palace wanted a worst case scenario to deal with, they would have been hard-pushed to invent one, and this, to the courtiers, meant that their lives were being made quite unnecessarily impossible for no better reason than that Harry and Meghan were putting their desires before the Crown and the Nation’s interests.

  Bad as that was, Harry and Meghan then decreed that the baby would not be born in a hospital, but at home. There had been no home births for two generations. Not only was this bucking the trend, but it was adding a whole new layer of opacity to an already needlessly dark situation. Medical wisdom was that home births might be relatively safe for young mothers, but geriatric motherhood starts at twenty eight and Meghan was a decade older. Putting aside the political inadvisability of a home birth, Harry and Meghan were putting herself and the baby in unnecessary danger. ‘The whole thing was just insane,’ a courtier said.

  Despite all of this, Meghan and Harry had decreed how they would disport themselves and they were not prepared to countenance any opposition. They continued to insist that they were private individuals who had a right to have their baby as and when and how they pleased. They wanted this time for themselves, and could see no reason to change their minds. Britain is a free country and it is virtually impossible to force an implacable adult to do something he or she does not wish to do, even when the national interest is at stake. As long as no laws are being broken - and Harry and Meghan were breaking no laws despite flouting a whole range of protocols and precedents - the powers-that-be had no choice but to accede to their demands and allow them to proceed with the home birth they were demanding.

  The way to clear up a mystery is to shed light upon it. The way to increase its power is to lure it further into opacity, as Meghan and Harry were doing. It is hardly surprising that even people who had doubted the stories about Meghan’s bump being a prosthesis, who had thought that the Doubting Thomases were being silly in their suspicions, now began to question what was really going on.

  In the midst of this turmoil Meghan did something which shored up the disbelievers in a way only one’s worst enemy would wish. At nearly eight months pregnant, she attended a function, elegantly accoutred in the highest of high heels. She greeted a child, got down on her haunches, legs spread wide open, displayed her undoubted skill in dealing with children, then without missing a beat, bounced right back up. This was an exceptional display of agility, even for an advanced yogi like her, and it caused astonishment. Indubitably, Meghan is an extraordinary woman, and this proved it, for while most women start waddling like a duck by their seventh month, and find it difficult to walk straight in flats much less balance themselves on their haunches while wearing high heels in the final trimester of pregnancy, there she was, giving everyone sight of how truly amazing she is.

  Whether it was Meghan’s natural ability to gain attention, both positive and negative, or her intention to remain at the forefront of all news reports by always providing the press with some new angle or snippet with which to run, thereby knocking all the other royals off the front pages, or whether she was so naive that she honestly didn’t realise that her behaviour was feeding a frenzy of her own creation, what she did next was pure genius in terms of headline nabbing. She announced that she would be retreating from public view unti
l the baby was born, and moreover that she and Harry had no intention of revealing when the birth had taken place until they were good and ready. She would not be parading around with a newborn. She objected to the custom whereby royal women stepped out of the Lindo Wing, shortly after giving birth, with their baby wrapped up in blankets while they themselves were beautifully coiffed and attired. That sort of thing was barbaric, she maintained, yet again conveying the message that she disapproved of royal traditions and her way was the more enlightened one. As far as she was concerned, the custom put too much pressure on the woman, and being an avowed feminist, she wanted to protect herself and all royal women by changing the practice. She therefore wouldn’t be playing ball. She would be enjoying being a new mother in the privacy of her own home, with her husband, as is the right of all mothers and fathers. This was ‘their time’, she said, and they wanted to keep it to themselves. Only when they were good and ready would they ‘share’ their joy with the world. On one level, her argument was sound if one accepted the premise that she was a private individual and not a constitutionally significant national figure, but on another, it was guaranteed to provoke a reaction, and sure enough, it triggered a whole new wave of speculation about the baby.