This, of course, is pure speculation. What is not is the fact that Harry and Meghan tried to strike out on their own by setting up their own household independent of all the other palaces, when they split from William and Catherine prior to Archie’s birth. ‘Going rogue’ is what such ambitions are known as in palace circles. To say that their attempt was greeted with incredulity would be to minimise the disbelief felt at the palace. A prince told me that he is sure that Lord Geidt, the Queen’s former Private Secretary who was shoved out in 2017 by the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, but still has the Queen’s ear, was behind the move blocking Harry and Meghan from going ‘completely rogue’. He argued for their office relocating to Buckingham Palace, where the Queen’s advisors could keep an eye on them. ‘Otherwise they’d have been like two cars hurtling down a dirt track with no brakes, kicking up dust in everyone’s eyes,’ the prince said.
From Harry and Meghan’s perspective, all they wanted was the freedom to indulge their tastes and values and, where they thought appropriate, to update the monarchy. They actually complained vociferously to all and sundry that their ‘special talents’ were not being used, that they weren’t ‘appreciated’ enough, and that, left to their own devices, they’d be ‘real forces for change’. They simply could not understand that it was unreasonable to expect any newcomer to any institution to be given the freedom to enact change the way Meghan and now Harry proposed. Insisting on being given the licence they wanted was a recipe for change, all right, but not change the way they originally intended, and certainly not change the palace wanted.
In the meantime, the turmoil continued both privately and publicly. No sooner did the furore over Meghan’s baby shower in New York die down, than she found herself caught up in yet more controversy. She and Harry moved out of Nottingham Cottage at Kensington Palace into Frogmore Cottage amidst fury at the cost of the refurbishments. These came to some £2.4m and were being paid for by the state. Their critics wanted to know why taxpayers should absorb the cost when they were being given free accommodation. One could equally have taken the view that since Frogmore Cottage is a state-owned building, the state should pay to keep it updated, though the outlook that would have covered all bases, and which is what the Grosvenor Estate used to utilise with its grace-and-favour leases, was that Meghan and Harry should be responsible for the full cost of repairs and refurbishment in return for living there gratis. This, however, was an age-old dilemma, and Harry and Meghan viewed the criticism that came their way as unfair, for who wouldn’t opt for the state paying for their refurbishments given the chance?
Within a month of Archie’s birth, Meghan burst back onto the scene, displaying the remarkable aptitude she has for generating interest. A very slender and flat bellied Duchess of Sussex turned up at Wimbledon to watch her friend Serena Williams play tennis. She was accompanied by Genevieve Hillis and her other Northwestern girlfriend, Lindsay Roth. Both women were appropriately dressed, as were the men and women who accompanied the trio. The rebellious Meghan, however, struck a blow of sartorial freedom by defying yet more British traditions as she breached two of Wimbledon’s cardinal rules. She was wearing jeans, which are banned, and a hat, which is never worn. She had actually taken the same hat, or an identical looking one, to Wimbledon the year before, when she sat with Catherine Cambridge. Then she had been perspicacious enough to keep it in her lap, but this time, she had it planted firmly on her head.
Although Meghan either did not know or did not care, there is a reason why women do not wear hats at Wimbledon. They have the potential to block the view of the person sitting behind the wearer. It is therefore considered ‘poor form’ to wear hats. But Meghan’s attachment to the hat suggested that she was living out some sort of fantasy of what California girls do when they get a chance to attend Wimbledon, and, as such, one has to feel for her.
Nevertheless, Meghan’s breach of the Wimbledon dress code earned her criticism, though what really incensed her critics was their perception that her conduct conveyed both contemptuousness and arrogance. She had ensured that she could wear a hat by clearing out the forty or so seats behind her. The only people allowed within spitting distance of her were her suite. Behind and beside her, there was row after row of empty seats. Outside, there were queues of people being prevented from witnessing the match, from occupying seats which they had paid for, while Meghan and her Northwestern university mates were flanked by her suite and a buffer zone of empty seats to keep her comfortable.
To the British people and to the British press, this was a gross abuse of power. No other royal had ever caused forty surrounding seats to be vacated, all of which would normally be occupied by people who had paid for them. The Queen, Prince Philip, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, the Cambridges, Princess Alexandra, even the late Diana, Princess of Wales, had never had cordons sanitaires created for them at Wimbledon. All the seats around them had always been filled. Yet here was Meghan surrounded by a sea of empty blue seats, attired in jeans and a hat in defiance of the established dress code.
If Meghan and her team had tried their hardest to come up with something that was unpopular, they could not have bettered what happened next. Her security people had the temerity to go up to two members of the public who were taking selfies and inform them that they could not use their cameras in the presence of Her Royal Highness, as she was attending Wimbledon in a private capacity and required privacy. Privacy in a public place, in front of television cameras which were beaming images into hundreds of millions of homes around the world, while Meghan was a guest of a national institution which she would not have had access to had she been a private individual, caused national outrage. Just who did she think she was? The respected British television presenter Eamonn Holmes gave voice to the sentiments of many people when he said that Meghan had got ‘above herself’.
If Meghan’s objective was to garner herself column inches, her conduct made sound sense. However, if it was to rewrite the rules regarding the conduct of the press and public when members of the Royal Family were guests in public in an unofficial capacity, she had only shown how naive she was. No one who appears in public has a right to privacy. To courtesy yes, but privacy, no. By its very definition, being in public means that you are a part of the public and therefore no longer private. If you wish to be private, you remain in the privacy of your home, or the privacy of other private places. You do not, however, go out in public, in front of television cameras which are beaming into hundreds of millions of homes, and demand that others respect your right to something you do not possess, while you are actually stripping them of their rights. The public have a right to look at anyone around them. They have a right to treat a public figure with the appropriate degree of recognition, attention, and respect that the said public figure’s presence realistically generates. All civilised and well-mannered public figures understand that fact and treat the public with the courtesy they deserve. Speaking as a public figure who was born into a prominent family, married into another, who has spent her whole life surrounded by public figures, I can say with absolute authority that it is inappropriate for a public figure to think that he or she has the right to regulate the conduct of the public to the extent that people can’t look at you, smile at you, or even if the moment seems right, approach you respectfully. I know that there is a category of Hollywood personality who does not agree, but in civilised circles, they are dismissed as the pretentious pifflers which they are. As for the message that any public figure is so special that there has to be a buffer zone, whether of empty seats or something else is beside the point, between him or her and the public: Since when did the odious expression ‘the great unwashed’ gain such acceptability that any public figure, much less a member of the Royal Family, can now claim the right to have barriers erected whereby ordinary people are kept so well away from them that the message has to be: your presence defiles me?
In fairness to Meghan, there are significant cultural differences between the British and t
he American ways of life. She might well have not realised how offensive a message she was relaying when she embarked upon what she regarded as ‘progressive’ behaviour at Wimbledon. This is where she would have been well advised to have taken the time to learn the nuances of British life, rather than ‘hitting the ground running’ to ‘update and modernise the monarchy’, as she put it. You cannot modernise an institution when you do not even understand the basics of the culture whence it emanates. Such attempts are doomed to failure. Your conduct will antagonize large swathes of people who start out being charitably disposed towards you. Whether you intend to or not, if you don’t understand their culture, don’t bother to learn about it, think that your way is better than theirs, you are not only telling them that you regard your way and yourself as better than their way and themselves, but you are ultimately conveying lack of respect for them and their ways. That is not how one garners respect.
Despite the Queen and Prince Charles refusing to go along with Harry and Meghan’s request that the Royal Family alter the protocols by which it and the media relate to each other, and in so doing muzzle the press so that they could no longer criticise Meghan, the hyper-sensitive and determined couple decided to begin the process of cutting the Fourth Estate down to size. Meghan had been media savvy for years. Not only had she cut her teeth on her blogs, but she also took professional advice from media managers and understood that the best way forward was to use social media to reach their public directly.
Instagram became their platform of choice. They would drip feed news as and when they wanted. This would give them total control and cut out the hated tabloids, so, on privacy grounds, they refused to allow Archie to be photographed by the press, but posted an ‘artistic’ black and white picture of his feet in her hand.
Whether it be a star, publicist, producer, director, agent, or wannabe, everyone knows that nothing keeps the press hotter than someone who tries to elude them. Everyone also knowns that nothing infuriates the press quite so much as public figures who bemoan intrusions into their private life, while seeking to control the narrative so absolutely that they violate their own privacy by posting precious, artsie-tartsie photographs and ‘meaningful’ messages on their Instagram, Twitter and Facebook accounts. As Harry himself had observed when he turned twenty one, you cannot on the one hand demand privacy from the press and on the other violate your own privacy by revealing information about your private life as and when it suits you. Yet that is now precisely what he and Meghan started doing.
As they sought to gain absolute control over the information they imparted to the public, few people outside the press and palace realised just how dangerous a ploy they had embarked upon by trying to cut the press out of reporting on them. Once more, the couple had decided to change the game, this time by excluding the press from photographing Archie. Up to then, royal babies had traditionally been photographed by a well-known photographer, whose pictures would be disseminated throughout the media. That way, the royals would get positive coverage, the press would make money, which was becoming harder and harder since the advent of the internet, and the public would be kept informed.
Because of the threat the internet has presented to the media, it had become an increasingly important duty of the Royal Family to cooperate with the mainstream on such anodyne occasions as photo sessions with royal babies and other happy royal events. As stated earlier, the British press and the British Royal Family have a symbiotic relationship. Each needs the other. The existence of each furthers the security of the other while advancing the cause of freedom in Britain, a free and robust press being a guardian of democratic freedoms, and a constitutional monarchy being a preventative to the grabs against democratic freedom to which politicians are prone. You therefore undermine the media at your own peril - whoever you are.
All enlightened people understood this, and even made personal sacrifices, such as I made when I refused the Police’s invitation during Operation Weeting to complain officially against the Murdoch papers and the Mirror Group for having hacked my ‘phones. My reasons for inaction are relevant to this subject. During Operation Weeting, the Hacked Off movement was launched by public figures such as the actor Hugh Grant, who had been exposed for using the services of a prostitute, and Sir Max Mosley, whose penchant for prostitutes and Nazi paraphernalia had been written about in the tabloids with the public being reminded that his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, had been the head of the British Fascists, while his mother had been the former Diana Mitford, friend and admirer of Adolf Hitler. Despite my own personal suffering at the hands of the tabloids, I took the view that Britain needs a vigorous free press. Why should a few jaundiced celebrities muzzle the media out of spite for having had their debaucheries revealed, and in so doing, put everyone’s liberty at risk? I therefore told the Inspector who almost begged me to reconsider, ‘The price people like me have to pay for our privileges is a free press. There are already sufficient laws in place to protect our rights. Maybe some of them need beefing up, but we certainly don’t need new laws that muzzle the press so absolutely that they can’t have a go at us, or at crooked politicians.’
What Meghan and Harry were in effect doing was undermining the press by trying to cut them out and deal directly with the public through social media. Royals have an even more important part to play in the functioning of a free British press than public figures like Hugh Grant or Max Mosley. Yes, celebrities are tabloid fodder, and yes, it’s a two way street that frequently benefits both press and public figure. But the part the royals play is of far greater significance. I would go as far as saying that only an ignoramus, someone who is truly irresponsible, or someone who is utterly naive would seek to behave towards the press as Meghan and Harry now started to do. You do not push your hand into the lion’s mouth, tickle the back of its throat, scratch its tongue, as a parting shot pinch its lips, and expect to emerge unscathed. Of course, if you have on impenetrable armour and you wish to gain an advantage out of the lion’s response, that’s something else. Provocation then makes sense, especially if the provocateur or provocateuse intends to flip things and emerge intact as the lion’s pretended victim.
It was against this culture clash, and Meghan and Harry’s refusal to deal with its causes and effects, that the questions surrounding baby Archie’s arrival on earth were dealt with by both the press and the palace. There is no doubt that most British publications took a very responsible line. So did the palace. One of the royals told me that there was genuine fury intermingled with despair that Harry and Meghan’s conduct had created such doubt about the baby’s legitimacy. There was serious concern that the Royal Family’s reputation for integrity would be damaged. There was also real fear the monarchy would suffer if it became an accepted and generalised belief that Archie had been borne by a surrogate. No monarchist wanted a situation in which a member of the Royal Family was believed to have practised a deception upon the public by pretending to be pregnant when she was not. It was felt that the honour and integrity of the monarchy could be called into question if the public believed that the Royal Family and its courtiers had colluded with faking a pregnancy when they had done no such thing. The dilemma was obvious. If the public believed that Meghan had been guilty of a sleight of hand, and that the Royal Family was innocent of any collusion, that was one thing. The public would look at the powers-that-be as innocent bystanders who knew nothing about it, but if the public believed that they had cooperated, that would be something else.
The passage of time has provided a degree of relief. Since Meghan and Harry have stepped down as senior royals and moved to California, the fear that the Royal Family itself would be implicated has receded. Partly, this is because there has been a growing awareness within the general public that Meghan and Harry are both mavericks. They are also increasingly perceived in Britain as fragile personalities whose mental health demanded that they be allowed to do as they please. In America, of course, they are celebrated as freedom fighters who have broken fre
e of the shackles of royalty and are now at liberty to pursue the humanitarian and commercial activities they were hampered from doing in Britain. In fact, this is only partly true. There is no better platform for humanitarianism than constitutional monarchy, but there have been human elements governing their departure which have received scant attention, especially in the American press. By Harry’s own account, he has struggled with mental health issues, and though Meghan has been less forthcoming in making admissions of that kind, the evidence of her blogs and their conduct suggests that she too has personality issues. It is these mental health concerns that have allowed the Royal Family and the powers-that-be at Buckingham Palace to cut them slack. What would otherwise have been intolerable has been made tolerable by these considerations, but the idea that being royal turns you into a victim entrapped in a cruel world where you aren’t even allowed to make money could not be more ludicrous. Even anti-monarchists accept that being royal is a great privilege.
CHAPTER 9
The palace had known, for a year before Meghan and Harry’s bombshell announcement in January 2020, that they were making plans to achieve what they would later call ‘financial independence’ by entering the commercial world. This was something no member of the Royal Family who was publicly funded had hitherto done, and that the possibility existed that Meghan’s ultimate aim was to enter American politics, which was also incompatible with her royal status.
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