Meghan and Harry

by Lady Colin Cambell

  Although it was not tactically wise for Harry and Meghan to admit that they too liked the lifestyle of the super-rich - he has gone to some pains on several occasions to explain away his use of private ‘planes as necessary for the protection of his wife and child, as if they are any safer on a private plane than they would be on a commercial flight - the reality is that both of them - she especially - are like just about everyone else. They enjoy the delights of that way of life. And while he displayed no interest in it until she came into his life, her frank lust for the best, richest, grandest, most sumptuous and comfortable that the world has to offer was already an established feature of her personality long before they met.

  Prior to becoming a duchess, Meghan was completely frank about her appreciation of the finer things of life. On her blog The Tig she dedicated much time and space into honing the joys of wealth, luxury, and fine living. She also displayed how willing she was to enjoy the simpler pleasures of life as well. In an interview with Vanity Fair, she even advanced the theory that ‘most things can be cured with either yoga, the beach or a few avocados.’

  Nowhere in her past writings nor her subsequent conduct did Meghan indicate possessing the attitude of a Duchess of Gloucester, a Countess of Wessex or a Princess Alexandra, all of whom are classically royal princesses joyfully and charmingly fulfilling each year hundreds of unglamorous royal engagements which never make the newspapers, but which nevertheless reward ordinary men and women for their civic service. These women embrace the dullness that Meghan was so eager to avoid during her first public engagement as a royal, when she suggested leaving the Buckingham Palace garden party after fifteen minutes. These royal women are in tune with royalty’s need to acknowledge the efforts of ordinary people apolitically, and to do so in environments not deemed newsworthy by the press or worthy of Instagram postings. It is understandable why an emotive activist like Meghan had no interest in doing the bread and butter stuff that has no emotional reward and will never make it into the papers or onto the net. Diana did not want to like doing bread and butter stuff either, and at the first opportunity, she ceased doing it. So Harry had a precedent which made Meghan’s distaste for the mundane acceptable to him, and though he resisted acceptance at first, once the marriage got underway her deep unhappiness at having to do things she didn’t want to reached him, and he gradually began to support her position of what one courtier calls ‘dereliction’.

  That is not to say that Meghan is lazy. She is not. But, like Diana, she prefers the dramatic stuff. She understands how important glamorous photo ops are to her legion of followers, but she also relishes popping into soup kitchens and visiting survivors of disasters such as Grenfell Tower or encouraging women who are struggling against domestic violence. She is wonderful at letting them know that she feels their pain and always leaves those she has visited with a smile on their faces.

  Like Diana, Meghan’s feels that her talents are unique. She has been as vociferous as her mother-in-law was in making everyone know that her natural gifts should not be wasted on the ordinary activities which she dismissed as ‘petty stuff’. She indubitably had some excellent ideas, such as creating a fundraising cookbook for the survivors of that disastrous fire, but at Buckingham Palace it was an accepted fact of life that the bread-and-butter duties which Sophie Wessex and the eighty-something year old Alexandra were happy to do was essential for all royals, Meghan included. She could not expect to cherry pick her way through royal tasks, dumping the boring ones on the other royal women while reserving only the emotionally-satisfying and glamorous ones for herself.

  The reality is, anybody who isn’t cut out for the meat and potatoes business of everyday royal life, will struggle with the mundanity of political life as well. Should Meghan have even a passing chance of achieving her goal of becoming President of the United States of America, she will have to learn to take the rough with the smooth, the dull with the exciting, the boring with the stimulating, and not expect that she can somehow be spared the onerous bits while always benefiting from the gratifying highs. She might well succeed in the mixed commercial and humanitarian lifestyle that she has opted for - all leavened with much downtime with Harry, Archie and their friends, for she has always liked her pleasures, which is one of the reasons why she was happy to spend hours shooting the breeze with film crews while waiting for her three minutes of screen time - but a brightly-shining star like her will never succeed either as a royal or a politician unless she finds a way to tolerate the ordinary, unexciting, unemotional, dull requirements of life such as lunches with mayors, untrumpeted visits to worthy institutions, and the momentary meetings and greetings with countless strangers who will gain a high from meeting the luminary they admire, while she, the brightly shining star, will not.

  Despite her failure to adjust to the royal world, Meghan has undoubtedly been successful in other areas. This success came about because she acted the part ascribed to her with a remarkable degree of élan. But she also believes it’s not enough to survive: ‘You must thrive.’ And since she didn’t like the lines or the limitations of the role that were being given to her, she did a variation of what Diana had also done: She left the stage for one of her own devising.

  Of course, if Meghan was never genuinely interested in being a working royal, and only wanted the platform to catapult herself to greater worldly success, she has been achieving her objective brilliantly. But what if she did genuinely think that she might be able to adjust to her royal role? If that is the case, hers is indeed a sad story. It might have been different if she and Harry had figured out that you can’t do as they have done. You can’t treat an enterprise as something worth undertaking only when you’re getting the rewards you require. Success as a royal has eluded her and success as a politician will do likewise unless she learns the lesson he knew before linking up with her. To succeed in those worlds, your goal cannot be to thrive. It has to be to survive, and to survive well.

  While Meghan and Harry have shown themselves to be brilliant at commanding the stage, whether royal or otherwise is beside the point, her conduct to date suggests that Meghan is congenitally unsuited to a life of service, though she might well be perfectly suited to a commercial life that has a side-line in humanitarianism.

  The reality is that the way of life of a constitutional royal was never going to have any appeal for someone who is as financially driven as Meghan has admitted she is. To be a successful royal, money can’t be a high priority. You also have to be a true believer in something that is both intangible and greater than yourself. Whether you are born into the position, like the Queen, or marry into it, like Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and the Duchess of Cambridge, you need a vocational approach if you are to stay the course. If you lack that, as Meghan patently does and Diana, Princess of Wales and Sarah, Duchess of York did, you begin to question the merit of the sacrifices you are compelled to make while pursuing the life of service royals are called upon to lead. Ultimately, if you are not a true believer, you find yourself putting your personal feelings above the cause you are meant to be serving. Once that happens, you are bound to fail, for success as a royal comes by putting your sensations to one side and rising to the occasion, whatever it is and however you feel. Self-abnegation is an intrinsic part of the whole process, and if you cannot deny yourself, you cannot succeed as a royal.

  That does not mean that there are not huge personal benefits and payoffs to being royal. There are, but they exist only if you respect the constraints of the system. My regret is that Meghan did not give herself enough time to discover what they were. This is a regret many of the courtiers share, though others take the view that she is better out of the picture. To them, her disrespect for the boundaries, which prevent politicisation and commercialisation, were inexcusable. To them, all individuals, whether they be political, commercial, professional, social, or royal, are expected to function within the system. As far as those courtiers are concerned, the British monarchy has spearheaded the concept of co
nstitutional monarchy since the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the restoration of the monarchy under his son Charles II in 1660. In the 360 years since then, the Crown has learnt by trial and error what works, and what does not. The British monarchy is now a vast and highly sophisticated institution in which the Royal Family and the courtiers play equally vital roles. The royals are expected to take advice only from their official advisors and tailor their conduct accordingly. These advisors are dedicated professionals whose sole goal is to maintain the efficacy of the British political system, of which the Crown is the head. They are, in their own way, vocationalists, as dedicated to the monarchy as a priest, rabbi or imam will be to his religion.

  In the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that there was consternation amongst the courtiers when Meghan, an utter novice as well as a foreigner, not only resisted all advice from her official advisors from the very beginning, but went behind their backs and appointed a whole range of alternative advisors separate from her and Harry’s Buckingham Palace advisors within eighteen months of her marriage. None of these appointments was approved by the palace. All were regarded as antithetical to the interests of the monarchy.

  The most contentious was Meghan’s appointment of the American media management firm Sunshine Sachs early in September 2019. This followed a summer of controversy in which Meghan’s micro-management of her and Harry’s public profile had backfired spectacularly. There were several incidents, all of which triggered an outcry predictable to everyone but Meghan and Harry, whose earlier nous seemed to have deserted him under his wife’s determination to control the press as she micromanaged her image.

  All of these incidents were avoidable, the negative reactions predictable. The first of these resulted in the furore surrounding baby Archie’s christening by the Archbishop of Canterbury on the 7th July at Windsor Castle. Meghan and Harry had decided to throw precedent to the wind and make totally private what had hitherto been a family event shared with the public through the presence of photographers, cameramen, and godparents. In furtherance of opacity, Harry and Meghan decreed that they would not be revealing the names of the godparents, nor would they be granting access to the photographers and cameramen who customarily covered the ceremony. They would issue a photograph of their own choice to the press, as and when they were ready to do so, and not before.

  Not surprisingly, this caused a hue and cry. Adam Helliker, who features earlier in this work discussing the leaking of the news of Harry’s relationship with Meghan, wrote an opinion piece in the Sun quoting the biographer Hugo Vickers, whose opinion neatly encapsulated the consensus. Keeping the press and public away would only ‘antagonise’ the world’s media. ‘It seems to me that the Sussexes are adopting a Frank Sinatra stance of “I did it my way” and I think it is the Duchess who prompts these decisions,’ Hugo said. He also made the point that withholding the names of the godparents was in stark contrast to previous custom. Their names and photographs had always been published ‘as far back as at least the present Queen’s christening in 1926.’ He then used the example of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, a revered figure in press and palace circles, to show up the uncooperative conduct of the royal couple, stating, ‘The Sussexes might do well to take a leaf from the Queen Mother’s book. She would always pause for the cameras, make sure they had a good chance to do their jobs and then move on.’

  To those who know code, these comments were interesting, because Hugo Vickers would not have been saying any of the things he did, had these sentiments not been shared by the palace. I have known Hugo for many years and know how well connected he is. I also know to what extent he values his palace connections. I’d go as far as saying that I wouldn’t want to have a baby with him and give him a choice between our progeny and his palace connections, for I know which one he’d choose. He is not only a lay steward at St. George’s Chapel, but is also a Deputy to the Lord Lieutenant of Berkshire.

  The following month, Meghan and Harry found themselves embroiled in even hotter water when they managed to score a whole series of own goals with one football. Not only did they spurn the Queen’s invitation to take Archie up to Balmoral for some family time with the other royals, on the grounds that the baby was too young to travel that distance, but they gave the press the opportunity to accuse them of hypocrisy by then flying, at the very time they should have been up at Balmoral, a greater distance with Archie, to stay with Elton John and David Furnish and their kids in the South of France. As the Queen was known to have been disappointed that her grandson and his family would not be visiting her at her beloved Balmoral, where she can really let her hair down and relax, this was seen as a slap to the face. When Harry and Meghan then managed to use private jets four times in eleven days, while lecturing ordinary people about the need to keep their carbon footprints small, they set themselves up for pillorying.

  In for a penny, in for a pound. No sooner did Harry park Meghan and Archie at Frogmore Cottage, than he put both his hands and his bare feet in the stocks by hopping onto yet another plane to join what the Sun called ‘the hypocritical superstars travelling to the Google Camp conference in Italy in [114 separate] gas-guzzling private planes. And dozens of A-listers are reportedly choosing to stay on giant polluting superyachts’ while being ‘ferried to-and-fro from the tech giant’s seventh annual jolly at an exclusive Sicilian resort in fuel-sucking Maseratis.’ Amidst glamorous conscionables such as Stella McCartney, Orlando Bloom, Diane von Fürstenberg, Chris Martin, Katy Perry, Bradley Cooper and Leo DiCaprio, a barefooted Harry, whose feet gleamed thanks to a recent pedicure, gave a rousing speech confirming that he and Meghan were so concerned about the state of the planet and the effects of climate change that they would never be immoral enough to have more than two children.

  Up to now, the British press had been having a field day condemning Meghan and Harry for inconsistency and hypocrisy. They now found a third charge to add to the roster. They decided Harry had finally joined Meghan in casting shade on William and Catherine, who had three children and were rumoured to be considering having a fourth. Competitiveness, spitefulness and point-scoring were the latest adjectives being used to describe the couple’s conduct.

  None of the reports credited Harry with being the instigator. They pointed to how Meghan had begun the year by leaking private information to five of her friends, all of whom remained anonymous, though there was speculation that one might be Suits actress Abigail Spencer. They had boosted her profile while rubbishing her father in a cover story published by People magazine in the first week of February under the headline The Truth About Meghan. She was portrayed as a ’selfless’ person whose friends’ sole concern was to ‘speak the truth about our friend’ and ‘stand up against the global bullying we are seeing.’ The picture these friends painted was of a simple, self-abnegating, down-to-earth girl who is so self-sacrificing that ‘I’m not even allowed to ask about her until she finds out about me.’ They described how ‘much she loves her animals, how much she loves her friends, how much she loves feeding you, taking care of you.’ They stated how worried they were that Meg’s health and that of her unborn baby might suffer unless the press stopped saying negative things about her. And they plunged the knife into Thomas Markle Sr, who had been claiming that his daughter was refusing to respond to his calls and letters. They stated, ‘He knows how to get in touch with her. Her telephone number hasn’t changed. He’s never called; he’s never texted. It’s super painful, because Meg was always so dutiful. I think she will always feel genuinely devastated by what he’s done. At the same time, because she’s a daughter, she has a lot of sympathy for him.’ Twisting the knife for maximum damage, Meghan’s friends continued, ‘At no point [following exposure that Tom had cooperated with a paparazzo to improve his image] was there talk of “Now that he’s lied, he’s in trouble.” Tom wouldn’t take her calls. Wouldn’t take Harry’s calls.’ So poor Meghan was forced after the wedding to write her father a private letter, one whose contents he had ne
ver disclosed to anyone, though the ultra-private Meghan had shared these with five separate friends, providing copies for them to leak to People, in which she had stated, ‘Dad, I’m so heartbroken. I love you. I have one father. Please stop victimizing me through the media so we can repair our relationship.’ She pointed out how his every comment was ‘an arrow to the heart’. And what was the response of her father, whom her friends were portraying as a cynical, publicity-seeking liar and hypocrite? According to them, ‘He writes her a long letter in return, and closes it by requesting a photo op with her.’