It is always unfortunate when families wash their dirty linen in public. The stench of grubby water sticks to all concerned, not just the guilty. Had Harry been older when his mother died, he might have understood how destructive it is to try to use the press against family. He would also hopefully have had more sympathy for those whom Diana had sullied as she poured bile over them, posing as the victim when in fact she was more often perpetrator than anything else. The place for resolving family conflicts is not in the world at large, but behind closed doors. Nor is the public arena a suitable platform for boosting oneself at the expense of family members. It always backfires, if only because with every victory, you lose a disproportionate number of supporters. The law of diminishing returns kicks in.
Meghan and Harry were aware that falling out with her father had done her image a great deal of harm. They appear to have thought that the weak link in the chain would be the Mail on Sunday for reasons which I will get into shortly. An American cousin of mine who likes Meghan - ‘She is so beautiful and elegant’ - spoke for many when he said, ‘Her father is dreadful. I wish he’d just disappear.’
Be that as it may, lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic acknowledged that Thomas Markle Sr had a cause of action against his daughter for defamation. Under American law, the plaintiff has to prove malice to succeed. A top lawyer told me, ‘What could possibly be more malicious than a daughter writing a letter to her father, full of misleading and inaccurate statements, with the evident purpose of leaking its contents to friends who then leak it to the media, to humiliate him and portray him in an unflattering light?’
While Meghan’s US admirers might have wished Tom Sr to disappear, in Britain the feeling was more nuanced. The fact that he had chosen not to sue her, but to get a British publication to put his side of the story, showed that he did not want to hardball Meghan, though he did want to redress the balance. Had he been the money-grubbing, attention-seeking jerk that Meghan’s friends had made him out to be, he could have got millions off People, as well as a lot more coverage than an article in the Mail on Sunday, by suing her and the friends who had defamed him to People magazine.
To those of us who know the score, Meghan’s choice of publication to sue was interesting, possibly even cynical, and certainly indicative of a sophisticated and intelligent operator. The Mail on Sunday is owned by DMG Trust, whose main shareholder and chairman is the 4th Viscount Rothermere, a cousin of Lady Mary Gaye Curzon’s first husband, Esmond Cooper-Key. The present editor is Ted Verity, but the previous editor was Geordie Greig, now editor of its sister paper the Daily Mail. The royal couple might well have thought that the Mail group would be a soft touch because Jonathan Rothermere and Geordie Greig have impeccable connections within the highest levels of British society and would not want to jeopardise their connections with the Royal Family. If that is so, they miscalculated.
British press barons are vastly influential, but Jonathan and his father Vere have always been known to be have been hands-off owners. They literally let their editors and managers function with no reference to themselves. During the Leveson Enquiry into press standards, this was proven when Jonathan was shown to be so detached from the running of his mighty media empire that he had resisted the former Prime Minister David Cameron’s blandishments to influence his editors over Brexit. I knew his parents, whom I first met in 1973 in Jamaica, where they had a house at Round Hill where Tom Inskip’s reception was held and Harry and Meghan stayed. It was therefore only natural that once I started having trouble with his newspapers, I would approach Vere to intercede on my behalf. He told me that much as he liked me, and would love to stop his papers defaming me, he simply did not have the authority to do it. And if he made an exception for me, he would have to do it for everyone else in future. Jonathan’s mother Pat confirmed her husband’s detachment, and used to say that the only person Vere would ever bestir himself for was the Queen.
Geordie wielded more day to day influence as the editor of one of the country’s most popular papers. He was as well-connected as the Rothermeres. His father Sir Carron Greig had been a courtier, a Gentleman Usher to the Queen for thirty-four years before being made an Extra Gentleman Usher. His eldest brother Louis had been a Page of Honour to the Queen, his sister Laura had been a lady-in-waiting to Diana, Princess of Wales, who was godmother to her daughter Leonora Lonsdale. Harry certainly knew Laura well, so the link was anything but notional.
If Harry and Meghan thought that Jonathan and Georgie could intervene should things get dire, they miscalculated. The Mail on Sunday have stated publicly that they will defend Meghan’s claim to the bitter end. Through friends in that organisation, I have been told privately that that is indeed the paper’s intention. Thomas Markle has given statements to their lawyers, has provided evidence of the considerable financial assistance he gave Meghan over the years, to include proof that he put her through Northwestern University, has furnished medical records to substantiate that he did have the heart attacks which prevented him from attending the wedding, and has turned over his telephone records which show that Meghan and Harry never once tried to telephone or text him after their wedding, despite claims to the contrary. On the other hand, he tried on numerous occasions to contact her, again contrary to her friends’ claims to People.
Within days, Harry would announce that he was also suing the Sun and the Mirror for hacking his ‘phones many years ago. The die was now well and truly cast.
It is a very serious occurrence when a member of the British Royal Family sues a British national newspaper. It is even more serious when you not only have a weak case, as Meghan patently did, but your opponent can argue that you don’t have right on your side. No royalist wanted to see either Meghan or Harry embarrassed and humiliated in a court of law. Moreover, the wisdom in established circles has always been that you sue the press only when you’re on terra firma, occupying the high ground both legally and morally. Aside from the fact that all legal cases are unpredictable and therefore frequently less manageable than novices think they are - Oscar Wilde and Gloria Vanderbilt Sr are two cases in point - the British tabloids, despite frequent evidence to the contrary, do have standards, though these are rather higher where others are concerned than for themselves. Despite their double standards being leavened with generous doses of sanctimoniousness, hypocrisy, self-importance, self-delusion, and judgementalism, they truly believe that they have a righteous purpose in preserving liberties in our society. To an extent, they are right. They therefore have all the righteousness of Pharisees while being brutally tough, their survival skills honed thanks to the fierce competitiveness that exists between the various national publications. They hate being sued. They never forgive those who sue them, even when you are in the right and they in the wrong, as I know from personal experience. They have long memories and even longer print runs. They will punish you down the line for taking them on. It therefore does not behove you to litigate unless the issue is so important, and you are so patently in the right, and they are so patently in the wrong, that you really have no choice. It really must be something fundamental, like an honest person being accused of being a thief, but it should not be wishful thinking and pretensions to victimhood.
When Harry declared in his emotive way that he and Meghan had no choice but to sue, he was being rhetorical. Doubtless his words moved him. Doubtless they were intended to move others. Meghan is known to be a superb wordsmith who captivated millions with her blogs. It is unlikely that she would not have overseen Harry’s statement, as she oversees everything else. They would have been wise to understand that in terms of suing the British press, no choice should literally mean no choice, and that though their rhetoric might move their supporters to sympathy, it would leave the press, and that segment of the British public that believes in a free press, cold.
The British press, with their skewered sense of justice and their tendency to join forces against anyone who attacks one of their own, were not about forget how the Mail o
n Sunday had been accused of being in the wrong when they were simply doing their job properly. The reckoning was inevitable, and came soon enough. On the 21st October 2019, ITV aired a documentary entitled Harry & Meghan: An African Journey. This was supposed to be a programme about their South African trip, with the focus being on their work, not themselves. The interviewer Tom Bradby was known to be friendly with William as well as Harry. No one could have imagined that Harry and Meghan would use the television programme as a forum for confession. Royalty, with the exception of Harry’s late mother, does not treat television appearances as if they are group therapy sessions, nor are the secrets of the confessional appropriate for spilling by the subjects of an interview to millions of viewers. Yet Tom Bradby managed to get Harry to confess to a breach with his brother, well known within elevated circles, but only now confirmed to the general public when he asserted that he and William were on ‘different paths’ and there were good days and bad days within the relationship. Since it has been a truism of British national life since 1997 that the royal brothers were close and mutually supportive, this was a bombshell revelation.
Because Bradby can lay claim to mental health issues of his own, having experienced a serious bout of insomnia, and because Harry and Meghan were wearing their misery openly, he brought up the subject of their mental wellbeing. Harry revealed how ‘every time’ he sees a flash from a camera he is cast back to his mother’s death. This was yet another instance of what Gayle King described elsewhere as Harry being ‘over the top’. Diana had been dead for over twenty two years. Was Harry seriously expecting anyone to accept that he was such an emotional mess that flashbulbs catapulted him back to Diana’s death - a death which he had implied in his October 1st statement was due to the press - or was he trying to gain the public’s support by playing the sympathy card? Several journalists to whom I spoke opined that Harry was either ‘losing the plot’ and had gone ‘bonkers’ under Meghan’s ministrations and ‘all that yoga and meditation she has him doing’, or then this was a bald attempt on his part to cynically play the card of his mother’s death in an attempt to muzzle them. They did not like it.
Disapproving as they were of Harry’s move, they were even more condemnatory of what they regarded as Meghan’s more overt attempt to gain the public’s sympathy for her hard lot. When Tom Bradby asked her how she was doing, and she bit her trembling lip, appeared to be fighting back tears, and bravely confessed that she was finding adjusting to royal life a struggle, that no one had asked her before how she was doing, implying that she was a sensitive soul surrounded by callous people, and that ‘It’s not enough to just survive something….You’ve got to thrive,’ she certainly moved admirers and even neutrals in North America. One of my oldest and closest friends, whose first husband was a household American name and whose second husband is an eminent figure in New York, told me how touched she was by Meghan’s struggles. In Britain, however, it was another story, with opinion divided much less in her favour. While Meghan had her supporters, a discomfiting number of people, journalists as well as pedestrians, expressed sentiments including, ‘What an actress. What a phoney. What a fraud. What a spoilt, greedy, self-centred, self-pitying, entitled cow.’
They were convinced of the fairness of their conclusions because Meghan had made her discomfiture known to Tom Bradby while she was surrounded by people whose everyday life is a genuine struggle to survive. Yet here she was, pleading for the world’s sympathy for her hard lot in life. To them, she did not deserve compassion for the hardships involved in her ultra-privileged existence; she should have been looking around her, counting her blessings, and thanking Harry, God and the Queen for having landed her in the hyper-privileged lap of luxury. One member of the public, who attended an event at my castle and engaged me in conversation, said, ‘Meghan Markle has to be the most insensitive woman on earth. How can you beg the public to pity you because you’re a royal duchess who has worn a million dollars’ worth of clothes in a year? Because you’ve spent £2.4m on renovating your five bedroomed house on the Queen’s bleeding estate? Because you have an army of staff to help you with your sprog (baby)? Where’s the cause for pity? Me and my friends find it really distasteful that this woman has come over here and, rather than be thankful for all she’s been given, she whines about not having enough support.’ To the British, who thought not only about Meghan the person but also Meghan the royal duchess and how she had so much to be grateful for, she was not deserving of sympathy, while to the Americans, she was.
Before anyone had time to recover from the sensation generated by the airing of the Tom Bradby interview, Holly Lynch, a 33 year old Labour MP gathered together a group of 71 other female MPs, mostly Labour like herself, to sign an open letter to Meghan on the 29th October 2019 showing solidarity. On House of Commons writing paper, it was addressed to Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Sussex at Clarence House, which, ironically, was the first of many indications that the writers were neither as sophisticated nor as knowledgeable as the public might imagine. The Prince of Wales’s residence is Clarence House. The Sussexes’ office was then at Buckingham Palace, their home at Frogmore Cottage, so before the letter had even begun, it was setting the tone for the inaccuracies, misleading information and the genuine lack of insight into what was going on that would follow. It stated:
‘As women MPs of political persuasions, we wanted to express our solidarity with you in taking a stand against the often distasteful and misleading nature of the stories printed in our national newspapers concerning you, your character and your family.
On occasions, stories and headlines have represented an invasion of your privacy and have sought to cast aspersions about your character, without any good reason as far as we can see.
Even more concerning still, we are calling out what can only be described as outdated, colonial undertones to some of these stories. As women Members of Parliament from all backgrounds, we stand with you in saying it cannot be allowed to go unchallenged.
Although we find ourselves being women in public life in a very different way to you, we share an understanding of the abuse and intimidation which is now so often used as a means of disparaging women in the public office from getting on with very important work.
With this in mind we expect the national media to have the integrity to know when a story is in the national interest and when it is seeking to tear a woman down for no apparent reason.
You have our assurances that we stand with you in solidarity on this.
We will use the means at our disposal to ensure that our press accept your right to privacy and show respect, and that their stories reflect the truth.’
Meghan, of course, was delighted to receive such overt and unprecedented support. She got in touch with Ms Lynch and thanked her.
Nevertheless, there were several problems with that letter, chief of which was the accusation that the press stories were violating Meghan’s privacy, failing to show respect, and violating the truth. The press in fact had a much more accurate handle on what was going on behind the scenes that the MPs, were also confusing the more bizarre comments posted on the internet with the valid criticisms the press were making. Journalists cannot be held accountable for what takes place on the internet, but of course politicians of all complexions are always keen to muzzle the media and will leap on any bandwagon that helps to further their censoring agendas. This was therefore a classic case of politicians trying to make capital out of a situation with which, by rights, they should not have been involving themselves. The conflicts between a member of the Royal Family and the majority of the press should have been off limits to Parliamentarians, and would have been had any other member of the Royal Family been involved. Meghan Markle being an America mixed race feminist and left-wing political activist, her unique qualities were extrapolated by these MPs into giving them licence to interfere, when in fact they had neither the right nor the correct degree of information with which to intervene.
There was actuall
y a strong case to be made that these politicians were exploiting Meghan’s identity for their own benefit and to further their own political interests. The fact that they were interposing themselves when there was a lawsuit between a member of the Royal Family and the Mail on Sunday made their actions even more indefensible. In a democracy, the right of the press to comment freely upon the actions of public figures, especially public figures who are either politicians or royals, is a fundament which needs to be protected by everyone who understands that a free press protects a free society and vice versa. Meghan had launched a lawsuit against a publication that had a valid right of response legally, and therefore the argument could be made that these politicians were abusing their positions by writing to Meghan in the terms they did.
The timing of the letter was also mischievous. Britain was a few short weeks away from a fiercely contested general election which, without exaggeration, represented the most important choice voters were required to make in a lifetime. The very soul and future of the country was at stake. Would Britain remain a centrist democracy under the sitting Prime Minister Boris Johnson, or would it become a Marxist state under the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn? Would it remain a part of the European Union or would it regain those elements of its national sovereignty that had been surrendered as a part of its membership of the European Union? Would Britain Brexit or would the voters opt for reversing their original vote to leave and remain one of twenty seven? Most of the signatories of the letter were Labour MPs. Many were avowed republicans. Several of them were known political agitators. The few who weren’t rabidly left-wing anti-monarchists were either avowed feminists who saw misogynism everywhere, or then they were the occupants of marginal seats who were plainly jumping on what they estimated was the populistic and popular bandwagon in the hope that they would save their seats. Beneath the ostensibly noble sentiments there was therefore a tremendous amount of cynical and politicised self-interest. Which, as far as the palace was concerned, was just the sort of situation they had always sought to avoid, and which would never have occurred had Meghan and Harry not been pandering to the very political elements in the country who wanted to abolish the monarchy. This was yet another example of how dangerous it was when leading members of a choir decide that it is their personal interest to sing off key. The anti-monarchist, pro-republican Marxist MP Rebecca Long-Bailey actually said that while she wanted to abolish the monarchy, she’d like to see Meghan made queen first.
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