Possibly it was not Meghan’s fault that the tape was cut the way it was. Maybe ITV was responsible for how self-obsessed and self-pitying she seemed as she complained about her great pain, in not receiving the emotional support and attention she required while adjusting to her new life of even greater privilege and opportunity than her old life, which had not been exactly underprivileged either. But her complaints seemed weirdly disproportionate to this psychologist, made as they were while she and Bradby were surrounded by South African women with genuinely significant daily struggles for life, liberty, health, food and safety. These women and these issues were meant to be the true focus of the programme. Yet, so complete was Meghan’s self-belief, so pronounced her need to obtain the support of viewers by gaining their sympathy for the hardships she was enduring in her difficult life, that she did not stop to question whether a royal duchess, happily married to a man who adores her, who has a beautiful, healthy son and a life of extreme privilege, should be maintaining in the face of so much genuine deprivation that her own suffering was so great that it could even warrant a mention alongside poverty, rape, mutilation, murder, starvation, and the many other issues that had been addressed by the programme as the South African women’s lives unfurled in their full horror.
Harry acquitted himself with equal emotional fervour during the interview. While his admirers may have been filled with sympathy when he confessed how every time he sees a flash bulb he is catapulted back to his mother’s death, those who take a more measured view of the responsibilities and privileges of a prince had cause to question whether he too had started to wallow in rather too much hyper-emotionalistic self-pity when a healthy dose of gratitude for his advantages might have been a more appropriate response to the many privileges that went along with his position. It is interesting that no one to date has questioned whether Harry has narcissistic and sociopathic tendencies commensurate with those questioned about Meghan, when, in every respect save intelligence, he has mirrored her, as his conduct throughout the Bradby ITV programme demonstrated. He too came across as someone who wants sympathy intermingled with admiration, all of which is offset by a notable lack of insight as to how blessed he truly is. Every criticism levelled at Meghan could be fairly directed at Harry. The only member of that triumvirate who justifiably escaped criticism was Tom Bradby. A journalist, who asks a question that pushes the boundaries of an interview into terrain it has no business occupying, cannot be fairly criticised, nor can his producers and editors when they come to compile the programme, if a couple as experienced in PR as Harry and Meghan decide to compare their own anguish with the Golgotha of others.
There are moments in life when people open their mouths and in a few choice words reveal more than they intend to. This happened to Oscar Wilde during his second trial for sodomy, when the prosecution barrister Sir Edward (later Lord) Carson asked him if he had ever kissed a certain servant boy. Wilde, who had been maintaining that he was not homosexual, truthfully and revealingly replied, ‘Oh dear, no. He was a particularly plain boy - unfortunately ugly - I pitied him for it.’ Just as how the jurors were able to conclude that no heterosexual man would have answered that question with reference to the looks of the boy, and thereby found Wilde guilty of the offence for which he was being tried, so too did many viewers of the ITV interview leap to an elementary conclusion when Meghan said that she often tells Harry that the purpose of life is not to survive, but to thrive. To her admirers, she was being her frank, honest self, articulating one of the guiding principles of her life. Her admission was not merely a sign that she has the healthy appetite of someone who appreciates a fully laden table, but that she is honest and up-front about her desire to have the best and the most of everything. In doing so the way she did, she also confirmed that she does not regard it as shameful to want more. This is something that does not perturb her admirers, who see nothing wrong with someone wanting to have it all if they can get it all.
Her detractors, however, took another view. To them, only an unconscionable egotist, and a rapacious one at that, could state on television, in the middle of a South African wilderness surrounded by some of the poorest people whose everyday life is an uncertain struggle for survival, that the purpose of life is not survival but thriving. What appeared to be insensitivity had the possibility of another interpretation, and a more harmless one at that. The psychologist hypothesised that Meghan, who has a very American attitude to poverty, was simply being frank. She accepts it more frankly and shamelessly than Europeans do. To many of the Britons watching her on television, however, she came across not as an enlightened woman who loves the poor, but as an entitled, insensitive First Worlder. What her admirers saw as healthy and frank self-empowerment, her detractors saw as a spoilt brat who has never learnt where the boundaries should lie, who has been raised to have boundless ambition, who displays boundless greed and boundless entitlement, and is so shameless about self-aggrandisement as to flagrantly, almost boastfully, denounce the ability of some of the poorest people on earth, whose struggle is elemental, to know what the true purpose of life is, which by her pronouncement was to thrive rather than just survive.
There might also have been more to Meghan’s tremulous confession of the hardships she had faced than meets the eye. She had studied Diana Wales closely. Her stated ambition is not only to emulate her, but to outstrip her. Just as how Diana used the books that I and Andrew Morton wrote, the press through friendly journalists such as Richard Kay, and her television interview with Martin Bashir, to manoeuvre herself from one point to another, so too might Meghan have been laying the ground for her departure from the confines of the royal way of life by establishing grounds for the public sympathising with her misery, and therefore giving her their blessings to return to her homeland.
Undoubtedly, Meghan disliked the royal way of life. She disliked its constraints, its sacrifices, its drudgery, its discipline, its lack of financial reward. She had never seen any reason to get out of bed and give herself away for nothing, which is what the royal way wanted her to do. No Mayors of Surbiton for her, thank you very much, when she could be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even a million or more, to make appearances for the same length of time on the other side of the Atlantic. If she wanted to give her time or self away to charitable causes, she would do it, but on her terms, for her ultimate enrichment, whether that be spiritual, emotional, or financial, and not to embellish the cause of the British monarchy.
Since then, she and Harry have shown that they fully intend to put their money where their mouths are. They have not only expanded their financial horizons, but have also set up a financial structure which allows them to acquire a marital pot that is indisputably their own. This means that, in the event of a divorce, each of them will have access to the joint fortune they will make. Until that new development, Meghan had no access to any of Harry’s money because the British legal system fully protected his fortune. It says much about Harry’s love for and belief in Meghan that he would do something like that. In Britain, people with inherited wealth, being alert to the dangers of divorce settlements, have their money so tightly tied up that adventuresses cannot gain access to it. This has become especially necessary since recent changes to English divorce law have made London the divorce capital of the world. There have been cases in which childless wives, whose marriages were only a few years old, were granted 50% of their husband’s entire wealth. Old Money has been so threatened by inheritance and income tax for the last seventy-five years that its possessors already had strictures in place which lessened the danger of greedy spouses getting sizeable divorce settlements, but even so people have still had to implement new safeguards to protect their palaces, castles, properties and chattels against nest-feathering divorces.
While it would be unworthy of us to think that Meghan wanted anything but love from a prospective spouse, despite Lizzie Cundy’s confession that she had asked her to introduce her to a rich and famous Englishman, once she ended up wit
h Harry she found herself in a whole new ballpark. Up to then, her men had been No Money men bordering on New Money. Now, however, she was married into one of the oldest and most tightly sewn up Old Money families. This meant that she would walk with little or no money in the event of a divorce, for Harry’s assets were ring-fenced. Being unable to make money while they remained proper members of the Royal Family, with all the financial constraints inherent in those positions, the reality was that should their marriage end in divorce Meghan would leave with only what she had brought into it. Moreover, the Hague Convention, to which the United States is a signatory, meant that she would be trapped living in Britain in the event of a divorce, for any children of the marriage would be obliged to remain in the UK as long as she and Harry were living there at the time of a separation. As Harry is a devoted father, Meghan will have known that there was no way he would agree to her taking his child or children back to the US should they separate. She, however, is extremely maternal as well as foresighted, so she had a second good reason to move her base of operations.
From here on in, not only will Harry be the one trapped in a foreign country should the marriage end and he wants to be where his children are growing up, but any money they make will go into the marital pot. Meghan will walk with a whole lot more money than she would otherwise have done had she remained a proper royal. Because Harry has been so willing to step out of the protection of Britain into the exposure of America, he must trust Meghan implicitly; or he is truly as desperate as one of his cousins believes him to be.
Their move to the United States has seriously undermined Harry’s position in other ways too. Meghan, it must be remembered, is an American citizen. Harry cannot become an American without losing his title and royal rank, both of which he would have to renounce to become naturalised. At the very most, he can only become an American resident. That is a process that takes time for most people and, judging by the abusive way he and Meghan have spoken about Donald Trump, it is very unlikely that the President will be cutting any corners on their behalf. This means that Meghan is the only partner with earning capacity at the moment. Even if Harry accompanies her to events, he will not be able to be financially recompensed until his status is regularised. Meghan will therefore be the only earner in the family for the foreseeable future. In the event of a divorce, that puts her in an even stronger position financially.
Meghan is a planner. She is proudly strategic, thorough, and considered. She seeks and takes the best advice. Long before her and Harry’s departure from Britain, she had her business manager Andrew Meyer reincorporate in Delaware Frim Fram Inc., the California-based company which ran The Tig and was shut down in 2017 before her marriage to Harry. The merit of Delaware is that Meyer could be listed as the company secretary without its owner’s identity being revealed, but the mere fact that Meghan opted to revive a company rather than start an entirely new one shows that on some level she intended to leave traces rather than assure herself of the privacy a new name would have done. This her admirers will say is reflective of the fact that she is such a loyal person that she even retains connections to her old companies, while her detractors will conclude that she leaves clues lying around so that the press will make the connection and write about her, in the process helping her to fulfill her ambition to become the most famous woman in the world.
Whatever her motive, Meghan and Harry set about fine-tuning their other priority as soon as they arrived in the United States. Controlling the British press while also managing their publicity in America so that the public would see only the facade they wished to present became their prime target. This did not require quite as much skill or finesse as the uninitiated might imagine. Meghan had People magazine in her pocket and Sunshine Sachs behind them. The American press, as previously stated, is basically a lot more amenable to printing what celebrities want than its British counterpart. As long as Meghan and Harry could drip feed People, Page Six and a few other vital portals the stories they wanted written, that was their American coverage taken care of. They had also done a Diana, cooperating with two amenable journalists, Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand, who would be publishing a book in the summer of 2020 which detailed their version of events. They had no doubt that this would become a worldwide bestseller, increasing their fame and adding to their fortune by opening up all sorts of new opportunities for them.
The British press was another story entirely. Harry’s irrational and longstanding hatred and Meghan’s determination that reports about her must reflect only what she regarded as fair representation were backed up by Sunshine Sachs’s aggressive tactics. They were all still feeling their way towards victory, namely the muzzling of any dissent while rewarding tame journalists with information. But they were building up to another attack, which would come soon enough.
In the meantime Instagram proved useful, as the couple proclaimed their desire for privacy on the one hand while on the other hand embarking upon a series of posts that increased their profile. Harry, still in England working out the details of their departure from the Royal Family while his wife had returned to Canada at the first opportunity, then launched a second excoriating attack on the British press, stating that Meghan’s privacy had been violated by a paparazzo photographing her with a long distance lens as she walked their dogs Guy and Oz, with Archie strapped to her front and two protection officers, one Canadian, the other British, bringing up the rear. Once more admirers and detractors of the couple were at loggerheads, the former sympathising with poor Meghan, who couldn’t even take a walk with her two protection officers, baby, and dogs without being interfered with by what Ken Sunshine so eloquently called the stalkerazzi, the latter deciding that Meghan, who was photographed smiling broadly for the benefit of the camera, must have colluded with the photographer as no one walks around like that unless they know they’re being photographed.
To the British press, this was reminiscent of Diana, who was always accusing them of violating her privacy while covertly setting up photo ops with them. It left them unmoved but irritated at what they regarded as the couple’s hypocrisy and uncalled-for victim-signalling. The Royal Family are public figures, supported by the state, i.e. the British taxpayer, and when they are out in public they are fair game to be photographed, especially when it appears as if the photos were staged.
Americans, with their different approach to the press and no royal family of their own to provide them with a common point of reference, might find it difficult to appreciate to what extent Harry and Meghan’s complaints damaged the couple’s interests. The royal couple had successfully avoided any press attention they had not themselves orchestrated for some considerable length of time. It was therefore felt that they were rather underhandedly trying to kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, they were keeping themselves in the news, while they casting themselves as victims - yet again, their detractors said. The fact that Meghan and Harry had been coming and going for two months without the paparazzi having violated their privacy, suggested to cynics that it wasn’t only the press who were being set up, but the public as well.
No sooner did Harry return to Canada that he and Meghan gave an insight into how adept they were at avoiding the press when it suited them. They snuck out of their bolthole on Vancouver Island undetected, were driven to the airport, boarded the JP Morgan Gulfstream company jet, flew to Palm Beach and landed that same evening, all in absolute anonymity. This suggested that the press might not have them under constant observation the way they were suggesting it did.
No matter what, Meghan and Harry remained assiduous in protecting their privacy. Now that they were private individuals rather than working royals, they no longer bothered about the contradiction inherent in eco-warriors like them, who had warned the world how ‘every action counts’ and people should not do anything to increase their ‘carbon footprint’ as ‘the planet’s in danger and it’s up to each of us’, significantly expanding their footprint by using private jets. But Harry had an an
swer for his critics. He had to protect his family by that mode of travel. It was not a luxury. It was a necessity. Their circumstances were so special that commercial travel was simply impossible.
Still undetected by the press who were clearly not adept at discovering their every move, Meghan and Harry spent their first night in Palm Beach with Serena Williams in her villa. The following day they journeyed to Miami, where they joined 425 guests who included the discredited former Prime Minister Tony Blair, half Greek half Irish (Guinness) shipping heir Stavros Niarchos III and his new wife, the ex-Mrs Roman Abramovich Dasha Zhukova, Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez, Magic Johnson, British architect Lord Foster of Thames Bank, and Patriots owner Robert Kraft, at the JP Morgan Alternative Investment Summit. This was held in a sprawling tent erected in the grounds of the five star 1 Hotel on Miami’s South Beach. To reaffirm the importance of those who were present, security was tighter than usual, with a six foot wall erected to prevent tourists who would be walking along the beach’s famous boardwalk from peering in.
This was the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s first post-abdication engagement and they could not have chosen better in financial terms. Irrespective of whether they were actually earning money for the talk they were about to give, Meghan and Harry now had access to JP Morgan’s coffers. There was no question of them resisting the lure of that lucre hereafter, nor of spurning the offers of the other major financial institutions who were being lined up by their representatives to avail themselves of the soon-to-be post-royals’ services. This was what they had swapped the constraints of Britain for, and there was no doubt, from the way they behaved, that they were absolutely thrilled to be there.
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