Meghan and Harry

by Lady Colin Cambell

  For all the sacrifices he’s made, Harry appears to be supremely attached to Meghan. He has willingly if not happily given up his own world for the one she envisioned they could create together. By April 2020, however, it was apparent that he was struggling to cope. Primatologist and anthropologist Dr Jane Goodall, a friend of the couple, was the first to break ranks and confirm that Harry was finding it ‘challenging’ to adjust to his new life. Another of his friends said that he complained that ‘I didn’t sign up for any of this’ when he got married and was questioning ‘what he’s got himself into.’ Alarm bells began to ring back in Britain when he began to question the advisability of having left the Army. As he ‘floundered’, the ever-watchful and concerned ‘palace crew’ swung into action. By May, I was being rung up by an impeccable source and informed that the palace had started making plans for his eventual return. Alone.

  Patently, Meghan’s forceful personality had not been enough to provide him with the structure and security he used to get from the Army, nor were her plans for their glorious future together proving to be such a satisfactory substitute. Quite how he will cope, in the long run, with a wife who regards external constraints as provocations to be conquered or avoided, remains to be seen. Could Meghan be making the same mistake Diana had made? A wife who rules the roost too fully and demands too consistently that her husband give up everything that he holds dear, to keep her happy, might push even the most obliging of husbands into concluding that the sacrifices aren’t worth keeping the marriage intact. There had come the point when Prince Charles realised that he’d compromise himself out of existence unless he beat a tactical retreat. That had sounded the death knell of the Wales marriage. Would Meghan’s demands break the back of her marriage too?

  By her own admission, she never wants to deal with ‘any negativity’. This means that the word no is something she finds unacceptable. There is no certainty how that will play out if and when Harry deviates from her script so entirely that he ceases to sing from the same hymn sheet, or even just raises her hackles by silently opposing her. In any marriage, there has to come a time when a couple, even one as well matched as Harry and Meghan, diverge. Whether Harry’s losses become so great that they will break the back of the marriage is now a question that would have been unthinkable even in January 2020. Although Harry is still in love with Meghan, the vacuity and unpredictability of their make-it-up-as-you-go-along way of life has already shown that he and Meghan have fundamentally incompatible approaches. One factor that might influence him to endure such an uncertain and unstable way of life is the reality of what will happen with Archie if he and Meghan should separate. Meghan has already stacked the decks in her favour by moving the family to California. Unless he manages to get himself, Archie and Meghan back to the United Kingdom prior to a separation, she hereafter has the right to keep Archie with her in California. This will condemn father and son to a trans-Atlantic relationship.

  Meghan has a formidable ally in her mother. Doria has evidently expressed the view that the best thing her daughter could have done was leave Britain to forge a new way in the United States. She claimed to be worried about Meghan’s mental health because she was so unhappy in Britain. ‘She doesn’t understand that you can be mentally healthy and cope with not getting your own way all the time,’ a courtier told me. ‘She doesn’t realise there’s a huge difference between the demands of a spoilt, entitled, overgrown brat, and the healthy expectations of a reasonable person.’ Doria, with her social worker’s training and her experience of dealing with the deprived and inadequates who enter the social system, does not have the experience of dealing with people whose lives are so big that privilege is counterbalanced with abnegation, with lives that make demands upon you, that require you to grow into them and cope with discomfort as a concomitant. Growth is sometimes painful but ultimately enriching for you and everyone else around you. ‘They are small-minded people whose lives have been very restricted by their modest circumstances. Mrs Ragland is a pleasant and dignified woman but she has very little experience of the world at large, much less of the royal world. As for her daughter, she is the most spoilt, demanding so-and-so I have ever had the displeasure to encounter,’ a courtier said.

  This is not a view shared by Meghan’s admirers. They do not regard the way she has influenced Harry to detach from his friends, family and royal heritage as anything but liberating him from a way of life that was preventing him from focusing on what really matters. To them, he is a beneficiary of her largesse, but to a significant number of Britons, he has lost the plot, and though he has been ever-increasingly dismissed as a spoilt brat, his obvious desperation to do anything and everything to keep his wife sweet engenders both pity and condemnation.

  Once more, the human element kicks in. The family has come to understand, in a way they did not in the early days of the marriage, and certainly not before it, how fragile in terms of mental health both Harry and Meghan are. They are cauldrons of bubbling, overheated emotions which not only threaten to erupt, but frequently do. Their misery prior to moving to the US was palpable. It took loved ones aback to see how truly desolate they were, despite having so much going for them and despite being so in love with each other. While Harry’s emotional instability had been containable before his marriage, under Meghan’s encouragement he had learnt to ‘get in touch with’ and indulge his emotions, giving full rein to them the way she has done ever since they got married and she gained a companion in arms who encouraged rather than restrained her. As they have sparked each other off to greater and greater heights of ambition, determination, and passion, it has not been joy but wretchedness that has been the overriding emotion. This discordance caused both worry and perplexity. The attitude was succinctly expressed by Mike Tindall, husband of Princess Anne’s daughter Zara Phillips and therefore Harry’s cousin by marriage, who summarised the view of the whole family by saying, ‘The only thing I want them to be is happy. They have got to find their way, and as long as they’re happy and Archie is happy, then that is all you can ask for them. I am sure they will do that.’

  Avoiding misery when a couple has so many advantages and privileges might seem like a pretty niggardly aim, but if that is the difference between a deeply miserable couple and one with some surcease from anguish, it starts to explain why the Royal Family has taken the view that Harry and Meghan’s path to independence needs to be encouraged.

  All couples spark each other off in different ways. Harry and Meghan’s interaction has been a fascinating combination of how a pair, wholly absorbed in each other and believing that restraint is a failing to be avoided as opposed to a virtue to be deployed as and when necessary, can access all that is positive and negative in both their personalities, and, having done so, set in motion a train of consequences which have turned them from one of the most popular couples on earth into one of the most reviled in his homeland, all within the space of eighteen months. Each of them has deep reservoirs of passion, self-indulgence, entitlement and aggression, which have brought them to this pass. While no one fears for Meghan’s survival, many of Harry’s loved ones are terrified as to what will happen to him should the limb that he has climbed out onto, with Meghan’s active cooperation, snap off. ‘The prospect is too dreadful to contemplate,’ a princess told me. ‘There are some words that one does not even want to think of, much less utter.’ This fear that Harry could entirely lose the plot, maybe even harm himself, is what is behind the latitude which has been granted them.

  The most cursory of examinations show that Harry and Meghan are indeed individuals who have admitted to suffering deep emotional pain, and who are also considerably more emotional than the average person. Although both have laid the blame for their misery at obvious doorsteps - his at his mother’s death, hers at her racial identity - their critics have some justification in maintaining that such suffering as they have admitted to is also tied up with more fundamental aspects of their identities such as their excessive emotionalism and tend
ency to over-personalise. Harry was always slated to be much more emotionally unstable than William, not because of his mother’s death but because of the way his mother spoilt him, while Meghan’s anguish appears to owe more to having been over-indulged by her father from a young age, resulting in her having difficulty even as a child with coping with the frustration that comes from not getting her own way. As one of the friends she left behind when she became a success on Suits put it, ‘I don’t for a nano second accept that Meg ever experienced any racial prejudice. I may be doing her a grave injustice, but I am sure as I draw breath that it’s all false memories. No one can remember one instance of her experiencing any of the suffering she now lays claim to. The only pain Meg ever suffered was to have to wait for her ambitions to be achieved. That must have been pretty painful for someone who’d always got everything she ever wanted while growing up.’

  Of course, if Meghan is prone to self-dramatisation, which her demeanour suggests she is, her suffering would still be heart-felt, so to that extent she is still deserving of compassion. Recent studies have shown that there is little psychological difference between the effect of real and false memories, so someone who lies to himself and others about having suffered as a result of an incident he invented, ends up being almost as badly scarred emotionally as someone who actually suffered the experience. This is a lesson Meghan should have learnt, for she was effusive on her blog about how effective self-hypnosis was when she was telling herself that she was a booker. If she failed to understand that blaming her racial identity for her own failures would inevitably bring her misery rather than the comfort she sought, that does not make her present suffering any the less real. All it means is that she is ultimately responsible for the pain she has entrapped herself into experiencing, at least on one level. However, she is no more responsible for having been over-indulged than Harry is. A parent who spoils a child does it no service. Diana and Tom Sr deserve the blame, and while the former never lived to see her handiwork, the latter has. Had he brought his daughter up to have a slightly lower opinion of herself and to accept that boundless ambition is not necessarily the road to happiness, she might well have accomplished less, but she would have also have been spared a lot of pain. Yes, she might have ended up the waitress her sister Samantha has said she would’ve been without their father’s input, but a happy and satisfied waitress might have been a better fate than the miserable duchess she became.

  Like many people whose parents’ destructively indulged them, Meghan and Harry are prone to blame everyone and everything but themselves and their own character defects for their inability to experience the fulfilment in life that they yearn for and believe they are entitled to. It should not have come as a surprise to anyone that they would end up blaming the British press for their inability to enjoy the plenitude with which they have been blessed. The fact is, the press have given them a hard time, and they would not have been human had they liked it, but she and Harry have nevertheless conveniently conflated the issues and in attributing blame unjustly, have confused the public as to where responsibility really lies. A handy enemy is always a useful tool to chide rather than accepting responsibility for one’s own failings. This is especially useful when one is breaking new ground and trying to win popularity contests with the Hollywood elite, the way Meghan and Harry were. While Meghan and Harry’s supporters have bought their explanation that it is the British press that has caused their problems, the better informed and more knowledgeable observers on the other side of the fence understand that they are ultimately responsible for their own happiness. The idea that one cannot lead a constructive and fulfilled life even while being subjected to adverse publicity is nonsense. I am the living proof. Nor am I unique.

  Irrespective of one’s point of view, there can be no doubt that the most damaging course of action Harry and Meghan embarked upon once they arrived in California was declaring war on the majority of the British press. The day before the Queen’s 94th birthday on the 21st April 2020, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when most of the world was in lockdown and everywhere people were dying or suffering serious hardship, they got their ‘people’ to issue a declaration to the editors of the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror. In pure Sunshine Sachs lingo, they were informed:

  ‘As The Duke and Duchess of Sussex now settle into the next chapter of their lives and no longer receive any publicly funded support, we are writing to set a new media relations policy specifically as it pertains to your organisation.

  ‘Like you, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex believe that a free press is a cornerstone to any democracy - particularly in moments of crisis. At its best, this free press shines light on dark places, telling stories that would otherwise go untold, standing up for what’s right, challenging power, and holding those who abuse the system to account.

  ‘It has been said that journalism’s first obligation is to the truth. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex agree wholeheartedly.

  ‘It is gravely concerning that an influential slice of the media, over many years, has sought to insulate themselves from taking accountability for what they say or print - even when they know it to be distorted, false or invasive beyond reason. When power is enjoyed without responsibility, the trust we all place in this much-needed industry is degraded.

  ‘There is a real human cost to this way of doing business and it affects every corner of society. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have watched people they know - as well as complete strangers - have their lives completely pulled apart for no good reason, other than the fact that salacious gossip boosts advertising revenue.

  ‘With that said, please note that The Duke and Duchess of Sussex will not be engaging with your outlet. There will be no corroboration and zero engagement. This is also a policy being instated for their communications team, in order to protect that team from the side of the industry that readers never see.

  ‘This policy is not about avoiding criticism. It’s not about shutting down public conversation or censoring accurate reporting. Media have every right to report on and indeed have an opinion on The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, good or bad. But it can’t be based on a lie.

  ‘They also want to be very clear: this is not in any way a blanket policy for all media.

  ‘The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are looking forward to working with journalists and media organisations all over the world, engaging with grassroots media, regional and local media, and young, up-and-coming journalists, to spotlight issues and causes that so desperately need acknowledging. And they look forward to doing whatever they can to help further opportunities for more diverse and underrepresented voices, who are needed now more than ever.

  ‘What they won’t do is offer themselves up as currency for an economy of clickbait and distortion. We are encouraged that this new approach will be heard and respected.’

  Not surprisingly, this letter overshadowed Elizabeth II’s birthday, proving once again that no occasion was so significant or insignificant that Harry and Meghan’s activities would not swamp it. No sophisticate reading it would ever have doubted that it was crafted by slick, clever American media manipulators. Aside from the language, which was pure Americana, the tone was New York knuckledusters dipped in Malibu saltwater. It was a tour de force of cant and hypocrisy, whose main purpose was to shut out those organs of the press who had not been sufficiently adulatory while deliberately confusing the issues and thereby deceiving the unwitting public into accepting that Meghan and Harry’s suffering equated with the ‘real human cost…..this way of doing business….. affects’ its genuine victims.

  As one of those people whose ‘lives [have been] completely pulled apart for no good reason, other than the fact that salacious gossip boosts advertising revenue’ over the last forty six years - and who has sued all four companies successfully and is in fact suing one as I write this - I am better qualified than most to say that Harry and Meghan’s actions were unjustified, unjustifiable, and dangerous to the w
ellbeing of the British people and the freedom of the British press. I was bemused that they and their advisors could have had the temerity to so cynically attach their cause to the real sufferings of others, myself included, as if a broken fingernail equates to the loss of an arm.

  What Meghan and Harry were trying to do wasn’t only unconstitutional. It was a direct challenge to the protocols by which two of this country’s greatest institutions, namely the monarchy and the press, conduct themselves. They were trying to justify creating a new and dangerous policy which could weaken the whole edifice upon which our freedom of expression was based. Their claims to victimhood were spurious. Yes, they had been criticised, but by and large those criticisms have been based in fact. They were not based upon lies. Just who did they think they were, seeking to overturn and thereby endanger established protocols which were finely calibrated to protect everyone in this country, not only those who were written about, or those who did the writing, but those who worked in the newspaper industry? Because they felt they had been wronged? They were being reckless and uncaring of the consequences their actions potentially had to the nation as a whole. In their sensitivity and, dare I say it, misguided sense of how entitled they were to protect their own feelings, they had equated those feelings with the greater injury they exposed everyone else to as they weakened the press. Could they truly be so blind as to where reality lay that they genuinely believed their wounded feelings justified endangering a whole industry, when there were already safeguards built into the system whereby those who were damaged could gain protection or justice?