It’s tricky, being Meghan Markle. Even when people are sticking up for you, they’re sticking the knife in you, too. Take Suzanne Moore in The Guardian. She wrote a piece knocking the tabloids for going on about the Duchess of Sussex’s habit of cradling her bump, which was decent of her. But, she added, Meghan was not allowed to feel protective of her baby because ‘her job is to breed in captivity’. That must have gone down well with the self-proclaimed feminist and activist – who, it’s true, abandoned her socially conscious online accounts once she got married.
But she’s damned if she does, and she’s damned if she doesn’t. Write stirring messages on bananas for sex workers, and the Daily Mail derides you. Get a Grenfell cookbook published, and there are whispers of disapproval from courtiers. Hang out with the Clooney/Beckham/Soho House set and be assailed for being too Hollywood, for forcing your hen-pecked husband to abandon his old, country-set muckers – including Tom ‘Skippy’ Inskip, the ultra-loyal, tight-lipped Harry pal, who, it’s said, advised Harry not to marry Meghan and has paid the price: banishment.
It’s been there from the beginning, that criticism. Very shortly after her engagement was announced, I had dinner with some old-fashioned grandees, one of whom has connections with Kensington Palace. Meghan came up in conversation. ‘She’s trouble,’ said one peer. ‘I’m not at all sure it’s a good thing.’ The KP-connectee sighed: yes, he said, that’s what a few people there felt. It’s always the way; courtiers are plus royaliste que le roi – more royalist than the king himself. Remember poor Fergie, aka Sarah, Duchess of York. When she married Prince Andrew, the Queen’s second son, she, like Meghan, was heralded as a breath of fresh air, a fun-filled redhead who’d blow the cobwebs off the monarchy. In the end, Lord Charteris of Amisfield, one-time Private Secretary to the Queen, declared, ‘She is vulgar, vulgar, vulgar, and that is that.’ Even The Independent wrote that Fergie had ‘exuberantly expensive bad taste, a voracious appetite for publicity and swallowed up large amounts of money.’
Meghan has seen nothing like that – even though staff at Kensington Palace are now calling her ‘Me-Gain’. And savvy – but well-informed and well-connected – outsiders feel she’s getting bad advice. And that that advice comes not from palace regulars, but from Meghan’s own connections. Connections who are blamed for Meghan’s apparent decision to let friends brief People magazine about her dire relations with her father, her hand in writing Harry’s speeches, her nail polish, her cooking and her trust in God. Eyebrows rose even higher during her luxurious New York trip and the ‘Marie Antoinette’ overtones of her baby shower, which included four Ladurée macaron towers costing $350 each. ‘She needs some pros,’ said an image-business source, ‘because the advice she’s been getting is crap.’ He paused, then added, ‘Which is odd. I’ve met her two or three times, and she’s quite a pro. She knows exactly what she wants. But she’s almost dealing with everything herself, and that’s dangerous.’
All this won’t go down well with her new husband. ‘Harry’s a proud man,’ said one insider, ‘and a sensitive man. He’d be very upset at the idea of people criticising his wife. He’s utterly besotted.’ This upset is, of course, reflected in the couple’s notorious Christmas card: black and white, their backs to the viewer, arms around each other, the sky alive with fireworks which you could, if you wished to, construe as shellfire. Was it meant to be arty, or cool, unlike the bland happy-families shot sent by William and Catherine? Was it a proclamation of us-against-the-world, as many ‘body language experts’ claimed? The photograph was taken on the couple’s wedding day, a day of unalloyed triumph, a day of radiance, a day of happiness, after what Prince Charles told one source was the ‘nightmare’ of the wedding preparations.
