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 on 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
