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 with 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
