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
