Although both their actions support that hypothesis, Meghan appears to be the driving force behind the ploy. The lawsuit she brought against the Mail on Sunday for breach of privacy, data and copyright demonstrated her determination to face down her adversaries even though she has cast her father in the role as one of them. If the matter goes to trial, it promises to be a humdinger. It will be the number one show in town: town being the whole of the world. If the name of the game is keeping her profile high, Meghan succeeds no matter the outcome.
As things stand, the evidence Meghan has submitted is a double-edged sword. It confirms her father’s claims that she never once responded to his numerous attempts to contact her following her wedding; that she cut him out of her life with a decisiveness which would have resonated with Harry, not only because he displays the identical characteristic of dropping people when they displease him irrespective of how long or close the relationship was, but because it was also a feature of his late mother’s modus operandi. And he seems to have adopted it questioningly.
Possibly Meghan has given up caring what anyone thinks of her except for Harry and her supporters. She knows they will accept whatever she says uncritically, so she does not need to concern herself with any response beyond theirs. Or maybe her position really has gone to her head the way Tom Quinn recounts in Kensington Palace: An Intimate Memoir From Queen Mary to Meghan Markle. Maybe she really was on the power trip the staff who served and observed her insisted she was on. Could there be any justice in their having nicknamed her Me-Gain the Duchess of Difficult who was Di Two and Di Lite and expected everyone to bow down before her and accept as gospel whatever she said? Her conduct in the lawsuit against her father certainly gave merit to that interpretation. She made the most unlikely and anomalous claims. Because her case would have no merit if she admitted that she had set her five friends up to leak the contents of the letter to People - you cannot legally claim that your privacy has been violated when it has been done at your behest - she swore that they had done it behind her back, without her knowledge, consent or approval. This, if true, was astonishing, but if untrue, was perjurious. Either way, it was an incredible claim to make. Meghan had clearly not recriminated against any of the five who had betrayed her confidence. Rather than sue them for preaching her privacy, which is where the real breach occurred, she had sued the newspaper which had given her father, the real victim of the breach, a forum to defend himself. Incredulity piled upon incredulity when the scope of the lawsuit was addressed. It had been blown up out of all proportion from a simple tort into an approximation of a public enquiry in which the Mail on Sunday would be tried for every wrongdoing Meghan wished to throw at them, irrespective of relevance to the matter at hand. A prince with knowledge of the law observed, ‘It’s very unlikely that her lawyers recommended this course of action. She seems to think because she worked in a fictional law firm on Suits that she is a legal expert.’ Of course, lawyers have a duty to advise, but a client is the one who instructs them, and since lawyers get paid whether a client wins or loses, it is up to the client to exercise good judgement and make sound choices. Meghan clearly did anything but this, and following an application from the Mail on Sunday to throw out the lion’s share of her claim, Mr Justice Warby duly did so. It was but the first of the many rounds in what promises to be an exercise in loss.
Who really wins and who really loses, except financially, is open to question in this game of double and triple bluff. The Sunday Times journalist Camilla Long wrote in April 2020, ‘Who wins is irrelevant - in many ways she has already lost. There will be a day’s headlines if she prevails after two, three or even four weeks of lashing stories about her destructive ambition and unedifying obsession with her image. Meanwhile she is reducing the pair of them to supermarket magazine fodder, telling Harry he’s getting better when in fact he’s getting worse. She will brush the whole trial aside as yet another injustice, no matter what happens.’
Long is ‘no fan of the royal family, and in many ways I’d hoped she would expose them as the pale, stale charisma vacuums they are, but at least they have the humility to know when to stop.’ But Meghan is ‘someone who thinks that she can win at anything; be the centre of all attention; have the moral upper hand in any dispute. Her ego blinds her; it even blinds the people working for her.’
But does it? What the British and Americans fail to understand is how different each of them is from the other. Beyond a common language, there is little else the two nationalities share. In Britain, reputations once destroyed are seldom reparable, but that is not so across the ocean. Much of what turns the British off about Meghan’s character is viewed far more sympathetically in her native land. What passes as chic and classy in the US is regarded as precious and pretentious in the UK. What is regarded as arrogance here is admired as confidence there. The same is true of pushiness, aggressiveness, and what in the vernacular is abbreviated as BS. Because Meghan is an American and royal, her coverage there will always
