In June 2016, Meghan flew to London for a PR junket which allowed her to watch her friend Serena Williams play at Wimbledon. She struck up one of those immediate friendships, which are a talent of hers, with Violet von Westenholz, the well-connected director of public relations at Ralph Lauren. Violet was a childhood friend of Prince Harry’s, her father Piers, Baron von Westenholz being a former Olympic skier who is one of Prince Charles’s oldest and closest friends. As a result, Violet and her siblings Frederick and Victoria grew up with Princes William and Harry. The families had remained close and Violet knew how desperate Harry was to meet someone. A royal told me, ‘she set him up on a blind date with Meghan Markle. The rest is history.’
Violet has never confirmed that she played Cupid, but then, as the royal says, ‘she wouldn’t, would she?’ By the time the public found out about the relationship, the word in aristocratic circles was that the Royal Family was tearing its hair out as a result of the background checks having provided very mixed feedback, with some people praising her and others suggesting that Meghan Markle was known in Hollywood and Toronto as an ‘operator par excellence’. ‘It was like introducing Typhoid Mary to New York.’ But Meghan had one redeeming feature: her bi-racial identity was an answer to the family’s prayers.
As Nelthorpe-Cowne has stated, Meghan is ‘ferociously intelligent’ and she played a flawless hand from the time Violet suggested introducing her to Harry until they were about to be married. By Meghan’s own account, ‘When she wanted to set us up, I had one question: is he nice? Because if he wasn’t kind then it didn’t seem like it would make sense.’ Meghan was displaying just the right degree of reluctance, and it reassured Violet that she was truly the lovely, sweet, personable and loving young woman that she appeared to be. She continued to be seen like this until she and Harry were about to get married. It was only then that cracks began to emerge in the perfect facade she had hitherto presented to the royal world, but no one is perfect and few people believed that Meghan would be anything but a positive addition to the Royal Family, while none could have imagined that within a year of matrimony she was laying the ground for her and Harry to step down as senior royals.
Beyond the royal world, however, the fissures were forming as Meghan and Harry’s romance gathered pace. The first to fall through the cracks was Piers Morgan, whom Meghan had cultivated on earlier visits to London. They had a last drink before she left for her first meeting with Prince Harry, and, as Piers says, thereafter she ‘ghosted’ him. While she doubtless felt the need to err on the side of caution and protect her budding relationship from the prying eyes of the press, the fact remains, she made a tactical error. Piers Morgan is an honourable man. For all his rhetoric and controversialism, he would never have betrayed her confidence. By behaving as she did, she was laying the ground to make herself an enemy if anything went wrong. And when it did, the chickens came home to roost.
Another of the friends Meghan had made in the last couple of years, as she jetted back and forth while Nelthorpe-Cowne raised her profile and added to her bank account, was the former WAG, model, television presenter and socialite Lizzie Cundy. They had become friendly enough for Meghan to confide that she wanted to leave Suits, move to London, join the upper-class cast of the reality show Made in Chelsea, and marry a Brit. The fact that she was neither upper class nor British seems not to have entered into Meghan’s calculations as she confided her ambition to join the cast of the reality show about upper class Brits living in Chelsea, and before long she was imploring Lizzie to find her a ‘rich and famous Englishman’. Lizzie suggested introducing her to the multimillionaire footballer Ashley Cole, but Meghan declined the offer once she realised who he was. Lizzie thought it might be because both their marital pasts had been checkered, but one of Meghan’s critics suggested that ‘it was because Meghan’s taste doesn’t run to men of colour. You only need to look at her history to see that all her significant others have been Caucasian.’ There is, of course, no reason why a woman of colour should limit herself to men of colour, and one of Harry and Meghan’s English circle believed that Lizzie’s suggestion would have offended Meghan, who was sensitive about her racial identity. Was Lizzie trying to say that she was fit for fixing up with only mixed race men? To Meghan, that would have been a putdown, but she met Harry shortly afterwards, so had no need of any further fixing up. When Lizzie heard the news, she texted Meghan saying what a ‘catch’ he was. Meghan replied, ‘Yeah, I know!!’ then ghosted her too.
The next to be cut out of her life was Nelthorpe-Cowne. Despite being such close friends that they confided in each other about their personal lives, had travelled together and formed what the business manager though was a genuine bond, when Meghan informed her after her third date with Harry that they were ‘serious’, that they were planning a ‘future together, and that she and Harry had said to each other, “We’re going to change the world.”
