Meghan and Harry: The Real Story

obsessively jealous, possessive and dominating. She was also a very strong personality. Like Meghan, she appeared to be soft and sweet and vulnerable when in fact she was all of those things as well as all of their opposites. She could be charming, captivating, and fun, just like Meghan. In fact, there were so many similarities between the two women’s characters, personalities, modus operandi and performance, that it was almost inevitable that Harry would quickly and irrevocably fall under Meghan’s spell. There is nothing more appealing to a Mama’s boy than a woman who is like his mother. It is said that most men marry their mothers, and while I would dispute the accuracy of such a blanket statement, the truism is that men who love their mothers gravitate towards women who are like their mothers. They are the most devoted of spouses, because there are few things more potent that a man replicating his mother in adulthood.

To understand Meghan’s hold over Harry, and why he was so eager to place his fate in her hands, one has to appreciate how his mother primed him for just such a woman. Diana was a very contradictory personality. For every virtue, there was a corresponding vice. She could be warm and kind and natural and affectionate then, when she wanted to turn, she would be cruel, cold, and vengeful. She was extremely manipulative and definitely did not hold by the maxim that ‘charity starts at home.’ She frequently cut out friends and family for little or no reason then, if it suited her, picked them up back again as if they were a toy. As a child, she had been badly damaged emotionally by her parents’ divorce. It left the most dreadful imprint upon her, and was responsible for much of the misery that dogged her into adulthood.

According to people who know her well, Meghan displays many of Diana’s personality traits. This includes the positive ones as well as the negative. Diana isolated Charles from all his friends in the early days of their marriage, and Meghan was already shaping up to be the sort of person who would be so engaging that Harry had little time, energy or desire for anyone else. Meghan never forgives nor forgets a slight, real or imagined, which was classic Diana, and, like the mother-in-law she never knew, when she decided to charm, she would charm, but when she decided to discard, she would drop someone as if they were a leper in Biblical times. Being as powerful a personality as she is, she also has the ability, whether she wishes to or not, to instil real fear in men who fall in love with her. If they are anything less than completely enthusiastic about providing her with the response she requires, she will let them know that they were letting her down. In a variety of ways, the mature, post-Trevor Meghan has made her men aware that they’d better give her what she wants if they want to keep her. Trevor’s failure to give her the breaks she wanted from him taught her never to ‘sell herself short again’, as she told a friend. In Meghan’s scheme of things, couples are meant to fulfill each other’s requirements. Her talent ever since the collapse of her first marriage has been to make them want to, or, as Harry put it, ‘what Meghan wants, Meghan gets’.

The psychotherapist Basil Panzer once said that men are much more fascinated by women who challenge them than those who don’t. They think they want all sweetness and light, but in reality what they want is some of that and being kept on their toes at the same time. Meghan, like Diana, learnt the art of variable reinforcement. In common with her mother-in-law, Meghan also possessed a cold fury when she did not get her way that made it impossible for others to disagree with her and maintain a pleasant relationship in which adults agree to disagree, while also maintaining a healthy degree of personal autonomy. Those who did not please her were in danger of losing her, which could create a terror of losing her in people - not only men but parents and friends as well - with whom she was involved.

Although Diana could equally instil the terror of loss in those with whom she was involved, hers was anything but a cool technique. She used to get so caught up in her own emotions that she would have to disentangle herself before she could detach herself from someone. This meant that Diana’s relationships seldom ended without a bang, while Meghan, who was far more self-possessed, had perfected the art of terminating hers so silently that there wasn’t even a whimper when she dropped the axe. Yet the parallels between the two women’s modus operandi were so pronounced that onlookers feared that Harry, familiar since childhood to the terrible consequences of going against his mother’s will, had been so primed that Meghan has been able to obtain a hold over him that has made her power invincible. Whether that is a fair assessment only time will tell, but what is undoubtedly certain is that Meghan is the dominant partner in their union, and she tolerates no threats from any quarter.

A case in point was Harry’s reaction to William’s suggestion that he should take things at a more measured pace. His reaction had been so adverse that the brothers fell out in a wholly unnecessary way. Catherine was caught up in the crossfire. Meghan could now appeal to Harry’s protective instincts as she capitalised upon the family’s reservations about the speed with which the relationship was hurtling towards permanence, detaching him further from his old support network. Rather than loosening Harry’s connection to Meghan, William’s intervention had tightened it. In doing so, Meghan’s influence over Harry had increased. This caused concern not only within the family but amongst the courtiers, all of whom only wanted a marriage if it would work,