Harry had been an usher at Tom’s Jamaican wedding to Lord St. Helen’s daughter the Hon. Lara Hughes-Young at Round Hill in 2017. They had been such good friends that he and Lara made the ultimate sacrifice to satisfy Meghan’s desire for privacy by preventing their guests from using their mobile ‘phones throughout their marriage celebrations. This had not gone down well with many of the guests, but best friends are happy to accommodate other best friends even to the inconvenience of lesser friends. Yet, once Meghan knew that Skippy had been less than enthusiastic about her existence, he was given the deep freeze treatment and excluded along with his wife from the holy of holies, giving out the message to everyone, including the world’s press (which picked up on their humiliation), that the Inskips had been demoted from first to second class.
‘All the score settling Meghan and now Harry are involved with is just pathetic,’ a royal cousin said. ‘Totally uncalled for and so much the opposite of life enhancing.’
The Inskips, however, would get their own back. Normally, royals are invited to be godparents of their friends’ children. Failure to issue such an invitation can be interpreted as a snub. With Lara about to have a baby, their friends wanted to know if they’d be inviting Harry to be a godfather. They said they would be doing no such thing, and said it so often that the slight ended up in the Mail on Sunday’s gossip column.
Royal weddings are memorable occasions not only for those who watch them on television, but those who attend them, and those who do not. There were so many surprising omissions at both St. George’s Chapel and Frogmore House that several people asked the question: What is going on? Had Harry and Meghan abided by royal and aristocratic tradition, all the relations whom custom decreed should have been invited, would have been. Very few invitees would have declined, so the chapel would have had a plethora of obscure royals and fifty or so attendees from Meghan’s past. These would have included people like her paternal Uncle Mike Markle and her maternal Uncle Joseph Johnson and his wife Pamela. They most likely would not have made the cut for the evening celebration at Frogmore House, but honour would have been served all around and Meghan would have shown the world that, proud as she was of her ascent in the world, she was not ashamed of her roots. This would have enhanced her reputation, instead of which the omission called her values into question. It was a fatal error on her and Harry’s part.
Admittedly, Meghan and Harry had sufficient supporters who would have behaved exactly as they did, for their viewpoint to enjoy merit in some quarters. But the controversy they created meant that they started their marriage in a maelstrom and, once that tone was set, it became difficult to alter it. Nevertheless, the church service, the reception at Windsor Castle and the subsequent black tie celebration at Frogmore House were great successes. According to one attendee, ‘it was a lovely party,’ a ‘very happy occasion.’ The couple was obviously ‘very much in love though they spent quite a lot of their time posing for photographs.’ Despite this, the absentees generated a great deal of talk and an even greater deal of speculation. Because such exclusionary conduct seemed atypical of Harry, people asked whether Meghan could have got such tight control of him so early in the game that she was already freezing out his friends?
To the older generation, this was reminiscent of the way Harry’s mother had used the invitation list to her own wedding, and the wedding breakfast following it, to wield power. She had struck her step-grandmother-in-law Dame Barbara Cartland’s name off the list on the grounds that she would garner too much attention from the public, thereby stealing thunder that Diana reserved for herself. The diarist Kenneth Rose wrote how Diana’s father ‘Johnnie Spencer tells me that he wanted to wear his Greys uniform when Diana marries the Prince of Wales, but that Diana herself objected. She thought it would detract from her own appearance. This is most extraordinary, like something out of King Lear.’
Showing that she could embody both Goneril and Regan, ‘When Johnnie Spencer showed Diana his draft list, she crossed out all the family who had not bothered to come to the weddings of her sisters! One day she will be very formidable.’ In fact, Diana was already formidable at nineteen, and she had used the occasion of her marriage to deliver messages to many of her husband’s circle, as well as to the world in general, in much the same way that Meghan and Harry did. She had even tried to prevent Charles from asking many of his closest friends such as Lord and Lady Tryon, and when he had dug his heels in, she had insisted that they could only attend the church service and not the wedding breakfast at Buckingham Palace. In doing so, she had made the point that they had been demoted, a tactic her son and his wife would deploy with people like the Inskips.
People who noticed the parallels between the way Diana and her son and daughter-in-law behaved started asking the question: Will the axe be falling in a discomfiting echo of the way it had fallen on staff, friends and relations once Diana joined the Royal Family? In 1981, within months of being married, she had insisted that Charles get rid of his loyal valet, Stephen Barry. She then forced out his Private Secretary, the Hon Edward Adeane, son of the Queen’s former Private Secretary Michael, Lord Adeane, despite the fact that Edward Adeane had given up a highly successful career at the Bar to work for the Prince of Wales. She also shoved out her own Private Secretary Oliver Everett because he
