Although it was not yet generally known, her father had the bills to prove that he had put her through college. All he would need to do, and as he would ultimately do when she embarked upon her lawsuit against The Mail on Sunday, was to give a newspaper sight of them. This would prove that Meghan’s struggles, though real enough, were mostly within herself and not external the way she was claiming they were. That, of course, is not to denigrate them. A woman who struggles with her identity the way Meghan has confirmed she struggled with hers is deserving of sympathy, and the fact that she surmounted her complexes and achieved what she did was commendable in anyone’s language.
But, by mixing up the struggles, she opened herself up to all sorts of interpretations and misinterpretations, few of which were comfortable to hear. By far the most unfortunate consequence was that she had reopened an old wound that was best left to heal on its own. Most of the damage to her reputation had been caused by her troubled relationship with her father. Although the consequences seemed to have been very slight in the United States, where pride in Meghan as an American princess was still pronounced, and few people seemed to understand why she was not being relished in Britain the way she was on the other side of the Atlantic, here her estrangement with her father had been particularly damaging. Her critics were noisome in their assertion that everyone makes mistakes. They expected her to forgive her father for what, after all, struck them as a relatively trivial offence; a source of embarrassment rather than something serious. Failure to forgive a stranger was one thing, a friend another, but a parent? That degree of harshness did not sit well with the average person in Britain, and, unsurprisingly, sister Samantha then waded in, accusing Meghan of being a liar and an ingrate for having denied their father’s generosity. The internet came alive with what they had dubbed the Markle Debacle, and while Meghan’s failure to respond might have come across as quiet dignity to her admirers, to her critics it was affirmation of callousness allied to haughty indifference.
It was not yet as apparent as it would subsequently become, but a turning point had been reached. No matter what Meghan did thereafter, her troubled relations with her father had put her in such an unflattering light that, as far as half the internet and a goodly proportion of the general public in Britain were concerned, she was now singing to the deaf and dancing for the blind. This was not an enviable position to be in, and one would have had to possess a heart of stone not to be concerned for Meghan, Harry, and her father, as well as for her reputation. Could the first acknowledged woman of colour in the British Royal Family have become such damaged goods that the chances were that she would fail in the role of royal duchess?
Because much of my life is lived in the public eye, and I deal with the general public with a frequency known to few private individuals, and because in Britain most people know who I am and want to speak to me about the Royal Family, I now learnt from Mr and Mrs Joe Public how catastrophic a fall from grace Meghan and Harry had suffered. People were now dismissing him as a ‘pussy-whipped’ ‘weakling’ who was ‘brain dead’, ‘pathetic’ and being ‘led by the nose’ by a stronger and brighter woman and by his nether regions. Catastrophically, most of them thought that Meghan was a ‘phoney’ who was ‘on the make’ and an ‘avaricious opportunist’ to boot. As far as they were concerned, she was a ‘hypocrite’, a ‘sanctimonious, pretentious, affected fraud’, a ‘liar’ and a ‘hard-hearted, self-seeking bitch who had treated her father in a manner they wouldn’t treat a rabid dog’. Repeatedly, they reiterated that ‘they had seen through her’, and ‘no matter how many hoops she jumped through’ or the ‘cacophony of righteousness’ emanating from her, people had made their minds up about her and weren’t going to change them.
This was not a desirable position for any public figure to be in, especially one who embodied the hopes of hundreds of millions of people all over the world. Not only would all those who were cheering her on be disappointed, but their hopes would be dashed and a golden opportunity lost. I hoped then, and I hope now, that she will find a way to retrieve her position and with it, the goodwill and respect with which she was endowed as she stood on those steps in May 2018 and exchanged vows to become the Duchess of Sussex. But I also know from personal experience that the British public has a nose where public figures are concerned, especially after it has seen them on television a few times and had an opportunity to get their measure. While the press can bury public figures in misrepresentations which are not easily dissipated, once the British public decides that it has seen through someone, there usually isn’t much that figure can do to alter their opinion, for the British public, unlike the American, do not like resurrections. As far as they’re concerned, once a corpse, always a corpse. In Britain, there are few second acts in public life.
Although things had not yet come to the pass where Meghan and Harry were so unpopular in Britain that they had crossed the Rubicon and been relegated to Has Been status, they were now in danger of approaching it. Then came even more negative reports from people close to her and Harry to further lessen her popularity. It was now
