But Meghan had demurred. It would be ‘boastful’ to put her own face on the cover, she felt. Her concept was to display a gallery of the women activists she admired, from Jane Fonda to Greta Thunberg, with thirteen other multiracial campaigning women – by no means conventional beauties, some of them (‘I want to see freckles!’ said Meghan to cover photographer Peter Lindbergh). She also wanted an image of the reader – whoever and whenever they happened to be looking at the magazine.
‘Can we have a mirror?’ asked Meghan of Vogue’s British Ghanaian editor Edward Enninful.
‘A mirror?’ (Gulp, gulp) ‘In the middle of fifteen other photographs?’
‘Yes. So people can look in the mirror and see themselves among all those other forces for change.’
Somehow, a mini-mirror of reflective silver foil would be duly printed on the cover in the middle of Vogue’s feminist portrait gallery – and there were a few small, scarcely conspicuous working photographs of Meghan inside the magazine. As a rare male among the contributors, Harry conducted a campaigning ecological interview with conservationist and chimp expert Jane Goodall, eighty-five, who praised him for being so youthful.
‘Am I?’ he replied. ‘Good. Phew! I hope to remain youthful for the rest of my life.’
Meghan rounded off her 350-page activist ‘Markle Manifesto’ by interviewing her heroine Michelle Obama and presenting an appeal for Smart Works, the latest charity she had adopted. Smart Works had been set up to provide clothes and coaching to help unemployed women in their job interviews, and the charity wasn’t looking, Meghan explained, for just any old hand-me-down garments. A more appropriate donation might be the Gucci suit you had been wearing for that crucial interview on the day you secured the job of your dreams.
‘This is the story of Wonder Woman,’ wrote Meghan, ‘ready to take on the world in her metaphorical and literal cape.’
Edward Enninful was overwhelmed by the onrushing energy of his guest-editor. ‘I can’t overstate,’ he wrote, ‘how much it meant to me to see HRH The Duke of Sussex marry this brilliant, bi-racial, American powerhouse. I simply never imagined that, in my lifetime, someone of my colour would – or could – enter the highest echelons of our Royal Family.’
Enninful described seven intensive months of meetings and phone calls and emoji-filled texts and emails from Meghan – ‘always warm, purposeful and to the point … Boy, was it an adventure!’ And in the course of all this, his unpaid guest-editor gave birth to a baby!
In the same seven months, January to July 2019, the Court Circular showed the Duchess of Sussex carrying out just twenty-two royal engagements, less than one per week – though this period did include Meghan’s maternity leave, along with a three-day tour to Morocco with Harry. But why had this ‘powerhouse’ recruit to the highest echelons of the House of Windsor spent seven months labouring so intensively on behalf of British Vogue – entirely unremunerated it must be emphasised again – while doing hardly any public work at all for the British royal family?
The answer lay in Buckingham Palace – or, rather, had been forcibly removed from the palace just four months before Meghan’s official arrival on the royal roster on 27 November 2017, the date of her engagement to Harry. In July that year the Queen’s most creative and senior courtier, her private secretary Sir Christopher Geidt, had been elbowed out of her employ in a backstairs coup inspired by Prince Charles and his brother Andrew – for once not at loggerheads, but working in cahoots.
Geidt, fifty-six in 2017, had run the royal show brilliantly and sensitively for the best part of ten years. Based in Buckingham Palace, the Queen’s private secretary could be described as the COO – chief operating officer – of ‘the Firm’, as the family themselves describe their monarchical business. A fiercely shrewd, reflective and thinking character, who had previously worked in army intelligence, Geidt had played a key role in working out the mechanics of transitioning royal power to the next generation – from Queen Elizabeth II to King Charles III. First knighted in 2011 (in the Royal Victorian Order), he had been awarded a second knighthood in 2014 (in the Order of the Bath), for his ‘new approach to constitutional matters … [and] the preparation for the transition to a change of reign’.
‘He has been a great private secretary,’ one close colleague told Valentine Low who broke the story of Geidt’s deposition in The Times. ‘He has really steered the Queen through a very successful ten years.’
But Geidt had infuriated Prince Charles with a speech that he had given in May 2017 to some five hundred royal staff – the assembled workforce of the Firm – announcing the retirement of Prince Philip from public life. This would call for more unified work than ever in support of the Queen, the private secretary had said, and the Prince of Wales’s staff who heard him felt that this was both ‘presumptuous’ towards their boss and actually dangerous to his interests. They had envisioned Prince Charles enjoying more power in the aftermath of his father’s departure, not less – and Prince Charles agreed.
Charles found an ally in his brother Andrew whom Geidt had forced to step down as UK trade ambassador in 2011 over his friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
‘Prince Andrew
