How Meghan became the unmerry wife of Windsor
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-meghan-became-the-unmerry-wife-of-windsor-q0td0js6m
The honeymoon was over for Meghan even before the wedding according to royal watchers who looked on aghast as the duchess’s dreams met reality at the palace.
Roya Nikkhah
Saturday March 06 2021, 6.00pm, The Sunday Times
Before the Queen’s annual Christmas reception for household staff in 2017, aides were told that Prince Harry and his American fiancée, Meghan Markle, would be among the guests. There were gasps of delight, according to one of those there. The newly engaged lovebirds appeared and could “barely make their way through the crush” of courtiers keen to congratulate them. When staff were later invited to enter a ballot for a seat at the wedding, the applications flooded in.
Little more than three years later, that delight has turned to shock and dismay. It has been reported that up to a dozen former royal aides are “queueing up” to register complaints about the Duchess of Sussex. Buckingham Palace is now investigating allegations that 39-year-old Meghan, the mother of Archie and now pregnant with the couple’s second child, was an “outrageous bully” to her staff before she departed Britain last year.
A statement from team Sussex denying the claims said Meghan “is saddened by this latest attack on her character”. Meghan has declared it “liberating” to be able to speak for herself in the television interview with Oprah Winfrey, which will be broadcast tomorrow in America and at 9pm on Monday in the UK on ITV.
With so many — usually anonymous — people giving their unvarnished accounts of “Megxit”, who should we believe? Plenty of observers and insiders are pitching in with hearsay but having worked alongside the principals and their aides as the drama unfolded, I have listened to the voices that matter in this war of the Windsors.
There was widespread concern and sympathy for Meghan as she entered the lion’s den of royal girlfriend territory. But even before the wedding the excitement of Harry’s engagement had worn off at Kensington Palace, then the prince’s home. “Half of the staff threatened to quit,” a former aide to one of the most senior members of the royal family claimed. Another Palace source claimed with uncharacteristic hyperbole that “the entire household was on the verge of quitting … it was drama, drama, drama with those two.”
Perhaps the most damaging allegation to emerge after the wedding involved an unedifying row between Harry and Angela Kelly, the Queen’s devoted personal assistant. It was apparently over an unscheduled tiara hair appointment for Meghan, and climaxed when Harry was said to have shouted “What Meghan wants, Meghan gets.” Claims that the prince ended up complaining to the Queen in a raised voice were denied, but stories of clashes between the Sussexes and staff multiplied.
One incident rang alarm bells about Meghan’s unattainably precise demands. A senior royal source claimed: “Soon after the engagement, Meghan hosted a shooting party at Sandringham for Harry’s friends. She ordered personally embroidered blankets for each of the guests, in red. When they arrived, they weren’t the right shade of red for Meghan and she went mental at Melissa [Touabti],” her former personal assistant who is alleged to have left “traumatised” because of Meghan’s unreasonable behaviour. Touabti was apparently not alone: “Harry’s first PA was in situ when Meghan arrived and left within months,” the source said.
A former aide said Harry “behaved appallingly for months” and that the prince had been “rude, petty and stressed about so many small things”, but when he was made aware of staff unrest, “he personally apologised to everyone involved”. Meghan didn’t, said the source, but she seems to have tried to mend fences, once arriving at Kensington Palace at 11am with croissants for staff, declaring: “Breakfast!” Many of the staff had been working since 8am and had eaten breakfast hours earlier.
In the run-up to the wedding, a senior royal source claimed that the Kingdom Choir, who performed Stand By Me during the service, did not have an easy time: “They had to send her dozens of arrangements. It was never right.”
Even Harry and Meghan’s engagement interview, widely hailed as a joyous display of a couple head over heels in love, did not apparently meet with approval. “She complained it hadn’t gone well, that Mishal [Husain] wasn’t empathetic enough, wasn’t warm enough,” said the source. The duchess declined to comment on these claims.
After the wedding, early sympathy for Meghan gave way to alarm. “The family have tried to be welcoming,” a former aide insisted at the time. “All the staff and principals have genuinely tried to be kind, but she is genuinely unkind back, pitting Harry against them.” A lifelong friend of Harry’s observed: “She’s changed him. He’s disappeared, he’s a caged lion.”
There is particular resentment at suggestions that because of Meghan’s African-American heritage, racism may have been a factor in the attitudes of royal household staff. “The diversity policy in the households is exemplary,” one senior source insisted. “Because of the Queen’s links with the Commonwealth, and her desire to represent all Britons, they have bent over backwards to be inclusive. It is absolutely wrong to say the Palace is institutionally racist. It really isn’t.” But the households have a way to go in making diversity visible: people from black and ethnic minorities in senior roles are few and far between.
Meghan was also said to feel that no one tried to help her to adjust to the regimented requirements of royal and constitutional protocol. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” an aide said. Another Palace source insisted: “Everyone bent over backwards to accommodate her — now they feel they’re being totally shafted and collectively made to look like racists.” Another courtier revealed that the Queen’s then equerry, Lieutenant Colonel Nana Kofi Twumasi-Ankrah, the first black man appointed to the role — who himself may have once felt like an outsider finding his way — was deployed to help “mentor” Meghan.
“The Prince of Wales, Duchess of Cornwall and William and Catherine all feel desperately sad about it,” an aide said. They were sad with good reason: the estrangement of the Sussexes from the royal family has proved irreversible, and that is why today’s hostilities are being conducted between palaces in London and a mansion in Montecito, California. “He can’t understand what he’s doing to his family,” a lifelong friend of Harry’s said.
Yet behind all the allegations of the Sussexes behaving shoddily lie awkward questions for an institution that seems to have had a shrewd idea of the reasons for Meghan’s misery, yet appears to have been unable to address them. “She has no idea about the institution she has married into … she thinks she should be on a level playing field with the Queen and the Duchess [of Cambridge], that the world revolves around her,” a royal aide said when the wheels started to fall off. “What she doesn’t understand or accept at all is the pecking order.”
Another royal insider suggested that Meghan had joined the family full of excitement and expectation but had not realised “the rigidity of the hierarchy”. As a successful, self-made professional, she may well have been disturbed to find herself “quite far down the list in protocol terms”.
Relations between Meghan and Kate became the object of intense scrutiny, and it may have been difficult for Meghan to find herself the junior partner, despite what she may have regarded as her greater professional accomplishments. “Kate made a success of her role because she came from a solid middle-class background and was prepared to play the game,” said the insider. Another Palace source said: “Some people were very snobby about Kate when she arrived, but she kept her head down and got on with it.”
A source who knows the royal family well remembers having a conversation with Harry and Meghan after their engagement, telling them: “Do things in your own way in the system, but I just don’t think you can do it half in, half out.”
The problem, another source suggested, was that “Meghan didn’t understand what she was letting herself in for, and why should she?”
Even the outpouring of affection for the monarchy occasionally bemused her. During the Sussexes’ tour of Australia and the South Pacific in 2018, hundreds of people turned out to wait outside the Sydney Opera House to welcome the couple. A source claimed that Meghan said to the team: “What are they all doing here? It’s silly.” “They were like, ‘They’re here because they admire and support a monarch and an institution that you’re representing,’ ” the source said. “She didn’t get it.”
On the same tour, when Meghan rushed out of a market in Fiji, cutting short an engagement with female entrepreneurs, there was tension in the air, with Meghan’s mood suddenly changing. I was the royal correspondent covering that event for the travelling media and saw the duchess appear to have sharp words with her aides, who later claimed the brouhaha was because the market was hot and overcrowded. Sources have claimed she left because she was unhappy about the presence of a UN organisation promoting women’s empowerment, with which she had worked before. Her lawyers denied this and said she met other leaders from UN Women later in the tour.
“Why is Meghan the way she is?” asked a senior royal source. “A very weird childhood is definitely part of it. She raised herself for much of it, living with her father for a long time and looking after him. The no friends at the wedding was quite a telltale sign. She’s really smart, if she could have seen the use of that inside the institution. She wanted to be ‘A’ list — the royal family is beyond ‘A’ list — but she wanted it the Beyoncé way, without restrictions. She was never up for royal life. Right from the start, she courted rejection.”
Lawyers for the duchess said this was wrong, that Meghan wished to be accepted and had left her life in in North America to commit to her new role.
Transplanted to Britain, Meghan grew increasingly isolated and not even a royal birth could save her. There was rejoicing at the arrival of Archie Mountbatten-Windsor in May 2019, but the pregnancy was marked by cruel and often ridiculous abuse in some sections of the media and across social media, where she was accused of “flaunting” her baby bump and of patting her stomach excessively. No wonder Meghan was driven to remark in a television interview with ITV’s Tom Bradby: “I really tried to adopt this sensibility of the British stiff upper lip, but I think that what that does internally is probably really damaging. I never thought this would be easy, but I thought it would be fair.”
In the same interview, Harry revealed the couple were thinking of relocating “at least part-time” to Africa. “I will not be bullied into playing a game that killed my mum … For me and my wife, of course there’s a lot of stuff that hurts, especially when the majority of it is untrue.” A senior courtier thinks the idea of spending time away at that stage was a missed opportunity: “A sabbatical in Africa would have benefited everyone.”
As the war of words turned ugly last week, friends lined up to talk about the Meghan they know, who they say has been wildly misrepresented. Sandra Wheatle was Meghan’s make-up artist on the US drama Suits. Wheatle, from Toronto, suffered an aneurysm in 2015 and said Meghan was “wonderful … She was the first person that turned up [in hospital] after my family. There she was in ICU, sitting rubbing my hand. I was blown away by how kind she was. I’ll never forget the nurse saying, ‘She was like a little mouse in the corner, she just sat there waiting for you to open your eyes.’”
Wheatle does not recognise descriptions of a diva or bully: “If you are a strong independent woman, some people don’t take to that kindly.”
The pair stayed in touch until Meghan moved to the UK in 2017, when she explained she would no longer be able to remain in contact.
Meghan’s Suits co-star Patrick Adams put it more bluntly on Friday in a Twitter tirade against the monarchy: “She has always been a powerful woman … and has never been afraid to speak up, be heard and defend herself and those she holds dear … She fell in love, moved to a new country … and began the difficult work of trying to find her place in a family dynamic that can at best be described as complicated and at worst, seemingly archaic and toxic. It’s OBSCENE that the royal family … is promoting and amplifying accusations of ‘bullying’ against a woman who herself was basically forced to flea [sic] the UK in order to protect her family and her own mental health.”
Whether the royal family could have done things differently will be debated indefinitely. Of the couple’s desire to carry out part-time royal duties while earning a crust across the pond, a courtier conceded: “This isn’t a modernised monarchy and it hasn’t totally figured out how to move with the times, but you don’t turn a submarine quickly. They wanted to rush it and boxed us into a corner.” But it is hard not to think that the main task of warning Meghan of the perils she would face should have fallen to Harry. Some of the prince’s friends and advisers attempted to warn him of the battles ahead. “I and others tried to speak with him to say, ‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?’,” a former aide said. “But he didn’t want to hear it.”
The prince and his wife and son departed for the US last year with a hard “Megxit”, leaving a flurry of lawsuits behind them. Meghan scored a victory in her privacy suit against The Mail on Sunday last month, but no amount of legal redress is likely to alter the reality of the royal family’s problem with outsiders.
For the second time in a century, an American interloper dared to fall in love with a prince, and swiftly departed with her husband in tow. The 1936 abdication crisis was caused by King Edward VIII’s love for the American divorcee Wallis Simpson. The stakes are not as high for Harry but his brother will one day be king, and the monarchy will surely be the poorer if the brothers are still estranged.
Meghan seems to feel she never stood a chance of satisfying Harry’s camp. In her interview with Oprah she makes clear she still smarts from having some phone conversations supervised; of feeling that the couple were unable to “make our own choices”; of being unable, as “an adult who lived a really independent life”, to say yes to an interview request. “I’m ready to talk,” she tells Oprah. A Palace aide responds: “Tin hats on.”
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