Meghan and Harry: The Real Story

by Lady Colin Campbell

would give you the shirt off his back if he thought you needed it. The Markles had played a far larger part in Meghan’s upbringing than the Ragland family. Her mother had been away for large stretches of time.

She waded in accusing Meghan of being a ‘shallow social climber’ and said their father had always given ‘Meg everything.’

2018. As the day neared, both the Markle and Ragland families were humiliated ‘in front of the whole world’ when only her mother and father received invitations.

The invitation list smacks of a career move.’

Although Meghan’s failure to invite either side of her family led both the Markle and the Johnson/Ragland clans to feel that they had been cast in the role of pariah in front of the whole world, the British media were careful not to mock the Raglands presumably because they feared accusations of colour prejudice should they do so.

The whole Markle family felt that Meghan had set them up for ridicule by not inviting them, a view which was confirmed as accurate when the British papers set about making them all look as ridiculous as possible.

Because his whole life had been spent in television, Tom Sr knew that they were making a fool of him, so he agreed to stage some photographs with what seemed a friendly paparazzo. When he realised that he had been set up and had been made to look a complete idiot, he was so distressed that he suffered a heart attack and was hospitalised in Mexico.

The Mail on Sunday then ran an expose presenting him in the most unflattering light, after which he had a second heart attack.

Although Tom Sr and Meghan were in touch after the first heart attack, and she encouraged him to come over and not pull out of walking her down the aisle, as he had said he intended to do, so great was the embarrassment, once he had his second heart attack, that she declined to contact him and refused to respond on the many occasions he tried to get in touch with her. Harry, on the other hand, did text Tom. He berated him for upsetting Meghan, while failing to ask the man who was about to become his father-in-law how he was following his second heart attack.

Meghan’s colour was an advantage that gave her and Harry flexibility they would never have otherwise had. There is little doubt that there would have been behind-the-scenes manoeuvres to break up the relationship before it could lead to marriage, had she been white.

They know that humanitarianism is often a mask put on by hypocritical attention-seekers to disguise their true intentions as they seek to gain approbation through pretending to be more wonderful than they are.

The British monarchy, like all the other constitutional monarchies in Europe, is resolutely apolitical.

the feeling amongst dispassionate observers was that she might turn out to be more troublesome than they hoped.

For all her warmth and affection, Diana was 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.

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.

Harry then issued the coup de grace by telling his grandparents that they would be accused of racism unless they agreed to the marriage. Of course, Harry knew only too well that Meghan’s race was not a negative to the family, but a positive. But the public would not know that, so this was his ace in the hole.

‘We all only hope to God it doesn’t turn out to be the catastrophe everyone fears it will be,’ the prince said.’

the Markles, who were held up to ridicule, the tabloids feeling that they were fair game for mockery as the message Meghan had given out was that they were such undesirables that they couldn’t even be included in her wedding.

Tom’s humiliation was so complete that he not only had a heart attack, but also offered to withdraw from the wedding.

insincerity is a mark of bad character

Britain anyone who is too self-consciously ‘classy’ is automatically dismissed as being anything but.

Fed up with her image being defaced the way it was being by them, she took advantage of the opportunity the speech in Fiji gave her, to shoot down her father’s claims of having put her through Northwestern University. She categorically stated that she had done so herself, by taking part-time jobs and resorting to student loans. Honour and her image were restored. Depending on your point of view, this was either a terrible mistake on Meghan’s part, or it was a tactically clever move which went some way towards shoring up the sympathy she deserved and thrived upon from her supporters. Nonetheless, royals do not use official tours to further their own personal vendettas.

her father had the bills to prove that he had put her through college.

her estrangement with her father had been particularly damaging.

They expected her to forgive her father for what, after all, struck them as a relatively trivial offence;

Failure to forgive a stranger was one thing, a friend another, but a parent? That degree of harshness did not sit well w...

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.

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 fath...

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 ...

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.

The one inexcusable in the upper reaches of society has always been treating staff in an untoward way. No matter how charming you are to your equals, no matter how apparently philanthropic with good causes, if you get a reputation for treating employees unacceptably, it is akin to a man being known as a wife-beater.

You can be as rude as you want to your friends, family or social equals. If you want to mistreat them, and they are dumb or weak enough to let you get away with it, that’s between you and them. They are your social equals, and therefore they are in a position to defend themselves. However, staff are not your social equals. They are therefore at a disadvantage from the word go. Treating them indecorously breaches every code of noblesse oblige, and as that matters greatly to people who regard nobility as a commendable aim in life, once you acquire a reputation for mistreating those who work for you, you lose a lot of respect and are viewed with suspicion.

They felt the Sussexes’ attitudes were antagonistic and patronising when not being dogmatic and insulting.

people closer to home wanted to know how any daughter could have dumped her father the way she had, especially when she herself had always said that he had been an excellent father?

She had established common ground with Harry in the most effective way possible: she had hooked him by appealing to his emotions, by presenting herself as a person whose strength had been forged in the crucible of deprivation and pain, just like his, and that she held the keys to happiness.

the relationship’s very existence would be threatened if third parties began to feed him information that was contradictory to her representations.

That was why she had not been able to maintain many of her truly intimate friendships from her past, for Meghan in the present was not the same person as Meghan in the past had been.

As Nikki Priddy said, the Meghan she knew before fame was not the same person she became after it. And while she had liked the former, she deplored the latter so much she did not want to have anything to do with her.

Although Meghan had praised her father to the skies publicly, privately she had become concerned that a garrulous loose cannon like Thomas Markle Sr would cough up inconvenient facts which might cause Harry to query aspects of her past which did not accord perfectly with her present version of events.

she had led Harry to believe that she had had a far harder life than she had. She had gained his admiration by making herself out to be far more self-sufficient than she had ever been, to have surmounted struggles that did not exist.

She had told him how hard she had had to struggle to put herself through university when, in fact, her time there had been one lo...

She didn’t want Tom Sr giving the game away and shining a light on those aspects of her persona which were, to put it politely,...

These were the ordinary, mundane, everyday frustrations of an ordinary but ambitious person who viewed herself as special, pitting herself against the world until they acknowledged her view of herself as being more accurate than their own.

In summation, her struggles were the ordinary tussles of an ordinary woman as she surmounted the restrictions of ordinariness until she could change them for the acknowledgement of specialness.

Her devoted swain would continue to believe that she was this brave lioness who had fought her way up in a cruel world, instead of being the pampered Flower who had been nurtured the way she really had been.

She endeared herself by appealing to his sympathies, by mirroring them, by making him aware of how much she had suffered at the hands of a cruel world while gaining his admiration for the brave and noble way she had coped.

She was so opinionated, so calculated and deliberate in all her actions, so sensitive to criticism, so resentful of anything but the most fulsome praise and displays of approval, that she would ‘eat off the head’ of anyone who ‘dared’ to say anything to her. Then she’d ‘dump’ them.