Meghan and Harry: The Real Story

by Lady Colin Campbell

At nearly eight months pregnant, she attended a function, elegantly accoutred in the highest of high heels. She greeted a child, got down on her haunches, legs spread wide open, displayed her undoubted skill in dealing with children, then without missing a beat, bounced right back up.

Local residents who were used to seeing members of the Royal Family out and about, such as the Queen, the Duke of York, even the late Queen Mother and Princess Margaret when they had been alive, and who were used to exchanging nods and sometimes even brief words, were informed that they must not approach, acknowledge or even look in the direction of either Harry or Meghan.

For instance, if the locals saw the couple walking their dogs, they were not even to look in their direction, and if one or other of their two dogs bounded up to them, they were not to pet it. This was a new way of doing things, one that the locals believed claimed all rights for the Sussexes, while stripping them of their own rights, so that they could not even be civil or respectful to the couple or neighbourly with the pets.

demanding, hypocritical brats who contradictorily wanted to be treated as private citizens when it suited them, despite requiring at all other times that they must be accorded all the privileges and constitutional dignities that went along with being royalty.

The royal world is not a platform for personal achievement or the realisation of personal ambitions, but a fully-established and functional organ of state.

Diana, Princess of Wales had been a fame junkie.

Diana herself had rung up the press to inform them that she would be leaving Vogue House at such and such a time.

‘You don’t become the most famous woman on earth by being a dutiful duchess,’ a courtier said. ‘You become the most famous woman on earth by creating drama, chaos, controversy, call it what you will. You only need to look at what made the Princess of Wales and Elizabeth Taylor so famous to see that that degree of fame is a five-word letter spelt h/a/v/o/c.’

He said ‘everyone says the baby’s changed so much over two weeks we’re basically monitoring how the changing process happens over the next month.’ This was an extraordinary statement to make. Archie was two days old. Babies don’t change appearance markedly and frequently in a forty eight hour period. Yet here was Harry asserting not only that his son kept on changing appearance over a two week period, but that he had done so to such an extent that it was impossible to say whom he looked like; notwithstanding the baby being officially two days old.

As Harry himself had observed when he turned twenty one, you cannot on the one hand demand privacy from the press and on the other violate your own privacy by revealing information about your private life as and when it suits you.

President of the United States of America. She hadn’t even passed her State Department examinations, yet here she was voicing ambitions to be the Commander-in-Chief. Self-belief does not have the magical quality in Britain that it does in the United States,

The fact that Meghan had voiced the belief that her career as an actress put her on a par with the late 40th President of America, because Ronald Reagan had been, like her, a moderately successful actor before moving on to greater things, struck them as incomprehensible.

She has a real gift for making enemies of people who want to be her friends.’

Diana. She happily jettisoned over a hundred patronages following her separation, freeing up her time for long girly lunches, gym and tennis sessions, sybaritic holidays on West Indian beaches and sojourns on private yachts in the Aegean whether owned by Panagiotis Lemos or Mohamed Al-Fayed was beside the point, not to mention the pleasures of the Harrods private plane.

you cannot deny yourself, you cannot succeed as a royal.

‘What could possibly be more malicious than a daughter writing a letter to her father, full of misleading and inaccurate statements, with the evident purpose of leaking its contents to friends who then leak it to the media, to

raised questions as to just how humane they actually were when dealing with those close to them, as opposed to strangers who would give them adulation as they indulged in displays of humanitarianism.

she possessed the same cocktail of traits that Diana had: charm and sincerity mixed with contrivance and opportunism, all overlaid with a patina of vulnerability and dextrous assertiveness.

they would thereafter use to their ultimate advantage as they did the alchemist’s trick of turning the base metal of negative publicity into the gold of ever-increasing celebrity.

Sadly, however, the British press and too large a proportion of the British public seemed unconvinced that they were anything but a conniving actress and her willing dupe.

Meghan and Harry’s postings systematically rained on William and Catherine’s parade.

The Daily Express royal correspondent Richard Palmer felt compelled to tweet, ‘Wow what unfortunate timing that once again, just as a senior member of the Royal Family was heralding an important initiative, the Sussex Royal Instagram account kicked into life with some PR pictures at the very same moment.’

Meghan is nothing if not canny. Being a child of Hollywood, she knows what grabs attention. Dogs, kids, and beatific beaming will do it every time, at least for people who like their idols wearing their hearts on their sleeves and showing their admirers what wonderful, caring, feeling, hyper-glamorous but always-down-to-earth individuals they are.

being Duchess of Cambridge who will one day be Princess of Wales then Queen of the United Kingdom is more than enough for her. She does not need to strip Ronaldo of his crown and disliked the air of tension Meghan created as she set about scene-stealing on her quest for ever-greater acknowledgement.

Meghan, however, had a far more American view of her position. Her goals belied her heritage, just as Catherine Cambridge’s belied hers. Meghan’s target audience was not and had never been the British people but the American worlds of commerce and entertainment.

It was therefore not surprising that she and Harry chose the night before Catherine’s 38th birthday on the 9th January 2020 to reveal to the world and the Royal Family via Instagram that they would be reconstituting their roles.

a progressive new role within this institution.

Unlike celebrities, who differentiate between their private and public lives, no such distinction applies with royalty. You are a prince or a duchess at all times, not just when it suits you to be. If you are engaged in commercial activities, it is supposed to be on behalf of the institution of monarchy, not on behalf of yourself. Such profits as accrue should never be for your own personal enrichment, but for the benefit of the Nation.

Philanthropy is often a cover for the purchase of respectability following acquisition of wealth by dubious means.

He and Meghan ‘seemed incapable of considering any option but the top job, and since they were never going to be King and Queen of the United Kingdom, they should be freed to become king and queen of something else instead,’ a courtier said.

This, in effect, was the result of the way Diana had raised Harry. She had brought him up without limits, to think in personal and emotional terms rather than objectively, to escape the consequences of his actions, to do as he pleased, to regard himself as special, not because he was a prince but because he was the adorable Harry.

With fully fledged Second Son Syndrome motivating him, and without the restraining influence of duty before personal satisfaction to curtail his aims or actions, once he and Meghan figured out that their ambitions would be more achievable outside of the royal fold than inside it, they behaved with a reckless disregard that had been absent even with Diana.

One must never forget the human element. Harry is Charles’ son, William’s brother, the Queen’s grandson. They all love him. They were all fully aware that Harry would have been perfectly happy to remain as a working member of the Royal Family, involved with his charities and maintaining his military links, had he not married a woman who wanted to capitalise upon his royal status and strike out on her own with him. The words ‘financial independence’ inspired terror at the palace, for all the reasons previously articulated. No one who loved Harry believed that the desire for financial independence lay with him. He had been perfectly happy with his financial situation prior to marriage.

As Princess Margaret’s former lady-in-waiting Lady Glenconner put it, ‘Meghan didn’t stay very long because she didn’t realise that to be a royal is jolly hard work and quite boring at times. It’s not all fun and glamour. A lot if it is behind the scenes, so it’s not supposed to be flashy.’

This she and Harry intended to achieve by exploiting their royal status for financial gain while basking in the glory of royalty and burnishing the gloss with Hollywood-style celebrity without the boring business of meeting mayors and doing all the other low-key, non-newsworthy activities which are the daily chores of monarchies, but which bored Meghan as rigid as they had bored Diana.

Her failure to settle happily in Britain lay not with her race, but with her refusal to adjust to a new way of life: one whose lack of financial reward had left her distinctly unimpressed.

There were strong feelings at the palace that the announcement was also ‘an impertinence and shows just how out of touch with reality the Sussexes are. Really, who in their right mind would issue a statement declaring that they are collaborators of the Queen? It confirms how utterly self-important, even delusional, the [couple] is. The Queen is the Sovereign. She is the Head of the Family. She is their SUPERIOR. Superiors do not collaborate with inferiors. They collaborate with EQUALS. The Queen’s only equals are other Heads of State.

Public figures who bemoan their lot too loudly lose respect from both their peers and the press, because most public figures in this country appreciate the importance of a free press.

Why should they be allowed to be royal when it suited them and private citizens when it did not? Why should they be both in and out, as they wanted to be, undertaking the occasional royal engagement when it was in their interest to do so, but otherwise being supported by the tax payer while they went about making fortunes for themselves?

‘The government should make that clear. There can be no Earl Sussex of Rosedale and no Prince Harry of Point Grey. Canada is not a halfway house for anyone looking to get out of Britain while remaining royal.’

The Queen put this regal assurance to good use as she conferred with the head of the family, Prince Philip, who by then resided full time at Wood Farm on the Sandringham Estate, having given up public life. Known within the family for his wisdom, practicality, humanity, and unflinchingly royal approach to duty, his viewpoint, according to a European royal was, ‘The most important thing was to not let things drag on.’

The Queen was disappointed that all the sterling possibilities the union had engendered throughout the Commonwealth might come to nought, and that the warmth, generosity and hospitality the family and public had shown to Meghan had meant so little.

Can she truly believe that she has liberated him from bonds which were not shackles but valuable moorings to a past life which, for all its imperfections, was a glorious one?

Meghan misunderstood the power of the monarchy and the relative fragility of the royals within the system. As Anne Glenconner put it, Meghan thought that marrying into the Royal Family assured her of ‘instant popularity’ and an exciting and easy life spent travelling in ‘a golden coach’, when in fact the royal way of life is hard and often boring to boot.

Great families and great institutions value the individual, but they also know that each individual is dispensable. No matter how important, powerful, rich, talented, beautiful, intelligent or anything else you are, you are on this earth for only a limited period. Durability becomes a matter of each individual making his contribution in the knowledge that he will be replaced and hopefully his family or institution will continue to flourish, with him having added something to it rather than subtracting from it. The greatest mark of success is that you leave things better off than you found them. It is this balance between your own importance and your relative unimportance, your replaceability and your unique irreplaceability, which gives the holders of great positions the sense of proportion necessary to fulfill their destinies.

Diana would never have been known as a great beauty had she not become the Princess of Wales. Nor would a Princess of Wales, who lacked her style, charm, personability and graciousness, have become the worldwide star which she was.

It will be interesting to see at which point in her development Meghan switches from acquisitiveness to preservation. To date, Meghan has moved from a No Money world to a New Money then an Old Money one when she married Harry. She and Harry have set about joining the Real Money world, in the stated hope of making enough for them to end up with having Real Money.

Old Money, New Money, No Money and Real Money all have distinguishing features, and each has impacted upon the couple’s lives. Old Money has the grand houses, castles, and palaces that are stuffed full of chattels which would seriously deplete the bank accounts of New Money and even make a dent with Real Money, should they be able to buy the items which are seldom if ever for sale. Old Money might not have readily realisable assets, but what they have is an accumulation of riches, now mostly in everything but cash, which New Money can only replicate, in a contemporary setting, by consuming its funds in a latter-day version of the real thing. Old Money also has some things that New Money and Real Money cannot buy. It has history, tradition, and breeding. These can be very discomfiting to a newcomer like Meghan, for the one thing that someone like her would find difficult is relating to people who, because of their heritage, are so unconsciously themselves that they wear their every advantage lightly and take no one, including themselves, too seriously. This conflicts with neophytes who are far more conscious of themselves and invariably take themselves far more seriously. The philosophical differences between Old Money and New Money are at the root of many a misunderstanding. Several of Harry’s friends have confirmed that Meghan never fitted in with his old crowd. Not only did she not fit in, but she pointedly made no attempt to do so. From the very outset, her attitude was...

between the upper reaches of Canadian and British society. Canadians of all classes are more similar to their American counterparts than to the British. They...

Although she was really of the No Money category, she had had enough worldly success to have acquired New Money tastes and attitudes, all fuelled with a generous amount of self-awareness.