IT is the most explosive royal book of the year. Tina Brown, the well-connected former editor of Vanity Fair, Tatler and The New Yorker, spoke to 120 sources for her account of The Firm’s past 25 years.
From Megxit to Andrew’s scandals, here we look at the revelations from The Palace Papers: Inside The House Of Windsor – The Truth And The Turmoil.
WHEN Meghan Markle first met Prince Harry, she did not see him just as a potential lover but the “solution to every problem she had”.
At 37, she was a woman “famished for prestige, frantic for validation”. Despite seven years on US telly show Suits, no big-time talk shows were knocking and no other acting jobs were offered. But with Harry, her star could soar.
In her new book, Tina Brown writes: “The morning after their first date, she spoke about Harry to a girlfriend as if he were a hot submission from her agent. ‘Do I sound crazy when I say this could have legs?’”
It is one of many nuggets unearthed by Brown.
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She describes the Sussexes being “drunk on the shared fantasy of being instruments of global transformation” and quotes an aide who describes their “mutual addiction to drama”.
According to the author, when Meghan met Harry in the summer of 2016 she was relentlessly trying to be taken seriously as an actress, humanitarian and tastemaker.
Suits producers loved her because she never turned down a promo opportunity. She asked publicists to “place stories about her in the British press”, lobbied for a minor speech at the UN and set up lifestyle blog The Tig, modelled on A-lister Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, which had become a “dragnet for luxury freebies”.
‘Glum takeaways’
Harry was at a crossroads, at loggerheads with brother William, who he felt was “hogging the best briefs”, like Africa and conservation.
Brown claims the princes had “Olympic rows” over wildlife charity the Tusk Trust, of which William had been patron since 2005. Harry hoped to “combine elephants and rhinos and HIV and poverty”, Brown writes, but “seemed not to have got the memo that the future King would always get the juiciest patronages”.
Harry’s romance with Cressida Bonas ended in 2014 after she got fed up with his moaning. She wanted a normal relationship but, Brown writes, Harry’s aversion to the Press made that impossible.
She reports: “Harry would walk four paces ahead of her, instead of holding her hand. When they went to the theatre, he left at the interval to get out without a hassle.
“She was either being dragged through the streets being yelled at or ignored while he threw a hissy fit.”
The couple spent most of their time “glumly eating takeaway” in Harry’s messy digs at Nottingham Cottage.
When they were invited to his friend Guy Pelly’s wedding in Tennessee, US, Brown reports that Cressida was horrified when Harry casually told her his office had bought his ticket and she should arrange her own.
Brown reveals it was Cressida who first advised Harry to see a therapist and he went to MI6 to help him find the right person. But it was not enough for the relationship to survive, much to Prince Charles’s disappointment.
A source recounts to Brown how Charles told them at a party: “‘I don’t know what to do about Harry. We so miss Cressida.”
While Harry had been surrounded by blue-blooded women such as Cressida all his life, he had never met anyone wordly and ambitious like Meghan before.
Brown quotes a friend who says he was “in a trance” from the moment they met at London’s Soho House in July 2016.
‘Very, very effective with men’
Meghan’s estranged father Thomas Markle tells Brown: “Her first year at college, she pointed at one guy and said, ‘That boy’s going to be my boyfriend’. And he became her boyfriend. She’s very, very effective with men.”
For their third date, Harry whisked Meghan to Botswana, in Africa, which Brown describes as the royal’s “go-to hot-and-heavy glamping retreat”. William, concerned the relationship was moving too fast, pointedly asked Harry: “Do you realise this is the fourth girl you’ve taken to Botswana?”
Though William was concerned about Harry’s “mental fragility” and how he might handle scrutiny of the new romance, nothing would dissuade him.
When Harry complained about “racist treatment” by the Press of his new girlfriend, Brown writes that Meghan “absorbed her new identity ravenously”.
The book tells how Harry became “groomzilla” in the run-up to the 2018 wedding. Negative stories from inside the royal household started to leak out, with a Palace source blaming the Sussexes for “shouting in front of other members of staff”.
Brown confirms that Meghan had scarcely met Oprah Winfrey and had never met George and Amal Clooney before giving them prime seats at her wedding. They were “the friends she wanted to recruit”. While her role as Harry’s bride brought Meghan global fame, Brown writes that she did not grasp the expectations that came with her new role.
She didn’t like sharing staff with William and Kate nor being down the pecking order for the use of two government private jets.
After years of collecting freebies — a publicist is quoted as saying she was copied in to a message from a member of Meghan’s team after she became Duchess of Sussex, urging them to still send “anything” her way — Meghan was horrified she was now banned from keeping designer gear due to strict Palace rules on gifts.
Brown also says Meghan was courting Netflix as early as 2018 but was told by the Palace that while she and Harry could do as many TV programmes they liked, they could not receive payment for them. Meghan was furious to find she was now financially dependent on her husband, who was in turn reliant on family handouts.
While William and Kate are calming influences on each other, Brown says, the Sussexes “fuelled each other’s distrust of everyone”. She describes how, at social gatherings, they “stood in a corner and talked only to each other”.
By the end of 2019, Harry and Meghan had decamped to Canada and were finalising their plans to leave the Royal Family, hoping to keep their royal privileges while developing their own commercial interests.
Their decision to press ahead with Megxit was made, Brown claims, when they saw the Queen’s 2019 Christmas speech — with their photograph pointedly removed from Her Majesty’s desk. It was no accident the picture had gone.
“That one,” Brown reports the Queen saying to the director preparing to film her. “I don’t suppose we need that one.”
William was appalled when he saw the Sussexes had been edited out, knowing it would cause a “category-five tantrum” from Harry.
Sure enough, the Sussexes accelerated their decision to leave.
And after The Celeb Report revealed the plan, the couple used their newly minted Sussex Royal website to announce their ambitions for a “new working model” to “collaborate” with the Queen as if, Brown writes, “the monarch were the co-executive producer of a TV series”.
Brown says senior royals were united in taking offence.
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The Sussexes were stripped of their patronages, Harry’s military titles, and the grace-and-favour home Frogmore Cottage.
“The Queen does not collaborate,” writes Brown. “She commands, as her impetuous grandson found out.”
- Additional reporting: Grant Rollings, Mike Ridley and Hayley Minn
- The Palace Papers: Inside The House Of Windsor – The Truth And The Turmoil (Penguin) is out now £15.
