Secrets from Meghan and Harry’s time in royal 'snake pit’
A royal insider has revealed what royal life really looked like for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle – and it’s no hold barred.
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How’s this for a spot of irony: of all the property associated with the British monarchy there is none more synonymous with royalty than Buckingham Palace – and yet of all the priorities owned by the Crown, it is the most recent acquisition.
(‘Recent’ being a relative term for an institution which can trace its lineage back to the Saxon kings of the 9th century, a time when key figures were named Ealhmund, Beorhtric and Wiglaf. Truly.)
While Windsor castle’s foundations were the work of William the Conqueror and King William III purchased what became Kensington Palace in 1689, it was only in 1761 that George III bought Buckingham House from the Duke of Buckingham and Normandy for £21,000 as a bolthole for his wife Queen Charlotte.
And yet it is ‘newbie’ Buckingham Palace which is Monarchy HQ.
And it is this very Baroque monolith which today, a society insider has claimed, is a “nest of vipers”.
Tina Brown is far better placed to know the in’s and out’s of royaldom than your garden variety biographer. She was editing Tatler at age 25 and later presided over Vanity Fair for nearly a decade.
Her social credentials are equally top drawer – she was friends with Diana, Princess of Wales and lunched with her only weeks before her death. (Brown also turned down an invitation to the dinner at Jeffrey Epstein’s New York mansion in 2010, held for guest Prince Andrew and also including Woody Allen, which has been dubbed the “predator’s ball”.)
She has just published The Palace Papers, the follow up to her indispensable The Diana Chronicles. Having hit shelves in the UK and the US (we have to wait until Tuesday to get our hot little hands on it) her forensically researched magnum opus is pulling back the red velvet curtains on royal life, and the picture is far from pretty.
During a lengthy interview with publishing doyenne Joanna Coles for The Washington Post this week, Brown let loose and revealed what she really thinks about the whole tweedy box and dice.
Most notable is her argument that the newly minted Duchess of Sussex had barely had her new monogrammed stationery delivered when she realised what a bum deal she had agreed to.
Because sure, being a member of the royal family might have sounded deliciously privileged – a non-stop whirligig of palaces and purloined emeralds and bowing and scraping footmen delivering one’s avocado toast – but the reality was a much grimmer one. (Or should that be a Grimm one?)
As Brown explained to Coles, “[Meghan] was always as an actress number six on the call sheet. That means you’re the number six person in terms of being important on the show. Essentially, in Prince Harry, she also married number six on the call sheet, because he was actually sixth in line by that time.”
Which is to say, that after tying the knot with her literal Prince Charming, the penny dropped for Meghan that the starring role that had eluded her throughout her Hollywood career was, again, only going to remain forever out of reach.
Top billing was always, perpetually, no matter how enthusiastically the Sussexes doled out hugs in regional youth centres or came up with inspiring Instagram posts, going to be off the table.
The bitter truths didn’t stop for the former Suits star. There was also the realisation that royal life didn’t just involve curtsying to the Queen on the reg and then deciding which underprivileged group she fancied visiting.
Instead, the Sussexes’ day-to-day involved a hoard of palace advisers, private secretaries, and career courtiers all with competing agendas.
During Harry and Meghan’s Oprah interview, there were more than a dozen references to the opaque royal “institution” with Harry alleging that there is an “‘invisible contract’ behind closed doors between the institution and the tabloids, the UK tabloids”.
More recently when Harry was interviewed by theUS Today program, he told host Hoda Kotb he had made a quickie visit to see Her Majesty to make “sure that she is protected and she’s got the right people around her”.
There has been speculation that his comments were aimed at either Sir Edward Young, the Queen’s private secretary, or Angela Kelly, her dressmaker and official bestie, both of whom allegedly crossed swords with the Sussexes during their all-too-brief royal stint.
(Kelly was part of HMS Bubble which protected the nonagenarian during the pandemic and ended up having to wash and set Her Majesty’s hair weekly, then dousing it in huge amounts of hairspray so it would last. She recently revealed she found the whole thing so nerve wracking, she had to throw back a G&T after each coiffeur session.)
Brown’s read is that the palace is far from a genteel cadre of devoted monarchists still trying to wrap their heads around the complexities of the fax machine but a far more, at times, venomous outfit.
“Were the palace advisers treacherous? I think that the palace is a snake pit,” she told Coles. “I think it always has been. I mean, I think it’s like any crusty institution, whether it’s the BBC or The New York Times or Buckingham Palace. It’s a crusty, dusty place, which has got quite a lot of viperish people in it.”
Still, Brown does not let Harry and Meghan off the hook. Oh no siree.
She argues the couple were surrounded by savvy communications staff but a central problem was that they refused to heed the advice they were being given.
So too does she think that the Queen did everything in her power to set the newbie Duchess up for success by giving her “one of her most treasured patronages” as patron of the National Theatre. So too did the Top Lady (Diana’s nickname for her mother-in-law) make Meghan vice chairman of the Commonwealth Foundation, which turned out to be another gift horse.
“Given that Meghan had said that she had a huge desire to do [some] sort of global humanitarian work, there’s no better platform,” she has argued. “This was a fantastic platform, really, that needed modernising and dusting off and repositioning … there was nonetheless a big role there, a longstanding role with a lot of longevity for the Sussexes.”
Instead of appreciating what Her Majesty had given them, the couple “seemed not to appreciate what these [roles] could become,” leaving the palace “baffled”.
Then we get to a source of alleged Sussex discontent which pops up in reporting with regularity: Money. According to Brown, this was a particular issue that she thinks Harry might have “minimised” pre-wedding.
“It’s unlikely that a man is going to say to her look, hey, you know, you’re not going to have half the things you think you’re going to get as a sort of fairy story princess,” she told Coles.
For Meghan who had been working since she was a teenager and earning her own income for decades, she now faced the galling reality of having to rely on handouts. Seven figure ones, sure, but still.
Harry, she points out, was “completely dependent on the bank of dad” along with the fact that he “had to kind of ask granny, the Queen, for one of the houses on the royal estates to live.
“I know [that] was absolutely maddening to Meghan. I mean, she did not like it.”
Meanwhile, the Duchess could see “the deals that were there to be made that they had to leave on the table because they were royals,” Brown says.
“It was as if Meghan just could not sort of resist everything that was offered on the celebrity buffet.”
It is against this backdrop that we get to Harry, a man for whom happiness seems to have proven perpetually elusive.
Her Majesty, Brown says, had long known how miserable and restless her grandson was, revealing that a royal adviser had told her that “we always knew that Harry was going to go at some point. He was really unhappy. The Queen knew that at some point it was highly likely that Harry would want out.”
Meghan, of course, was far from happy with her royal lot too.
“She’s looking at someone like Michelle Obama and thinking, wow, she has it all. You know, she’s got the stature and she has the ability to live in amazing houses, go on amazing holidays, be the big voice for humanitarian [causes], anything she wants, but also has freedom,” Brown told the Post.
“That’s what Meghan wanted, as well. And I think that Harry came to want that.”
So, off they trundled to the US, ready for their close-up … only to face a decidedly uncertain future.
“Meghan doesn’t really have a brand,” Brown has said. “You feel that she is sort of grasping somewhat at whatever is the kind of Twitter caring of the moment. You know, it’s, you know, vaccinations, it’s Ukraine, it’s women’s rights, it’s hey, my 40th birthday, let’s have a mentoring scheme. Nothing is really going anywhere for Meghan.”
And part of why they haven’t pulled off this Obama-esque makeover? Those “vipers” were kinda handy – and good at their jobs.
“However much they hated the constraints and … the advisers, try doing it without the palace and the advisers, right? Because what the palace does …[it] has amazing convening power,” Brown said. “There’s no one who won’t take a phone call if they see Buckingham Palace on the phone, Kensington Palace on the phone.
“All of that’s now gone. And essentially, they have to just hire PRs to do that for them.”
Those same advisers, to Brown’s way of thinking, would also have been able to “tell them the whole problem with entertainment deals is that you have to deliver hits”.
“They’re now having to scramble for the deals in a way that anybody who’s a celebrity … has to do,” Brown said. “And I think it’s a very hard task to keep that aloft. If you’re royal, there’s no timestamp on it. You can be as boring as you want for years and years and still you’re gonna have big things coming your way.”
Facing the threat of irrelevance, ‘scrambling’ for deals and having to rely on outside PR outfits … If there is one thing Meghan must have worked out by now it is that not even real life princesses get to have a happily ever after.
Sometimes, maybe, it’s better the “viper” you know …
Daniela Elser is a royal expert and a writer with more than 15 years experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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