Why Prince Harry, Meghan Markle keep getting caught out with truth
One of Harry and Meghan’s most devastating claims about the royal family has been disproved, which brings up more awkward questions for them.
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If there was one thematic throughline in the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s two-hour long pique-filled Oprah Winfrey interview this year it was “truth”.
“I think it’s really important for people to understand the truth,” Meghan said.
“How do you feel about the palace hearing you speak your truth today?” the talk show titan quizzed the duchess.
“I’m not going to live my life in fear. You know, I think so much of it is said with an understanding of just truth,” the former Suits star explained.
In fact, the word “truth” cropped up 11 times during the prime time appearance which rocked the very foundations of the monarchy.
Which is ironic really given that since then, the Sussexes’ relationship with truth has become increasingly … complicated, shall we say.
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This week a clutch of new stories brought renewed focus on the issue.
Thursday saw the release of the royal family’s annual official spending reports – bear with me here – with the Clarence House accounts showing that Prince Charles had kept on funding Harry and Meghan after they quit royal life.
This stands in stark contrast to the picture that po-faced Harry painted when speaking to Oprah when he said: “My family literally cut me off financially … I’ve got what my mum left me and without that, we would not have been able to do this.”
However, now a senior spokesman for Clarence House has told the Express that “The Prince of Wales allocated a substantial sum to support them” to make the “transition” from working members of the royal family to civvy street.
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Quite how generous this “substantial sum” might have been is not known but, per the Express, some reports have pegged it as much as $5.5 million.
Maybe “cut off” means something different in royal parlance?
Then in a positively odd new development, on the same day, the world also learnt that the Sussexes’ had turned down the option to give their son Archie the title of Earl of Dumbarton, which he was entitled to, “because it contained the word “dumb”.
The Telegraph, citing multiple sources, reported “that both Harry and Meghan declined to use the title of Scottish nobility because they feared Archie might be bullied or attract unfortunate nicknames.”
(Quick – no one tell them their own title includes the word “sex”).
At the time, way back in 2019, it was read that their decision to eschew a title for their son was rooted in a cheering commitment to giving the boy the best shot at a normal life and not because they didn’t fancy the one on offer.
No friendly journalists were briefed at the time to correct things.
Then we get to the truly sticky question of the $921,000 earrings given to Meghan as a wedding present by Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the obfuscation surrounding her decision to don the chandelier sparklers for a state dinner in 2018. A dinner that came three weeks after the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, though crucially before Saudi Arabia was officially blamed for the violent murder of the dissident. At the time, the media was briefed that the earrings had been borrowed.
This week, royal biographer Robert Lacey revealed, in an extract from an updated edition of his book Battle of Brothers, that: “Meghan’s answer that the jewels were ‘borrowed’ was presumably designed to avoid admitting their awkward provenance – well, awkward for a professed human rights campaigner. When the story came out in March 2021 her legal apologists leapt forward to point out that the earrings were actually lodged as property in the name of the Queen, like all wedding gifts to members of the royal family. So the duchess had been technically correct in saying that she had only ‘borrowed’ them.”
However, Lacey writes, “Meghan’s royal minders in Fiji were quite adamant they had made her aware of the embarrassing Saudi origin of the jewels.”
Awkward indeed.
All of this comes after the hullabaloo this month over whether Harry and Meghan had asked the Queen’s permission to use her lifelong nickname for their daughter Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor.
A spokesperson for the duke and duchess said that during a conversation with Her Majesty, Harry had “shared their hope of naming their daughter Lilibet in her honour. Had she not been supportive, they would not have used the name.”
However, the BBC reported that the sovereign was “never asked” her opinion on the choice of name, a report that Buckingham Palace has refused to deny. (Lawyers for the Sussexes then sent out a letter to media organisations labelling the report “false and defamatory and should not be repeated.”)
But then it came to light this week that the Sussexes had purchased the domain name for “Lilibet Diana’’ before the name was approved by Her Majesty, raising even more questions about the exact timeline here. So … case not closed then.
Anyone else fancy a Bex and a lie down right about now?
Why, in 2021, does Harry and Meghan’s commitment to “speaking their truth” seem to so regularly run counter to facts that later emerge? Why does getting a straight answer about certain thorny situations seem like an increasingly tough ask when it comes to the wannabe Hollywood power players?
All of this is not to suggest for a moment that the duke and duchess are being misleading or devious; I’m not saying that for a second. Rather, that in these situations they are genuinely speaking what they feel to be the truth, only that “their truth” doesn’t always align with the cold hard facts.
(Whoever thought writing about the royal family would venture so precariously into the philosophical conundrum famously posed by Kierkegard about the subjective nature of truth? Whatever happened to just writing about new hats and plaque unveilings and whatever ignominious money-making gambit Fergie had gotten herself involved in?)
There is no greater example of this fact-lite inclination than Meghan’s claim, speaking to Oprah, that the couple had actually secretly gotten married three days before their multimillion-dollar Windsor Castle wedding in 2018 – “Just the two of us in our backyard with the Archbishop of Canterbury,” Meghan explained.
While it was a romantic notion, the stuff of a million and one Pinterest boards (you just know there would be mason jars involved), the Archbishop of Canterbury was drawn into the fray and later said that wasn’t exactly true and that their legal union was the one we all watched live.
Coming a close second was the duchess’ instance that she had to “turn over” her passport and that “when I joined that family, that was the last time, until we came here, that I saw my passport.”
How then did she make a slew of personal trips, during her time as a working member of the royal family including to the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and two to the US? (The Queen is the only person in the UK permitted to travel without a passport as they are issued in her name).
The problem is that all of these instances chip away at Harry and Meghan’s credibility which is a shame because, while they might have a deep and unedifying yen for complaining when in the vicinity of a microphone, in among their bleating they do raise some very real and very important questions about the monarchy.
Beyond that, their brand pitch, as they set about making their fortune in the land of Stars’n Stripes, is that they bring with them an authenticity and willingness for a certain sort of refreshing emotional forthrightness that is totally unprecedented for members of the royal family. Bully for them.
Only problem is they have demonstrated a worrying propensity to tap-dance around inalienable truths to create their own narrative. They might genuinely believe what they say, for example that they got married three days before their wedding, but wholehearted, genuine commitment to their preferred interpretation of events can’t bend cold hard reality.
“The truth is a snare,” the philosopher Kierkegard wrote. “You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.”
Maybe it’s time someone slapped that on a bumper sticker in Montecito …
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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