Right royal learning curve for Meghan Markle

Meghan Markle has made a few false starts with the British public.

Royal fans in Windsor relax after setting up their positions ahead of this weekend’s wedding. Picture: Getty Images

Just two days away from the keenly awaited nuptials of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, a royal wedding that would not have happened even a generation ago, and the event has been overshadowed by uncertainty over the attendance of the bride’s father, Thomas Markle.

The romantic multi-million-dollar wedding, born of a blind date less than two years ago in the old-world confines of the Soho Townhouse in Dean Street, central London, is now in turmoil.

The crushing humiliation of being caught out staging paparazzi photographs has exposed not only Thomas Markle’s financial frailty and poor decision-making but a dysfunctional one-sidedness to the marriage, where Meghan Markle has appeared to airbrush her life, ­involving her father only at the last minute under pressure from the British public.

Prince Harry has spoken to him only on the phone, and Thomas Markle, leading a simple reclusive life in Mexico, largely has been left to fend for himself.

Questions raised by Meghan Markle’s family months ago have been brought into sharp relief, particularly why Thomas Markle was left so isolated — almost tacked on to the biggest wedding of the year while his daughter was busily ­immersed in the finer details of its preparation.

 

Meghan Markle’s older half-sister, ­Samantha Grant, who is not in­vited because of her catty comments about Markle’s “pushy’’ personality, wanted to know why her ­sister hadn’t helped support their ­father at a time her wealth was skyrocketing and he had fallen into bankruptcy.

“He was very clear with her about the fact that he needed some help and, by his report, twice she flatly refused,” Grant claims.

Grant insists her father had to swallow his pride and instead ask her for money to prepare for the wedding.

“Nobody is milking her for money,” Grant says of Markle. “You help your father in return for everything he has done for you. It’s that simple.’’

And now, after pulling out of the wedding, then changing his mind after pleas from his daughter, Thomas Markle says he won’t attend the nuptials because he’s having heart surgery.

The drama is certain to have unnerved the unlikeliest royal bride anyone has seen during this Queen’s reign: a divorcee of mixed race, and American, with a family — like families the world over — that’s nowhere near perfect.

St. George's Chapel

12:00pm

Wedding service begins at St George's Chapel. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle married by Dean of Windsor and Archbishop or Canterbury.

Carriage Procession

1:00pm

Couple embark on carriage procession through town before returning to Windsor Castle.

St. George's Hall

Afternoon

Queen hosts reception at St. George's Hall for couple and 800 guests.

Frogmore House

Evening

Prince of Wales hosts evening reception for 200 close friends and family at royal residence of Frogmore House.

Markle’s self-confident and sassy character, breaking all the stuffy royal protocols, may yet persuade her father to change his mind yet again, but in the end it will be a medical decision.

Just two years ago this is what she wrote on her Instagram account: “Happy Father’s Day, daddy. I’m still your buckaroo, and to this day your hugs are still the very best in the whole wide world. Thanks for my work ethic, my love of Busby Berkeley films and club sandwiches, for teaching me the importance of handwritten thank you notes, and for giving me that signature Markle nose. I love you. Xo Bean.’’

The criticism of her father for accepting money for the paparazzi photographs is also misplaced. Just last year, despite repeated demands for privacy, including a public plea from Prince Harry to leave his girlfriend alone — claiming front-page smear, racial undertones of comment pieces, and sexism and racism of social media trolls — Markle herself agreed to be on the cover of Vanity Fair and give a tell-all “we are so in love’’ interview.

Yet Markle has been forgiven many of her early faux pas — crossing legs, public displays of ­affection, touching commoners, wearing jeans, black outfits and sleeveless dresses — as she joins Prince Harry, now matured from his hard-partying Las Vegas days.

Thomas Markle married his university girlfriend, Roslyn, in 1964 and they had two children, Yvonne and Tom jnr. The couple divorced in 1975. He then married Meghan’s mother Doria. In the 1990s he lost most of his money in a failed jewellery business and declared bankruptcy. He is now lives in Mexico and is said to be shy and reclusive and in poor heath. Picture: Splash News

Today he’s an advocate for mental health. His passion promoting the Invictus Games, helping those who have suffered life-changing injuries in the military to find a new purpose in life, has been impressive. But he used to be the playboy prince — remember the nude photographs of the wild VIP Las Vegas party five years ago, or the misjudged Nazi costume he wore to a party in 2005 two weeks before the National Holocaust Memorial Day? Prince Harry has retained his rebellious spirit but, having slipped down to sixth in the line of succession to the throne, he enjoys more freedom than before.

That Prince Harry has been encouraged to break away from the social strictures that formerly bound his great-uncle, King Edward, and more recently his great-aunt Princess Margaret, has been portrayed as a pivotal moment to reinvigorate and modernise the royal family.

But Markle, to be anointed on Saturday as a duchess, possibly of Sussex, still will have to deal with all of the flummery that comes with being royal, being seen and not heard (very much), while also keeping her family onside.

It has been a mistake for her to have so distanced her family from her British life. While Thomas Markle was telling a gossip magazine he wasn’t going to attend the wedding, a move that completely sidelined Kensington Palace, ­several of Meghan Markle’s cousins were arriving at Heathrow ready to be guest commentators for the broadcast.

Prince Harry is clearly besotted to have a determined and sexy wife to rely on, yet she will have to dial down the overt American instincts that were so attractive to him if she is to totally win over the British public and become an ­effective consort.

Yoga instructor Doria Ragland met Meghan’s father Tom Markle on the set of US soap opera General Hospital, where she was a trainee make-up artist and he was the show’s lighting director. They married in 1979. The pair separated when Meghan was two and divorced five years later. Meghan lived mostly with Doria. Doria has a half-brother, Joseph, and a half-sister, Saundra. Picture: MEGA

As beautiful as she is smart, the former Suits actress is accepted because she has made Prince Harry, always the public’s favourite, a happy man indeed. But those differing cultural and social expectations have required quick adjustment.

Initially it appeared Markle wanted to fix British foibles: her enthusiasm for caring and sharing, even organising secret meetings with Grenfell Tower fire victims, seemed somehow to be overly ­ingratiating. So, too, the insensitive comparisons with Prince Harry’s mother, Diana, the Princess of Wales, with biographer Andrew Morton claiming she was picking up the work, at age 36, from Diana, who was 36 when she died in a car crash in a Paris tunnel in 1997.

When Markle commissioned an engagement photo shoot, wearing an extravagant Ralph & Russo dress, it was as if she were in a celebrity magazine photo spread, and she totally misjudged the British mood for subtlety and austerity.

So this Saturday’s wedding has to strike the right balance of celebration, happiness and cost. Having her father there would have been an important show of unity and love. Yoga-loving mother Doria Ragland, with whom she is particularly close, will accompany Markle in the car on her wedding day, but if Thomas Markle doesn’t ­attend she may have a more prominent role.

On the royal side, there have been delicate negotiations too. Prince Harry has insisted that one of the 600 wedding invitations goes to his out-of-favour aunt, Sarah Ferguson. This is despite ongoing tensions: his father Prince Charles and his grandfather Prince Philip reportedly can’t stand to be in the same room as her.

 

Eyebrows also have been raised that despite the estimated $5 million cost of the wedding, the 2640 members of the public invited into the Windsor Castle grounds because of their leadership of local communities have been told to bring their own picnic for the four-hour wait between the arrival of various wedding guests and the departure of the bride and groom on their special carriage, pulled by Windsor Grey horses.

Tens of thousands of fans are then expected to line a route through Windsor as the couple heads to a lavish luncheon at Windsor Castle.

None of this was front of mind when Prince Harry and Markle settled into the comfy velvet chairs of the Dean Street private club Soho Townhouse on an early July evening in 2016.

Prince Harry later admitted he was “beautifully surprised’’ when he walked in and saw Markle, mentally noting the need to lift his game on this blind date. “Make sure I have got good chat,’’ he told himself.

The conversation that night centred on their good deeds. Markle jokes that her humanitarian and charity efforts got her a second date, and a third in the same week, before the two ­compared diaries and identified a window of spare time during Prince Harry’s trip to Botswana the following month.

Perhaps it’s best that Markle didn’t know that the luxury $1000- a-night tented hut in the Okavango Delta in Botswana was where Prince Harry romanced a former girlfriend, Chelsy Davey.

Coincidentally, Markle had also been invited into the VIP section of Wimbledon in 2016, sitting close to another of Harry’s exes, actress Cressida Bonas.

Since those five African nights in August 2016, the couple has never spent more than two weeks apart, catching repeated trans-­Atlantic flights. For five months they were able to keep their blossoming relationship a secret.

“It was an authentic and organic way to get to know each other,’’ Markle revealed.

When it did become public through a leak to a British tabloid, the reaction was fierce — brutally so — because Markle was not part of the tight-knit British upper-class inner circle, had been married before, was American and bi-racial. There were questions about the manner in which she had dumped her first husband, Trevor Engelson — they dated for seven years and were married for two — and her more recent boyfriend, Canadian chef Cory Vitiello.

Markle said in her BBC engagement interview that it was disheartening that there was a focus on her ethnicity.

“It’s a shame that’s the climate to focus on that, (it’s) discriminatory. But at the end of the day I am proud of who I am and where I come from. We have never put focus on that (race).’’

But the British public puts enormous focus on appropriateness and knowing one’s place. It’s a culture of subtext and Markle’s desire for front-and-centre attention, not her ancestry, has been the main public concern.

Grant Harrold, a former butler to Prince Charles, knows Prince Harry and remarked: “The problem is that she’s got to remember that, as a member of the royal family, she represents the family or, as it’s been called, the brand.’’

Etiquette expert Liz Brewer said Markle was “no longer an actress’’ and had to be mindful of everything she said and did, including, most importantly, being politically neutral.

Despite this, earlier this month Oprah Winfrey was wooing Markle’s mother in a six-hour meeting to do an American interview about how badly some people reacted when her daughter started dating Prince Harry. That Markle’s mother had even countenanced such a broadcast was reportedly met with concern inside Buckingham Palace.

Markle has the three-stone ­diamond ring, her prince, a new suite of rooms at Kensington Palace and a lodge on the Sandringham estate. But the hefty price the British public will demand for all of that is discretion and bucketloads of duty — and this weekend’s wedding is just the start.