Harry and Meghan: Finding freedom and burning bridges
Their story is called Finding Freedom. But for Meghan and Harry it looks more like a case of burning bridges. Have they cut ties forever?
For all the headlines and dozens of pages of newsprint devoted to “Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family’’, there is just one question the royal households – from Buckingham Palace to Kensington Palace to Clarence House – want to know the answer to.
Most of the book excerpts appear to confirm gossipy contemporaneous Fleet Street reporting of royal fissures and tantrums between the Houses of Cambridge and Sussex — but did the Sussexes participate, authorise, contribute or be complicit in any of the book? Was this, as some believe, 24 chapters of score-settling?
Since the book’s pre-release, royal courtiers have briefed about an increasing “exhaustion’’ surrounding Harry and Meghan’s repeated complaints.
Royal insiders are still disbelieving that Harry, sixth in line to the throne, who has grown up resenting the media for the death of his mother, Princess Diana, would co-operate. But his wife? In the book it is revealed Meghan tipped off photographers in her acting career so that they would know where she could be “papped’’ – as in “paparazzied’’. One photographer even had her mobile phone number. Meghan was also known for distributing photos of her own “good deeds” on supposedly secret visits to charities.
Certainly, in the UK, commentator after commentator has accused Meghan of ensuring a “glossy’’ and “friendly’’ book with small intimate details they claim adds a pro-Meghan flourish to what was largely reported from Fleet Street.
“Harry and Meghan, The Ultimate Unreliable Narrators’’ screamed The Sun. “No Way Back for Harry and Meghan’’ was the Daily Mail; Andrew Morton, Princess Diana’s biographer, wrote in the Mirror “Harry hasn’t just burned his bridges with his family – he’s buried the ashes. There is no way back for the couple now. By striking out on their own and doing things their way, the Sussexes have blindsided the royal family in the way Diana did when she did her Panorama interview in 1995’’.
In the book there is detail about Harry’s solo lunch with the Queen; how the couple were preparing to bypass the courtiers to gatecrash the Queen at Sandringham directly, and that Meghan was sitting in a bath on the eve of her 2018 wedding distracting herself from her family problems by Face-timing friends and then texting her father one last time. Harry’s private Twitter handle – presumably long deactivated -was unveiled.
How close did Meghan or Harry come to providing information directly, or through friends, for this hagiography? The answer to that question could impact on how much support the Sussexes will continue to receive from the royal family and whether at any time in the distant future they would be welcomed back.
The Sussexes, via a spokesperson, have denied providing any interviews for the book.
The book’s co-authors are Omid Scobie, 39, a former celebrity reporter for Heat magazine, now royal editor of Harper’s Bazaar, and Carolyn Durand, a US journalist based in America who previously worked for ABC News in London and now writes for Elle.
Scobie moves in the same social set as some of Meghan’s best friends, including Markus
Anderson, the Soho House consultant, although there is no evidence Anderson provided information for the book. The authors have boasted of having access to those closest to Harry and Meghan and their inner circle of friends, without naming sources.
Anderson, whom Meghan had once described as her “loving, supportive, and endlessly fun friend’’, was the one who provided the discreet venue for their first dates and subsequent romantic country pad, and was one of the 15 handpicked who attended Meghan’s ostentatious baby shower at the $75,000-a-night penthouse suite at the Mark Hotel, New York in April 2019. Scobie, meanwhile, insisted to The Times, which serialised the book over the weekend, that neither he nor co-author Durand had interviewed the couple for the book. He has, however, boasted of how he hugged Meghan at one of her final UK events.
“The book doesn’t claim to have any interviews with Harry and Meghan. And nor do we,” Scobie said. What is less clear is whether Meghan and Harry gave tacit support for the book, collaborating, for instance, by allowing access to those who speak on their behalf.
The Queen is reportedly “deeply hurt’’ by the ongoing and deepening estrangement of Harry and Meghan from “The Firm”. In early January they blindsided her with their Sussex Royal website announcement that they were stepping back as full-time royals and moving overseas.
Now the book’s airing of fractious relationships has been another dagger to the heart for the monarch, now 94, and has also struck at Prince Charles, who has been helping bankroll the couple’s North American lifestyle.
The book criticises Kate Middleton for being frosty and not welcoming “a disappointed” Meghan into the family and that Harry’s rift with Prince William centred on the elder brother advising Harry to “take as much time as you need with this girl’’. Harry believed William was being a snob. There are moments of delusion too: how the Sussexes felt their global popularity was reinventing and modernising the monarchy but the “men in grey suits’’, also described as “the vipers’’, felt they needed to be reined in, as well as pique about how Charles and William’s diaries were given precedence.
Then there is the tearful line from Meghan who told friends about their decision to quit royal duties: “I gave up my entire life for this family.’’
During the pandemic and adjusting to life outside the royal machinations, the Sussexes have bellowed – seemingly tone-deaf about their own privileges – from their Los Angeles mansion pad about the “uncomfortable’’ history of the Commonwealth, the very institution the Queen holds dear.
They insisted racism “had come to a head’’ and fiercely supported the Black Lives Matter movement, which in the UK has been linked to Marxism and anti-Jewish sentiments.
The Queen had allowed Harry and Meghan a year’s grace to trial living in North America with a review of the situation – particularly about their finances – around January.
In the most recent reports, Harry and Meghan had to be convinced to accept that 12-month trial because they wanted a complete clean break and have no intention of returning. Perhaps they won’t want to admit to any mistakes. The Queen has invited the Sussexes to cross the Atlantic and visit her at Balmoral for this northern summer, but there are increasing fears they will decline the offer. No one knows when the Queen or 99-year-old Prince Philip will see Archie again. The toddler has spent half his life in Canada and the US and hasn’t seen any of the royal family since November.
Last September the couple snubbed the same invitation from the Queen to join her on her summer holidays, claiming baby Archie was too little to travel, yet Meghan then travelled with him to New York so she could watch her friend, Serena Williams, play in the US Open tennis final.
Nigel Cawthorne, author of Prince Andrew, Epstein and the Palace said: “The British monarchs have fought a successful popularity battle since 1066 and can afford to lose a few dukes and HRHs on the way.’’ He believes the Queen’s other pressing problem, Andrew, “knows like no other how to resist the Svengali-style intrigue its courtiers play with consummate skill”.
As he pointed out, even though the Epstein scandal is one of the longest-running and most devastating in recent royal history, Andrew has retained his HRH title and his income even though he is the least popular royal.
As well as the publication of the book, senior royals have been dismayed that Harry, 35, and Meghan, who turns 39 next week, have pursued legal actions that have seen old wounds repeatedly dredged up. Meghan is embroiled in a legal case against The Mail on Sunday, claiming her privacy was invaded when it published a letter she had written to her estranged father, Thomas Markle.
The newspaper says Mr Markle provided the letter to set the record straight after he claimed the letter was misrepresented in an article in People magazine.
Meghan says she did not know about the People interview. In sealed legal documents she has named the five friends who spoke to People magazine off the record and claimed “her friends had never seen her in this state before, they were rightly concerned for her welfare, specifically as she was pregnant, unprotected by the Institution, and prohibited from defending herself”.
It has already been suggested that the Finding Freedom authors, Scobie and Durand, may be now drawn into this UK legal battle, adding to the various witnesses who may have to provide sworn testimony about sources and friends. Perhaps then will we know with certainty who said what to whom.
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