by Richard Kay

‘Will he do more interviews? He just might’ ‘A cultural gulf is opening up between them’

OF ALL the problems Meghan Markle anticipated in her transformation from actress to duchess after marrying into the Royal Family, this was surely the one she least expected. So imagine what must go through her mind when she reaches for the telephone to call her father. Hardly a day goes past without a headline that seemingly emanates from the private thoughts of Thomas Markle.

Recently we’ve had reports of his sadness at not receiving a Father’s Day card from his daughter and a bizarre outburst about Donald Trump’s meeting with the Queen later this month. ‘If the Queen is willing to meet our arrogant and insensitive president,’ he was quoted as saying by the U.S. gossip website TMZ, ‘she has no excuse not to meet me, I’m nowhere near as bad.’

All this has followed hot on the heels of his recent bombshell interview with ITV’s Good Morning Britain, in which he repeated private conversations he’d had with his new son-in-law Prince Harry and discussed Meghan’s desire to have children. It is, of course, an unwritten rule that the royals never discuss politics, yet here he was giving Harry’s views on Brexit and Donald Trump.

As upsetting as having such intimacies aired undoubtedly is for Meghan, she is also facing the accusation that she has now cut her father adrift.

According to reliable sources close to 73-year-old Markle, the father-of-three has not spoken to either Meghan or Harry since his TV interview with Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid.

For his daughter there is understandable anxiety about whether she can call her father for fear that everything she says to him seems likely to appear somewhere or other in public.

It is a unique predicament for the royal family because, until now, in-laws have almost always been discreet — you need only to think of the sensibly silent Middleton family. But discretion seems to be something that Thomas Markle either doesn’t understand or chooses not to understand. What an absurd, tawdry and decidedly unroyal mess the Markle affair has become.

From the moment he announced he was pulling out of the wedding just days before he was due to walk his daughter down the aisle at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, the unworldly Thomas Markle has run rings round the so-called sophisticates of Buckingham Palace.

To begin with, there was nothing but sympathy for the retired Hollywood lighting director and his brutally honest explanation that after his collaboration with the paparazzi over staged photographs his presence at the wedding would be a distraction.

He admitted the collusion had been a ‘serious mistake’.

Then came the news that he had suffered a heart attack and was not well enough to travel to the wedding even if he wanted to.

While this seemed a plausible — if convenient — excuse, there were the first stirrings of discomfort inside Kensington Palace regarding Markle’s habit of making his announcements via the media.

They were soon to discover just how spectacularly he was wrongfooting them.

The furore over the fake photos, apparently designed to improve his public image, prompted an unprecedented official statement by Meghan. In it she described the situation between herself and her father as ‘deeply personal’.

She and Harry also asked for ‘understanding and respect’ to be extended to her father ‘in this difficult situation’.

So it was hardly surprising that Kensington Palace was kept in the dark about Markle’s TV interview to ensure he could not be persuaded to withdraw from it.

As for the man himself, he admitted he hadn’t warned his daughter or her new husband in advance but said he hoped that nothing he said would offend them and that the Royal Family would ‘understand my feelings as well’.

All in all it was an incendiary mix, and if it hadn’t already exposed Meghan to the icy displeasure of the royals towards anything which damages or undermines regal prestige, it was only a matter of time.

The extent of the interview, conducted live, left seasoned courtiers incredulous. Meghan, too, was said to have been completely ‘taken by surprise’ by his comments.

So what is going on, and what has happened to Markle and his relationship with his daughter after he spoke so openly?

In the shabby Mexican coastal community of San Antonio del Mar, a few miles south of the U.S. border with California, Markle has been telling friends of his disappointment about Kensington Palace’s silence.

One figure who speaks to him regularly told me: ‘He is feeling upset by that. Before the wedding there was a relationship.

‘He spoke to Harry a lot in the build-up, but since the interview, nothing. He feels shunned.

‘He thought they might have had plans to come out to see him by now but he hasn’t heard if there are. He doesn’t care if they don’t come for a while — he knows how busy they must be — he just wants to know they are coming.

‘At the moment he can’t go to them; the problems with his heart were real enough.’

Markle was admitted to the Sharp Chula Vista Medical Centre, just a few miles north of the Mexican border at Tijuana, where a stent was fitted. The hospital has a specialist unit dedicated to heart and vascular care and proudly boasts a ‘history of medical firsts’.

It was here that a doctor told Meghan’s relieved father he had reached them just in time after a dye, which was fed into his body through his groin, revealed a critical blockage in an area of the artery known as the ‘widow maker’ to cardiologists.

According to the friend, the senior doctor told him he would have died had he attempted the gruelling transatlantic flight to make his daughter’s wedding.

Markle has been trying to follow doctors’ orders since being discharged from hospital with instructions to lose weight, rest and watch what he eats.

I understand he has largely given up meat and is eating fresh fish. He has quit smoking, too.

Friends also say he is not the heavy drinker he has been portrayed as. ‘Those pictures of him coming out of convenience stores with six-packs of beer are misleading,’ says a neighbour. ‘He doesn’t drink beer, he buys them for the security guards who look after the development where he lives.

‘He has a glass of wine but only with dinner. He isn’t in good health and he needs to take exercise.’

Markle hoped the TV interview would ‘set the record straight’ and show the world that he is not a hermit.

‘Tom is well-read and well-travelled, he has been to Europe before, has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Hollywood and is knowledgeable about the royals,’ says an acquaintance.

‘And when he speaks about Meghan his eyes glow with pride. He’s got a 20-year-old Volvo and the back seat is covered with celebrity magazines with Meghan on the cover.’

Since the interview he has been inundated with big money offers from around the world.

‘He is considering what he’ll do next. Will he do another interview? He just might.’

The danger is that if he does, it may be the death knell for his relationship with his beloved daughter.

Long before the wedding, Harry and Meghan tried to persuade him to visit London and meet the royals.

‘Meghan told him just to get on a