With siblings like these, who needs enemies? Alison Mau: Meghan Markle’s vile brother and sister are ‘the worst’
Meghan’s bitter half-siblings show why weddings bring out the worst in families.
If there are ever occasions when family relationships are tested in the weirdest ways, it’s got to be weddings and funerals. These high days, with their combination of expectation, tradition, emotion and stress, can threaten to fracture the closest of bonds.
Siblings are often the worst. A person I’m quite close to (OK, it was me) almost had to go ahead sans-bridesmaids after her sisters argued so furiously in the days leading up to the ceremony, they were threatened with expulsion and a flight home. Thankfully, calm was restored in the nick of time.
No family is perfect. Everyone has baggage; most do not choose to share their very personal grievances in public at exactly the time the nuptial couple are at their most nervous, and ostensibly most excited. Which is why, just two short weeks out from her big day, royal bride Meghan Markle must be wishing her half-brother and sister would just shut their traps.
The carping coming from home in the past few months has not been pleasant. Meghan’s half-sister Samantha has described her variously as shallow, a narcissist, and a social climber. She was furious at Prince Harry’s comment that Meghan had found ‘‘the family she never had’’, after spending Christmas with the royals at Sandringham. The title of her just-released book, The Diary of Princess
Pushy’s Sister leaves so little to the imagination, that it negates the need to read the thing at all.
You might think Samantha, having left it all on the field so to speak, would retire to the locker rooms. But no! Apparently she feels that a stiff card envelope from Buckingham Palace, with her name in copperplate, is still her due. ‘‘I’d be lying to say that I wouldn’t be hurt if I didn’t get an invite but that’s really up to her,’’ she says, putting the blame back on Meghan in a wonderfully classic example of gaslighting.
Who’d want such a sibling? She’s really the worst! Err, no, as it happens she’s not the worst. That honour has just passed to Meghan’s half-brother Thomas Markle Jnr, who this week hand-wrote a two-page letter to Prince Harry and leaked it straight to gossip website InTouch.
‘‘Dear Prince Harry,’’ he begins, and then proceeds to word-vomit all over the page.
‘‘It’s not too late, Meghan Markle is obviously not the right woman for you … as more time passes till your royal wedding it become (sic) very clear this is the biggest mistake in royal wedding history.’’ That’s a big call, when you think about it. There was Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, for starters. And Charles and Diana.
And how the 50-year-old, who has never met Harry, has such extraordinary insight is a mystery. Perhaps he’s psychic.
He then accuses Meghan of driving her father to bankruptcy, calls her a below C average actress, and claims ‘‘she is a shallow, jaded, conceited woman that will make a joke of you and the royal family heritage’’.
I’ve not always been the biggest fan of the royals, but I favour their (and Meghan’s) judgement over the man with the two-time arrest record for drunkenly threatening his girlfriend with a gun.
Apparently Thomas Jnr is particularly affronted about the ‘‘strangers’’ invited to the wedding when he is not. There is nothing unusual about that, as any bride or groom who’s ever had a series of intense discussions with their parents about the need to invite Uncle Ken – who’s not actually an uncle, by the way – to the reception despite the fact that you haven’t seen him since that trip to the South Island in 1979.
After having a quiet snort about grammar and syntax, I think we can discount Tom Jnr’s thoughts about the royal wedding, and about his half-sister Meghan. He’s wrong when he claims her father was also left off the list. Thomas Snr will, says the palace, walk his daughter down the aisle of Windsor Chapel on May 19. Her mother, with whom she is apparently very close, will bring Meghan from an unnamed hotel to Windsor on her wedding morning. Meghan will have the family she loves and respects with her.
And Samantha and Thomas Jnr can stew gently in their vile juices as they watch the spectacle on the telly, just like the rest of us.
Samantha and Thomas Jnr can stew gently in their vile juices as they watch the spectacle on the telly, just like the rest of us.