What a gal! Ermine edged poise and a creamy dollop of pure American vivacity
being obsequious. She even managed to ask Meghan about royal babies, which must have stuck in her feminist craw. She was the Prince’s choice of interlocutor, an inclusive pick of which his future wife would approve. Meghan is a noted equality campaigner, a feminist with a special interest in gender equality and women’s rights – well, as much as any woman who has just given up her career to marry a prince can be.
We learned that theirs was a relationship built on cosy nights in, on roast chicken dinners and long country walks. They were candid about spending nights in a tent together under the Botswana stars, as brazen an admission of pre-marital royal sex as we have ever heard. They were introduced by a mutual friend, whose identity remains unknown.
‘We should protect her privacy,’ Meghan warned Harry, who immediately shut his royal trap.
What a day it was, although earlier it was clear that some broadcasters found the news more important than others. Within an hour of the announcement, a male voice on the BBC News channel sounded the first tootle on the Eyeore trumpet. ‘Not everyone is a royalist,’ he harrumphed. Sky News grasped the mood and the moment with a little more celebration.
Historian and royal expert Alastair Bruce was wrapped up in a scarf and rosy cheeks outside the Palace, talking of ‘how utterly in love they are’. He dared ‘anyone who has a heart that beats’ not to be cheered by the love story, and speculated on what her new title would be: Princess Henry of Wales, Duchess of Sussex, Queen of Hearts, Sultana of the Commonwealth, Raisin d’Etre? ‘She will never be Princess Markle,’ he said – but that is exactly how fans on both sides of the Atlantic will regard this singular young lady.
And so begins a new chapter in the royal family, with a woman who is not what you might expect. For a start, she is no boring Sloane or weedy aristo. She is an actress and a star; double good. The pressure and spotlight won’t come as shock, and it helps that she is an independent woman who has already made a success of her life and learned how to deal with fame.
We won’t forget her first official appearance, under a grey, wintry sky in Kensington Palace garden. She walked past the leafless trees in sexy cocktail shoes, and it was she who turned away from the cameras first, taking Harry with her.
‘I fell in love with her so incredibly quickly,’ he said later, peeling his heart open for the world to see. ‘This beautiful woman fell into my life and I fell into hers. I know that I am in love with this girl and she is in love with me.’
Oh, the drenching romance of it all! We have watched Harry, from the days of his toothy schoolboy grin in his little prep school cap to that solemn walk behind his mother’s coffin to falling out of nightclubs with his unsuitable friends. All that turbulence is behind him now, as he faces the future with the woman he loves by his side. It’s all too fabulous. And so is she.