Here’s the good news about your toe-curlingly indiscreet dad, Meghan
AMID the perfectly pitched life of Princess Meghan, the achingly righton Duchess high on virtue and low on fat, old father Thomas Markle is an embarrassing outlier — a lumbering reminder of the past she can never quite escape.
He is the hairy Hobbit in her modern fairyland, the redneck in her rainbow world.
It was embarrassing enough that he very nearly overshadowed her wedding to Prince Harry with a deal that involved him posing for paparazzi pictures for a fee, followed by the will-he-won’t-he drama over his eventual non-appearance.
Meghan must have thought her father had learned his lesson about the wisdom of accepting invitations from the media for the equivalent of beer money.
Sadly, he seems about as camerashy as a contestant on TV’s Love Island. His latest foray was — how can one put this politely? — an ‘unspun’ interview on ITV, where he committed just about every sin in the book. He discussed the Royal Family’s views not just on politics, but the two hottest controversies of our times: Brexit and Trump.
Meghan’s father revealed that Prince Harry was optimistic about Britain leaving the EU (‘open to the experiment’) and generous towards the U.S. President (‘give Donald Trump a chance’).
It also tickled me that Harry and Meghan, such inveterate virtuesignallers, should be tied to a man who thinks the most important characteristic in a potential son-inlaw is that he should refrain from beating his wife.
For all this bean- spilling, we are told, Thomas received a fee of £7,500 and a trip to a swanky hotel in California. Crikey — ITV must have thought all their Christmases had come at once. He could have demanded ten times that and they would’ve bitten his hand off. Whatever else Mr Markle does next, he should get himself an agent.
Meghan, I’m sure, is mortified. As for the Palace, it’s hard to see what options remain at this stage.
Bring him into the tent and he’s liable to carry on revealing even bigger, potentially more embarrassing secrets. Leave him on the outside and he remains a loose cannon, a permanent threat to the Duchess’s otherwise flawless performance as the nation’s newest royal.
My advice is simple: stop worrying about it. Because, far from damaging Meghan’s image, I think Thomas’s eruptions might even help — underlining the astonishing extent of the hurdles she’s overcome.
Anyway, as anyone who has an embarrassing dad knows, these clod-hopping creatures are usually more of a blessing than a curse.
My own father has one or two embarrassing dad aspects — not least an unfailing lack of regard for social protocol and an unfortunate ability to answer any given question truthfully, if not always tactfully.
Even his efforts pale in comparison, however, with those of my husband, who is embarrassing dad-in-chief to our two children and, in particular, our teenage daughter.
THATshe loves him dearly despite the fact he is a Conservative politician (ten out of ten in the embarrass- o-meter), once told a reporter his favourite rap was by Wham!, and is single-handedly responsible for making GCSEs considerably harder is testimony to the unbreakable bond between a father and his daughter.
The truth is, however toe-curling they seem on the outside, inside every embarrassing dad is a heart the size of a supernova beating with pride at his daughter’s achievements.
And, just because Thomas Markle has a tendency to say the wrong thing at every possible turn, dresses as though he thinks Sports Direct is smarter than Savile Row and appears to have the sort of diet that makes Donald Trump look like Deliciously Ella doesn’t mean that he doesn’t love Meghan.
It’s this she should concentrate on as she struggles to forgive a betrayal that, right now, must feel unforgivable.