by Richard Kay and Geoffrey Levy
Yes, the royals have made their mistakes over the years, but of one thing you could always be certain: the Firm could be relied on to stage a good wedding.
Ruthlessly planned, endlessly rehearsed and timed to the second, with every guest and every bloom in place, each one since the war has been a masterpiece of glittering royal showmanship.
That is how it has always been, as Mail readers have been nostalgically reminded this week with our series of royal wedding specials, from the great romance of the Queen and Prince Philip to the glamour of Princess Margaret and Lord snowdon.
On saturday, it is Harry and Meghan’s turn. Theoretically, this ought to be the most thrilling royal wedding of them all — the Queen’s actionman grandson marrying a Hollywood actress who is the great-great-great-great granddaughter of a slave.
How disappointing and slightly worrying that the excitement and expectation of the days leading up to their wedding should be overshadowed by family division and crises.
And how astonishing that Buckingham Palace, normally a finely-tuned machine, brilliant at overseeing pageants and jubilees, should appear to be so ineptly disorganised.
Not even yesterday’s late announcement that Prince George and Princess Charlotte will be among Meghan’s attendants has dampened down the sense of panic and controversy over why her father, who was meant to give her away, is not now coming to the wedding.
Her mother, of course, will be there. But she’s arriving jet-lagged after an 11-hour flight, just three days before the wedding.
And then, yesterday, came another unedifying attack from a member of Meghan’s extended family — her half-sister samantha adding to the brickbats she’s already thrown by denouncing Meghan for trying to silence her.
Not forgetting the bride’s half-brother Thomas Jnr penning nasty letters to Harry demanding that the prince dump the ‘narcissistic, shallow, selfish’ Meghan.
If only Meghan had put this motley clan — it includes Tyler Dooley, a cannabis farmer — on the guest list. If only senior voices at Buckingham Palace had whispered in Harry’s ear that the bride keeping her family on the outside with their noses pressed against the window pane was bound to mean trouble. seemingly, such crucial advice was not forthcoming.
As for the bride’s father, Thomas Markle, being naive and foolish enough to participate in the staging of paparazzi photos of himself preparing for the wedding — and sold worldwide by the photographer for an estimated £100,000 — that unseemly situation should never even have been allowed to have arisen.
He was, of course, invading his own privacy at the very time Kensington Palace was sending strict warnings to the media not to harass him.
WHICHeveR way you look at the issue, it was utterly misguided for experienced royal advisors not have realised that this lonely man — who lives in a drab, seedy, drug-plagued Mexican town along with other cash-strapped American retirees — would struggle to deal with the enormity of his daughter’s wedding.
even worse, the plan for him not to meet Harry until just hours before the wedding was absurd and probably unworkable.
someone, surely, might have given thought to how best to involve Mr Markle in the weeks running up to the wedding, some way of acclimatising him to what lay ahead.
Palace sources were yesterday hinting — not entirely convincingly — that there had been offers of assistance to the 73-year-old former Tv lighting director.
Behind palace walls last night, long-standing courtiers were expressing surprise that a channel of communication had not been opened up to Mr Markle, at the very least keeping him informed and making him feel involved.
How simple it would have been to have flown him to London and put him up quietly in one of the palaces. When Prince Philip married the Queen, his ailing mother came to live under the royal roof. In all the circumstances now there is huge surprise that, at the very least, someone wasn’t diplomatically despatched to his Mexican home to meet him, reassure him and make