A pivotal new role for steady Sophie
The Countess of Wessex has much in common with the future royal – and much to teach her, says Guy Kelly
For all her instant popularity and seeming gameness for the challenges of public life, Meghan Markle will still need all the support she can get when she formally joins the Royal family on May 19. After all, the 36-year-old is set for a daunting transition. When she marries Prince Harry, Meghan will be trading an acting career and a life of relative freedom for one of duty, reserve and near-ceaseless waving – and that’s notwithstanding the private pressures of remembering if and when to curtsy to her in-laws.
Fortunately, help is close by. In her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Cambridge, Meghan will have a relative newcomer to the family who knows precisely what it takes to make the successful leap to royal status. Her experience will no doubt prove essential; yet if Harry’s fiancée looks a little further back in the pecking order, there lies, arguably, an even more valuable – and perhaps even more understanding – role model. Namely: Sophie, Countess of Wessex.
Since marrying Prince Edward in St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, in 1999 (the same venue at which Meghan and Harry will tie the knot, both couples having shunned the pomp of St Paul’s or Westminster Abbey), 52-year-old Sophie has risen to become one of the Queen’s most trusted deputies. Just last week, she was photographed accompanying her motherin-law, alone, in the car from the annual Christmas
Eve carol service on the Sandringham Estate.
Riding solo with the
Queen is not a privilege afforded to any old
Windsor.
In many ways,
Sophie is the exemplary modern royal: dignified, stylish and devoid of pretentiousness.
Nor is she a shirker.
In October and
November, for example, she carried out around 30 official engagements
– only a clutch fewer than
Prince Harry and the Duke of Cambridge each managed over the same period.
“[The Countess] is probably the best example of an outsider coming into the family and learning on the job,” says royal biographer Robert Jobson. “The Duchess of Cambridge’s age and proximity will make her a natural ally [to Markle], but as an aunt-type figure, there is nobody better to quietly guide Meghan in how it all works than Sophie.”
The similarities between the two women are noteworthy. Both come from staunchly middle-class families. Meghan’s mother, Doria, is a yoga instructor, and her father, Thomas, who divorced Doria when their daughter was six, has worked as a television lighting director. Sophie’s mother, meanwhile, was a secretary and her father a tyre salesman. Before marrying “royal spares” (Prince Harry is currently fifthin-line to the throne to Edward’s ninth, though both are slipping with every addition to the Cambridge brood), they enjoyed thriving careers in creative industries. Meghan has already stepped down from her long-running role in US legal drama Suits, while Sophie Rhys-jones, as she once was, carried on working at her own PR agency, RJH Public Relations, until 2001. Neither career was an indicator of, shall we say, future royal dignity, either. Meghan’s appearance as a box-holder on the US version of Deal of No Deal has already provided much mirth on both sides of the Atlantic. And it can also be said with some certitude that Sophie is the only person in British royal history to have headed up a PR campaign on behalf of Mr Blobby.
“At the time of her striking up a relationship with Edward [in 1993, after meeting at a charity photocall], everybody said Sophie was ‘the girl next door’, and they were really quite snobbish about her family,” says Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine. “It was unpleasant, but the Queen is the least snobbish person of them all, so she was immediately fond of her.” Indeed, media attention has dogged the courtship of both couples. Just as Prince Harry
‘As an aunt-type figure, there is nobody better to quietly guide Meghan than Sophie’
issued a statement, in November 2016, to declare that “it is not right that a few months into a relationship with him that Ms Markle should be subjected to such a [media] storm”, 23 years earlier his youngest uncle was writing to Fleet Street editors asking that they stop “destroying our private life and, more importantly, Sophie’s life”.
Sophie’s near six-year stint as Edward’s girlfriend and six-month engagement – a gruelling slog compared to Meghan’s whirlwind 18-month courtship – saw her endure many red-top snipes. Thanks to her looks and sense of humour, comparisons with Diana, Princess of Wales were inevitable and made her a media darling. Then topless photographs with Chris Tarrant, once her colleague at radio station Capital FM, emerged less than a month before her wedding. Two years later, it was the secret tapes from a News of the
World sting, in which she was recorded calling the Queen an “old dear”, that forced her to quit PR for good.
Since then, she has scarcely put a foot wrong. Her children, 14-year-old Lady Louise – born prematurely in 2003 – and James Viscount Severn, nine, are rarely in the public eye, but noted for their faultless behaviour on ceremony, while the family live a quiet life at Bagshot Park, a royal residence in the grounds of Windsor Great Park.
Having entered The Firm under a more hostile sisterhood than Meghan (in the Nineties, everyone had to win over the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, too), Sophie learned how to charm privately, and do what was asked of her publicly. Over the past 18 years, she has become patron to more than 70 charities and organisations, making hundreds of visits every year.
Not all have been mere ribboncutting, either. In 2016, she cycled 450 miles from Edinburgh to Buckingham Palace in aid of the Duke of Edinburgh Award, raising more than £160,000. Arriving in London after seven days of pedalling, the Lycra-clad Countess spoke, in her pleasingly un-windsorian RP, of the “lovely, lovely experience” she’d had.
Other causes close to her heart include disabilities, charities helping to prevent blindness in developing countries, the London College of Fashion and the 5th Batallion the Rifles, of which she is Royal Colonel. And when not in military camouflage or Spandex, she generally turns out at events wearing designs by Erdem, Emilia Wickstead and British couturier Bruce Oldfield. Quietly, she has built a reputation as one of the most stylish royals.
According to Seward, it is her work ethic that so enamours her to the Queen. In recognition, the monarch made Sophie a Dame Grand Cross of the Victorian Order in 2010. The Duchess of Cornwall had to wait until 2012 to receive the same honour.
“Sophie’s not a self-publicist. It’s not, ‘hey, look at me’, she just gets on with it, and the Queen really appreciates that,” Seward says. “She looks good, without being over-the-top, and she’s not craving celebrity.
You often wouldn’t know she had carried out all those engagements. The Queen once had her mother and Margaret, but now she can trust Sophie.”
In their spare time, the pair are said to have bonded over a shared interest in British military history, regularly poring over archives in the Round Tower at Windsor.
“She’s very much the Queen’s favourite, and you’ll notice that whenever there is a family holiday or gathering, Sophie and Edward often stay a while longer than the rest,” says Jobson.
It is the kind of relationship – not to mention the kind of public and private reputation – that Meghan surely hopes to have with her in-laws one day. Meghan’s place in The Firm is set; but whose example she follows is up to her. In the joint interview they gave upon announcing their engagement last month, Prince Harry made clear she was joining a collective effort. “It’s an added member of the family,” he said. “It’s another team player as part of the bigger team.” Sophie has broken into that team and made herself invaluable. Meghan could do worse than to follow her lead.
‘The Queen once had her mother and Margaret, but now she can trust Sophie’