Meghan and Harry will tour Windsor on wedding day
Andrew Morton has new books on Wallis and Meghan but, he tells Harriet Alexander, he’ll always be known as Diana’s biographer
THEY have a lifetime of royal tours ahead of them as a married couple. But after saying their vows in front of the watching world in May, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will waste no time getting started.
Kensington Palace has announced the newlyweds will undertake a tour of Windsor as their first trip as man and wife, to greet well-wishers from all over the world who have come to see them.
Prince Harry and Ms Markle, who are planning their May 19 wedding themselves, have released a series of updates about their day, and how they hope to “share their celebrations with the public”.
Decisions include a carriage ride through Windsor, taking place straight after the St George’s Chapel ceremony and before their reception.
Kensington Palace announced that the wedding service, at St George’s Chapel at midday, will be conducted by The Dean of Windsor, The Rt Revd. David Conner.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev
Justin Welby, will, as expected, officiate as the couple make their marriage vows.
Even for a writer living just outside Hollywood, the latest plot twist in a real-life saga he has followed for more than three decades could not have been better imagined. Andrew Morton, the biographer whose 1992 book on Diana, Princess of Wales shook the Royal family to its foundations, was even more delighted than most when Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced their engagement in November.
“If you were sitting in a script office in Hollywood, and you said ‘give me a character that will make them [the Royal family] relevant for the next 100 years’, they [the ideas people] would have said: OK, she’s bi-racial, divorced and an actor.”
Was he rubbing his hands in glee at the prospect?
“It certainly adds another chapter,” says the Yorkshireman, with a wry smile.
Morton, 64, is at work on a book about Ms Markle, to be published in April. Announced in December, it’s a quick turnaround, but nowadays the former tabloid hack is helped by several assistants – and, he adds, it helps that he lives in the leafy Los Angeles enclave of Pasadena.
“This place is Meghan Central,” he says. “Pasadena. I could not have chosen a better place in the whole of the world to find out about her.
My wife [Carolyn, his second wife, whom he married in 2012] has lived here for years. So all the friends have kids that go to Immaculate High (her school), or St Francis (the boys’ equivalent). It’s like, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit.
“And it’s just amazing the number of people I know who know something about her.” Can he name names? “Buy the book!” he says, with a laugh.
I am with Morton to talk not just about Ms Markle, but about his latest book, Wallis in Love, a look at the life of Wallis Simpson, the last American to marry into the House of Windsor, which goes on sale tomorrow.
Morton became intrigued by Simpson while writing his first historical book, 2015’s 17 Carnations: The Royals, the Nazis and the Biggest Cover-up in History, which detailed Edward VIII’S worrying closeness to Hitler. In Wallis in Love, he analyses the Baltimore-born social climber, who drove the King to abdicate. It’s a fascinating story, whose enigmatic title purports to reveal that the one true love of her life was not Edward, but another man, Herman Rogers, her lifelong friend and confidant.
It was his favourite book so far to write, he says, though nothing he does is ever likely to eclipse Diana: Her True Story – In Her Own Words. That was, after all, the book that made him, despite – or perhaps because of – it causing a scandal at the time. One MP, Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, even called for Morton to be sent to the Tower of London. Billed as “her true story”, the book was a warts-and-all exposé, detailing the bulimia, the suicide attempts and the adultery – and only later was it revealed that the source for the book was the Princess herself: she had dictated answers to Morton’s questions via her friend James Colthurst. Morton is sanguine about the fact that, despite having written more biographies of non-royals than members of the House of Windsor – Tom Cruise, the Beckhams, Angelina Jolie and Monica Lewinsky among them – it is for the Diana book he will be remembered. “On my obituary it’s going to be ‘Princess Diana’s biographer’. And I accept that,” he says, sitting in the elegant bungalow where he spends his winters, with summers in London. His comfortable life is, perhaps, the life that Diana built – he still earns several hundred thousand pounds a year in royalties.
He has, he says, always found the Royal family interesting – he studied history at university, where he developed a fascination with aristocracies and elites, and later worked as a royal reporter at the Daily Star. After 10 years there, he was approached to write the Diana book.
He has no idea whether Princes William and Harry have read it, and suspects that, if they take their cue from their father, the Prince of Wales, they disapprove. Ms Markle, however, he believes has read it. It sat – friends have said – on her bookshelf in her Toronto home where she resided while filming Suits. And he thinks that Carole Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge’s mother, would be the exact demographic to appreciate the tome. “I always feel that someone like [her] was a Diana fan,” he says. “She’s of the demographic, in her late fifties, early sixties, that would have read it and so I’m quite sure that she was going to protect her daughter from anything coming down the pipe.”
In some ways, perhaps, the 25-yearold book serves as a guide for both the Duchess of Cambridge and Ms Markle. The Princess of Wales was candid about the challenges of the role, and open about the difficulties of life as a member of “the firm”.
He laughs at the thought of it serving as a guidebook. “Perhaps,” he agrees. “Certainly with the whole backlash from the Diana embriolague [sic], if that’s the word, it gave William permission to marry whomsoever he wished. And take his time over it. And nobody was going to say, well you should be marrying an aristocrat from blah di blah.”
Prince Harry, he says, was even more determined to do his own thing.
“There are no raised eyebrows at Buckingham Palace, as there is no room for that. I think the difference is that Harry has been absolutely gung-ho about Meghan.
“William and Kate split up, didn’t they, there was a chink of daylight there. So there was an opportunity for people who were perhaps ambivalent about her to make their feelings known. With Harry, he hasn’t left a chink of light.”
He laughs when asked about the stories of an alleged rivalry between the Duchess of Cambridge and Ms Markle.
“I took a bet on when the first headline will come out: ‘Sisters-inwar’,” he says. “And I said April. So, note to sub-editors – get going.
“Kate is, at the end of the day, going to be queen. But she is sensible enough to know that everybody is fascinated by Meghan because she’s an unknown quantity. [Meghan has] done a few engagements. She has the glamour and mystery of a Hollywood star. At some point she’ll become part of the furniture, and there’ll be a sort of levelling.”
‘By letting Meghan and Kate in, the Queen has ensured the dynasty will go on for a long, long time’
The Queen, he is sure, is delighted. “I think the Queen will be doing cartwheels,” he laughs. “Backflips. At the fact that she has assured the dynasty – which is what the job of the monarch is to do. She’s ensured it will go on for a long, long time. I’ve spoken to people at the Palace about this who say exactly the same thing. That by letting Meghan in and Kate in and all the rest of it, she’s established a pedigree of people who are prepared to devote their lives to the Crown.”
Quite different, then, from Wallis Simpson?
“I think the huge difference between [Meghan and Wallis] is that Meghan has lived by the philosophy of giving back. And I think that the tragedy for both the Duke and Duchess of Windsor is that, apart from some degree of war work in Nassau in the Bahamas, they never gave back.”
Does Morton think Ms Markle and Simpson share in their ambition?
“Of course she [Meghan] is ambitious. And she’s a networker. She carved this out for herself,” he says.
Does he expect the Meghan tome to cause a similar sensation to the Diana book?
Ever the tabloid hack, he chuckles. “I hope so.”
Wallis in Love (Michael O’mara, £20) is published tomorrow. Read Meghan and Mrs Simpson by Andrew Morton in the Telegraph Magazine this Saturday