Meghan & Diana

Royal biographer Andrew Morton on why following the ‘Princess Diana playbook’ has backfired on the Duchess of Sussex

Is Meghan really the new Diana? George Clooney certainly thinks so. Speaking in Los Angeles this week, he described how his friend, the Duchess of Sussex, was being “pursued and vilified” to the point where history is in danger of repeating itself – and “we’ve seen how that ends”.

Sarah, Duchess of York has now added her two penn’orth. Writing in Hello! magazine this week, she complained that the Duchesses of Cambridge and Sussex have become online targets of a vile social media culture that pits one against the other. This relentless celebrity death match echoes the way she and the late Diana, Princess of Wales were endlessly and unfairly compared. That her comments came in the week that American television channel TLC broadcast a show entitled Kate v Meghan merely underlined her point.

The latest attacks on the seven-month pregnant Duchess also carry a hint of racism – at least according to Yomi Adegoke, author of Slay in Your Lane. “She was criticised for being too nice, too pregnant, too Hollywood,” she wrote in The Washington Post. “Black people in Britain knew what this really meant: all codes for being too black.” Hmmm. Let’s unpack this, as they say on CNN. The latest controversy surrounding the Duchess of Sussex flared this week after five of her friends spoke anonymously to People magazine, where they addressed the media characterisation that Meghan has become “Duchess Difficult”; namely a bossy bride, a bossy boss and an uncaring daughter. They described how Meghan has, for the last two years, silently endured the “lies and untruths”. Now the falsehoods have become intolerable: “We worry about what this is doing to her and the baby. It’s wrong to put anyone under this emotional trauma, let alone when they’re pregnant.”

Let’s set aside for a moment Meghan’s declaration during her engagement interview with Prince Harry that she would ignore the media – “I made the choice not to read anything negative or positive” – and look at how uncannily Meghan’s post-wedding narrative mirrors that of the late Diana, Princess of Wales.

Like Diana before her, the Duchess has been blamed for the premature departure of royal staff, including private secretary Samantha Cohen, who is leaving after 17 years of royal service, her personal assistant Melissa Touabti and her female Scotland Yard bodyguard. A Scotland Yard source explained that for someone like Meghan, who wants to be seen as “one of the people”, round-the-clock security was “quite constraining”.

Just as Meghan has quickly morphed from Duchess Dazzling to Duchess Difficult, so in a matter of months Diana was transformed from fairy-tale princess to a “fiend and a monster”. She was blamed for what was gleefully described as “malice at the palace”, the departure in quick succession of many of Prince Charles’s long-serving staff including his private secretary, valet and Scotland Yard bodyguard. At one royal engagement, the exasperated princess told veteran royal watcher, the late James Whitaker: “I am not responsible for any sackings. I don’t just sack people.”

Similarly, Diana and her friend Sarah Ferguson were defined throughout the Eighties by their fashion rivalry; so too are Kate and Meghan. But the new generation of royals has also to contend with what Fergie described as the “sewer” of social media, where “bullying, sniping, bitching, even the most appalling sexism, racism and homophobia are commonplace”.

Of course, royal fashion rivalry is nothing new, especially in a culture where women, especially royal women, were and are defined by what they wear, and royal men by what they say and do. When Edward VIII abdicated to marry twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson, she used fashion as a weapon to make her own silent but nonetheless cutting comment about the House of Windsor and her disdain for the Queen, later Queen Mother. The sleek duchess, who was regularly voted the world’s best-dressed woman, went for sharp, tailored styling, dismissing her royal rival, whom she dubbed “Cookie”, for her flowery, floaty outfits.

To her credit, Meghan has used the fascination with her fashion to support labels of ecologically and ethically minded designers, as well as companies that incorporate a philanthropic element into their enterprise.

So it must have come as a shock for Meghan when, after enjoying so much laudatory coverage, she has faced her first media frost this winter.

Much icy chatter focused on rumours concerning her wedding. She reportedly requested that air fresheners be used to rid the 15thcentury St George’s Chapel of its “musty” smell; that she and Kate had a spat over Princess Charlotte’s dress; while the Queen herself intervened when Meghan had thrown a tantrum over which tiara she was going to wear.

It is easy to picture the scene at Kensington Palace, where a