Is it any wonder that Meghan cut ties with her family?
Like a piece of toilet paper that clings persistently to the end of a shoe, or a barnacle gripped tightly to the side of a ship, Meghan Markle’s father, Thomas Markle, simply refuses to go away.
Markle (76) has already gifted us with a tell-all documentary — Thomas Markle: My Story — but apparently he has a lot more to say.
The retired TV lighting director is currently working on another documentary, this time about his own life. “It begins with my life, my family, my love of theatre and television and how I got there,” he told The Sun. “Then my life with Meghan, growing up, her school days until she went off to college, and when her career began.”
Thomas’s other daughter, Meghan’s half-sister, Samantha Markle, has also been kept busy with The Diary of Princess Pushy’s Sister: Part 1.
The ‘mémoire’ (for some inexplicable reason, she opted for the French spelling of the word) is set to be released in the US next month, and Samantha promises to dish the dirt on a woman she hasn’t seen since 2008.
Meanwhile, Meghan’s halfbrother, Thomas Markle Jnr, is making sure the gravy train doesn’t leave without him. He recently blamed Meghan for his unemployment and homelessness, saying he can’t get a new job “because of the notoriety of being related to the duchess”.
The Markle family will not go down quietly — they made that clear the moment Meghan (39) entered royal life. Thomas Markle Snr profited from staged paparazzi photos in which he prepared for a wedding that he wasn’t invited to.
Samantha Markle will appear on any talk show that will have her. Thomas Markle Jnr seems to think he’s entitled to some form of compensation for a lottery he didn’t win.
And yet, despite these blatant displays of avarice, vanity and vindictiveness, there are still people who use Meghan’s family breakdown as a stick to beat her with.
Meghan’s critics have created a narrative that justifies their deep-seated bias. They need to establish a credible reason for their irrational aversion, and the only thing they can find is her estranged family.
Critics of Meghan tend to hone in on her personal relationships, as if it offers some sort of insight into her moral development. The trouble is that they never put it into context.
Yes, she only invited one family member to her wedding, but perhaps it had something to do with the fake paparazzi photos Thomas Markle Sr staged in the lead-up to her big day. Yes, she no longer speaks to her father, but perhaps it has something to do with his shameless piggybacking and grotesque yearning for fame.
It’s clear that Meghan’s family wants their pound of flesh, yet Meghan’s critics prefer to push that inconvenient truth aside and focus instead on the narrative of the cold-hearted, upwardly mobile ‘Princess Pushy’. They know the facts but they much prefer headlines about the family members she cut ties with and the friends she apparently pushed aside.
In recent months we’ve heard from the childhood sweetheart that Meghan “ghosted”. Apparently we should all still be in contact with the people we went out with in our teens.
We’ve also heard from a laundry list of Meghan’s former ‘friends’ who believe they were erased from her life once she joined the royal family. It transpires that their definition of friendship is a chance meeting at a charity gala event and/or a few polite texts.
It’s really only a matter of time before we hear from the DHL delivery guy who thought he had a connection with Meghan and the friend from crèche who still regrets sharing her Crayola with her…
It’s easy to frame Meghan as someone who wants to erase her past and disentangle herself from extraneous relationships. But perhaps we should consider the principles of the people she has removed from her life before we consider their removal as evidence of her supposed callousness.
If a person is willing to cash in on a relationship — or lack thereof — well then there mustn’t have been much of a relationship there to begin with. And if a woman extricates herself from her family, well, you can be pretty sure she’s given it a lot of thought.