How I saved Suits star from Cheryl’s ex and the VERY unroyal fate of a ... WAG wedding!
THE truth is that I had almost no idea who she was. Inconspicuous in a black wrap coat, dark jeans and highheeled boots, Meghan Markle was just another hopeful actress at the time – if one with a Hollywood smile.
But even when we met four years ago, she seemed determined to raise her profile – and that’s why she’d arranged to spend a cold November evening with me, angling for a mention or two in the newspaper.
Young, bright and energetic, she was doing well with a new role in US legal drama Suits, and was clearly going places.
Working our way through a bottle of prosecco at the rooftop bar of London’s Sanctum Soho Hotel, something else became clear, too – her keen interest in British men of a certain, well, standing.
Producing an iPhone from her handbag, she pointed to the picture of a good-looking man on her Twitter account, and said: ‘Do you know this guy, Ashley Cole?
‘He follows me and he keeps trying to talk to me on Twitter. He’s trying really hard.’ ‘I bet,’ I said calmly. She continued: ‘He wants to go out on a date while I’m over here in London. What do you think? Do you know him?’
Meghan was clearly flattered by the attention. Ashley Cole was, after all, a genuine football star earning more than £100,000 a week playing for Chelsea. An England international, at one point he had been considered the best left-back in the world.
As for his celebrity credentials, Cole had famously been married to Girls Aloud singer Cheryl. Yet he had also been chronically unfaithful – notoriously so.
It was just a few years earlier that the player had been unceremoniously dumped by Cheryl as a succession of mistresses came forward to share tawdry details of their liaisons.
So, as the evening progressed, I set her straight. Meghan seemed taken aback and quietly replied: ‘Thanks, I appreciate it. Some of my friends told me to stay away from him, too.’
Then she giggled: ‘I think I’ll leave it.’
We spent three hours together that night, with Meghan gulping down the fizz. We talked about boys, established that we were the same age, 32, both single and both unhappy that The One seemed so elusive.
She asked me about British men, and confided that she had recently got divorced from her husband, and now she was single and very much ready to mingle. I quizzed her about American men but she didn’t seem so keen on them.
As our night came to an end, we hugged and wished one another luck – not that she would need it. There was a sign of things to come, perhaps, even in the final moments of our time together.
Meghan’s berth that night was the nearby Soho House, which is run by Markus Anderson, rumoured to have helped introduce Meghan and Harry.
(It is understood that the royal romance developed in secrecy in sojourns at a number of Soho House branches around the world.) Meghan, however, was unable to find a taxi for the short trip through the wet London streets – and somehow persuaded the owner of the Sanctum to ferry her round there in his Aston Martin.
It is true that we barely knew each other even then and that I forgot her name soon afterwards.
But an entanglement with Ashley Cole?
I think that Meghan owes me a bottle of prosecco – and Harry, too.
Do you know this guy? He keeps messaging me and wants to go on a date