The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Meghan Markle wanted a halo, not just ratings’
‘Megxit’ gets the Tina Brown treatment, packed with hair-raising one-liners and revelations from insiders – even Markle’s own father
THE PALACE PAPERS by Tina Brown 592pp, Century, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
You’ve got to hand it to Tina Brown – the awardwinning journalist sure knows how to tell a good story. Even when imparting information we already know, The Palace Papers is a compulsive read. Picking up where her 2007 bestseller The Diana Chronicles left off, she covers some of the same ground on the late Princess of Wales, before turning to more recent events. Beginning and ending with the Duchess of Sussex’s doeeyed appearance during her Oprah Winfrey interview – wearing Diana’s Cartier tennis bracelet, as well as equal lashings of black eyeliner – this is the well-connected Brown’s attempt to put “Megxit” in context.
In order to understand the “truth and the turmoil” inside the House of Windsor, you need to understand the Windsors themselves. The first part of the book is a whistle-stop tour through the first 50 years of the Queen’s reign, from her earliest interactions with Sir Winston Churchill to her sometimes testy relationship with her sister, Princess Margaret, and the back story of Charles and Camilla’s romance.
Some anecdotes inevitably have the ring of familiarity, but Brown gives credit where it is due, stitching together the best observations by the likes of Lady Glenconner and the Right Honourable Margaret Rhodes – two of the Queen’s besties. And there are still some surprises. Who knew, for example, that Marion “Crawfie” Crawford, Elizabeth and Margaret’s former nanny, was hoodwinked into writing the 1950 book, The Little Princesses, that saw her banished from the royal household? And while we know that the Queen and the Queen Mother refused to be in the same room as Camilla practically until the day of her wedding to Charles in 2005, were we aware that his three siblings were minded to write him a joint letter condemning his adulterous behaviour after the birth of Prince Harry? Or that the heir to the throne described his youngest brother, Prince Edward, as a “f---ing idiot” after his production company was caught filming at St Andrew’s University in 2001, despite a media blackout while Prince William was studying there?
Brown also serves up some classic one-liners. When Diana’s former
butler Paul Burrell was found with more than £4million of her possessions, including negatives of Charles, William and Harry in the bath, her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, apparently announced: “I hope his balls burn.” When Diana learnt James Hewitt had collaborated with Anna Pasternak’s Princess in Love exposé of their affair, she apparently told her friend Simone Simmons, the psychic: “I hope his cock shrivels up.”
And my personal favourite, Boris Johnson on meeting Prince Andrew: “I’m the last person to be a republican, but f---. If I ever have to spend another lunch like that, I soon will be.” (The “coroneted sleaze machine” is later described as spending two days holed up in his room at former US ambassador to the UK Walter Annenberg’s Palm Springs estate, “apparently watching porn”.)
Brown’s turn of phrase – honed by decades at the helm of Tatler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker – is also the stuff of scriptwriting dreams. Of Prince Philip’s closeness to Penny Romsey, she wryly observes: “The Queen seems to have decided that Romsey was necessary for her husband’s good humour.” Of HM’s relationship with her former racing manager Lord “Porchey” Porchester: “No one other than family enjoyed the same sort of intimacy with the Queen.”
But it is in her appraisal of Meghan Markle that Brown – like the Duchess, a fiercely ambitious networker – brandishes her credentials as an intuitive empath. While largely sympathetic to the American actress’s plight in a hierarchical system she barely came to understand, at last we have a balanced account of Megxit, rather than the one-sided word salad served up by the Sussex squadders behind the book Finding Freedom.
In her pre-Harry life, as well as being “absolutely focused on fame, celebrity, relevance” and “very, very effective with men”, Meghan “won a reputation among the marketeers of luxury brands of being
warmly interested in receiving bags of designer swag”. In 2011, when she met her stylist Jessica Mulroney, who is married to the son of a former Canadian prime minister, “it could not have escaped Meghan’s notice that a crucial factor in Jessica’s commercial leverage was her famous husband”. Before long, the Suits star “wanted a halo, not just ratings”.
Like a royal Relate counsellor, Brown analyses the relationships at the heart of The Firm. Harry and Meghan became “drunk on a shared fantasy of being the instruments of global transformation” and “couldn’t wait to cram down every cake offered on the celebrity buffet”. William and Kate, meanwhile, preferred a quiet night in. “When William got riled up, Kate calmed him down. When Kate was rattled by the press, William talked her through it. The Sussexes fuelled each other’s distrust of everybody else, and Harry’s wife was as temperamentally combative as he was.”
Brown is refreshingly unafraid to point out the financial imperative behind the Sussexes’ move to America. “The grating problem was money,” she insists. “Meghan wanted a paying job.”
Contrary to his media caricature as borderline-alcoholic trailer trash, Thomas Markle snr, who Brown has interviewed for the book and refers to as “Tom”, cannot fail to elicit sympathy, ghosted by the daughter he says he bankrupted himself to send to private school. Described by colleagues as “professional”, “kind”, “totally dependable”, “trustworthy” and with “a big heart”, the former Hollywood lighting director calls Harry “the snottiest man I’ve ever heard in my life”, having been berated by the prince over the phone while he was in his hospital bed, recovering from a heart attack.
With two of the three Ms that made up Megxit – Meghan and money – covered, the most revelatory part of The Palace Papers concerns that less well-understood factor: mental health. All credit to Brown for discovering that it was Harry’s former girlfriend Cressida Bonas who first encouraged the “angry” prince to see a therapist – and that he even turned to MI6 for advice. As a person close to Harry told Brown at the time: “There was a need for someone who would be incredibly discreet and who understood what it’s like to have a public version of your life and a private version of your life. Therapists at MI6, that’s what they do.” He did find a therapist, and later wrote to Bonas, Brown claims, thanking her.
But perhaps the saddest part of Brown’s story is that Harry remains at loggerheads with the two people who cared deeply about his mental wellbeing: William and Kate. It may be a coincidence that Brown lost her husband of 40 years, the celebrated Sunday Times editor Harold Evans, in 2020 as she was finishing the book – but grief features prominently in her analysis of what went wrong between the royal brothers.
When William cautioned Harry about rushing into a relationship with Meghan, Brown claims it was out of concern for his “mental fragility”, fearing he would not be able to handle the scrutiny she was about to face as the first woman of colour to marry into the Royal family. Harry apparently responded by saying: “The best way I can protect her is to marry her as quickly as possible because… she will then get police protection”, only seeming to confirm William’s worries that his brother still hadn’t processed their mother’s untimely death.
Brown’s conclusion that William has “found a way to accept both his destiny and his own complexity” arguably puts the monarchy in a better place than when Diana left it – but with an unmistakeable Harrysized hole at its heart.
Brown claims Cressida Bonas urged Harry to get a therapist – and he asked MI6 for advice