Don’t fall out with Kate, Meghan... she’ll be the boss one day
PUT yourself for a moment in Megh an Mark le’ s £1,000 Manolo Blahnik pumps. You’ve landed the biggest role of your life. The whole world is your stage. Forget about the fourmillion who tuned into Suits each week – now billions are watching.
They’re agog at your every utterance, each natty little outfit, the constant caressing of your (barely there) bump, and how your puppy- dog eyes are permanently locked on to Harry, the nation’s favourite son. This is the greatest gig ever, so you’re not about to blow it.
A dynamic backroom team is corralled. High-powered meetings with crisp agendas are set. Empowering speeches solemnly written as your credentials as humanitarian, philanthropist and feminist are polished to a perfect sheen.
You’ve said you ‘want to make a tangible impact… this kind of work feeds my soul’.
So you swept into this fusty old dynasty like a human whirlwind. Cripes, I feel exhausted just writing about it.
When you joined the cast of The Firm you were billed as a breath of fresh air. Biracial, divorced, glittering career – a modern woman who had already lived a life.
What you hadn’t anticipated is that the Royal Family hates to be upstaged. Your worldliness, a need to publicly address hotbutton issues like abortion, has got courtiers reaching for the smelling salts.
In the change-averse Palace corridors, the passion, zeal and determination you displayed to make it in Hollywood are not attributes to be celebrated. When you became HRH the Duchess of Sussex, your previous title ‘MSH’ Markle (Make S*** Happen) should have been retired.
Firing off emails to staff at 5am may be an efficient way to get results while you’re on the set of a TV show, but in the polite ‘would you mind awfully if…’ world you now inhabit, they risk coming across as domineering and controlling.
Perhaps it was waking to one of those ‘helpful’ emails that cost you not one, but three members of staff in only six months. But as you’ve said: ‘It’s always been important to me to be vocal about what I feel is right.’
That explains why you incurred the displeasure of the Palace by asking for air fresheners to improve the ‘musty’ atmosphere of St George’s Chapel – where successive monarchs have worshipped since 1475 – before your wedding.
Then there’s the rest of the family. Dear, dignified, demure sister-in-law Kate who hasn’t put an LK Bennett-clad foot wrong in the 17 years she’s been in harness. She’s been a faithful servant to the Crown. She has produced heirs, buoyed up our future
AFRIEND recently attended a dinner where both were present and was struck by how unlike each other they were. While Kate’s regal reserve came across as stiff, Meghan was all chatty chumminess. Ultimately, the challenge facing Meghan is whether she can change the Royals – or whether they’ll change her. In the 12 months since her engagement, she has shaken up The Firm, encouraged to challenge the status quo by her besotted husband.
Right now she’s winning, not least because she enjoys the approval and indulgence of the Queen and Prince of Wales, who are both taken with her. But she needs to tread carefully. It’s William and Kate – our future King and Queen – who will one day be running the show.
So making an enemy of Kate and driving a wedge between two brothers who have supported each other unflinchingly through tragedy and turbulence is asking for double trouble.