‘BUCK’ THIS! THEY SAY
The press and royals were Meghan her crazy for many years before Harry & wife ditched palace
Forget Megxit — this should really be called the Sussexodus.
Blaming Meghan Markle for Wednesday’s surprise announcement she and Prince Harry are stepping back as “senior” royals is supremely off the mark, experts say.
She’s not Yoko Ono or even Wallis Simpson but the wife of a man who’s struggled nearly his entire life with life in his fancy fishbowl.
“Everyone is putting the blame on Meghan, but I think it’s Harry too,” historian Marlene Koenig, editor of the popular Royal Musings blog, told the Daily News.
“He was only 12 years old when he lost his mom, and that can be traumatic. Prince
Charles got help for his sons, but maybe it wasn’t enough and he’s still struggling. He said after his military service that he thought about leaving the royal family.”
Indeed, the popular prince now known as the Duke of Sussex told Newsweek in 2017 that flying an Apache helicopter in Afghanistan gave him some of the greatest peace of his adult life.
“Being in the army was the best escape I’ve ever had,” he told the magazine. “I was one of the lads and could forget I was Prince Harry.”
And while his mother,, Diana, died in a car crash caused by a drunk chauffeur, he’s never forgotten the Paris paparazzi pursuing her at the time.
During his trip to Africa last fall with Meghan and baby Archie, he was clear that wound still “festers.”
“Every single time I see a camera, every single time I hear a click, every single time I see a flash, it takes me straight back,” he told ITV’s Tom Bradby.
He said it was “incredibly emotional” retracing his mom’s steps in Angola 22 years later — a journey Diana had done in her work against land mines — and said her legacy was shaping his decisions for his own wife and child.
“I will always protect my family, and now I have a family to protect. So, everything that she went through and what happened to her is incredibly raw, every single day, and that’s not me being paranoid, that’s just me not wanting a repeat of the past,” the prince said.
During their trip, Harry and Meghan announced their twin lawsuits against several of Britain’s top tabloids — Harry’s for phone hacking and Meghan’s for a breach of privacy involving publication of a private letter she sent her estranged father.
That came after Meghan was the subject of repeated coverage filled with coded or outright racist language that helped fuel vicious online trolling.
In one egregious example, a Daily Mail headline in November 2016 screamed, “Harry’s girl is (almost) straight outta Compton.”
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s sister Rachel Johnson, meanwhile, wrote in the Mail on Sunday that Meghan’s mother Doria Ragland was a “dreadlocked African-American lady from the wrong side of the tracks.” She also said
Meghan had “rich and exotic DNA.”
A respite came during gushing coverage of the couple’s March 2018 wedding, but soon the harsh treatment resurfaced.
Headlines a few months later linked Meghan’s name with terror suspect “Jihadi John” because she supported a community kitchen inside a local mosque. Never mind the mosque also hosted Prince Charles, Prince William and Theresa May.
A BBC radio host was fired last May after he tweeted an image that compared the couple’s newborn baby Archie to a chimpanzee.
“The criticism was horrible. Not only the racism, but the xenophobia,” Koenig told The News.
“The press has a lot to an
swer for in creating this situation,” she said. “They just kept piling it on, piling it on.”
Despite Prince Harry’s best intentions, his family’s nonpolitical palace has been largely mum, adopting the long-held mantra, “never complain, never explain.”
“I just don’t think [the palace] knew how to handle them,” Koenig said. “It’s sad. The Sussexes are a power couple.”
The Duke and Duchess made it clear Wednesday they’ve both had enough. In a major snub to the mainstream press, the couple announced they’re exiting the so-called Royal Rota system that essentially guarantees pool images of their events.
It’s an unprecedented break with royal protocol, like their intention to live at least part-time outside of the U.K.
In her own ITV interview during the Africa tour, Meghan admitted she’s struggled with her new life as a newlywed, mom and overnight princess.
Her eyes teared up as she agreed with Bradby things were far from a fairy tale.
“It’s not enough to just survive something. Right? That’s not the point of life. You’ve got to thrive. You’ve got to feel happy,” she said.
“I really tried to adopt this British sensibility of a stiff upper lip. I’ve tried, I really tried. But I think that what that does internally is probably really damaging,” she said.
One marriage expert cheered the couple for taking a break, especially after Harry, 35, watched his own parents’ marriage end in divorce, as did Meghan, 38.
“I think they’re doing the right thing. They’re prioritizing marriage and family over work and extended family,” Manhattan-based couples therapist Rachel Sussman told The News.
“It’s so important for a couple in the first few years, especially when a child is involved, to prioritize their relationship. They have to create a foundation, and anything that interferes with that could have long-term negative effects,” she said.
But other experts of the royal kind are hoping Harry and Meghan’s proposed divorce from their royal relatives doesn’t go through.
“It’s very sad for Britain if we lose them,” royal biographer Penny Junor told The News, calling Meghan and Harry a “completely golden couple” and Harry the “royal family’s secret weapon.”
“The problem is, the monarchy is a very strange institution, and we behave in a very strange way around them. We expect them to behave in a particular way, and Meghan could not be expected to understand the subtleties of that in a million years. I think she found that very difficult,” Junor said.
“I would like to see them change their minds. If you look back to the wedding, the British were ecstatic on that day,” she said. “I would like to see them have another go.”