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Meghan the narcissist gets her day in court, but she’s too blind to see she’s already lost
Camilla Long
Sunday April 26 2020, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
The trial of the decade kicked off on Friday morning, with much excited fiddling online — a pre-trial hearing conducted, “trickily”, on Microsoft Teams. In one window, the duchess’s little Italian waiter QC appeared, with a plume of glossy turkey hair. In another, there was the silent, clipped, gravedigger QC for the defence, representing The Mail on Sunday and its case for printing Thomas Markle’s letter. Both were in rooms that had been blurred out, while the purring judge — a man not unlike Alan Rickman — sat in a normal Harry Potter panelled courtroom.
Along with 80 or so other journalists, I watched the whole thing from start to finish. It felt vast and important, like Leveson part two. At one point, it lookedless like a trial of the matter at hand and more like a
trial of the press in general. If Prince Harry has his way, it will be a monstrous, all-consuming, neverending rapture: a terrible reckoning, a Book of Revelation for the people he hates. For Meghan it will involve an end-times level of self-promotion and publicity. Guess what? She will take the stand. It is their dream circus.
Be in no doubt: this is a circus. It seemed astonishing to me that these skilled and pre-eminent men, with 100 years of experience between them, should waste any time discussing a story of such effervescing Marie Antoinettish frippery and thin-skinned triviality. There was talk of “post-Naomi Campbell jurisprudence” and a comic moment when they stopped to consider whether Meghan’s “favourite snack”, avocados, fuelled “human rights abuses, drought and murder”. That was before we got to the 75 pages of articles that had displeased the couple. First impression: neither the duchess nor Harry can take criticism.
Second impression: for someone who doesn’t like to talk about her private life, the duchess sure does want to talk about it. Before this trial, we knew little about her relationship with her grim Honey Bear father; now there’s little we don’t. The hearing made reference to a whole 33 further pages of mostly personal content she made available 10 days ago, including texts to her father from Meghan and Harry before their wedding.
The messages add absolutely nothing. In one, she appears concerned for her father’s “health and safety”. In another, she seems most interested in getting “security” to the hospital where he’s just had heart surgery, presumably to stop him talking to the press. So why release them? Perhaps to provide a mirage of openness, give the impression she’s happy to lay it all out when she isn’t. If anything, the couple come across as unhealthily obsessed with the press and their own image.
But then, the duchess is someone who thinks she can win at anything; be the centre of all attention; have the moral upper hand in any dispute. Her own ego blinds her; it even blinds the people working for her, like her
poor QC struggling to keep up with the vastness of her pompous submissions. I am no fan of the royal family, and in many ways I’d hoped she would expose them as the pale, stale charisma vacuums they are, but at least they have the humility to know when to stop, instead of throwing themselves into this extraordinary trial and its ramifications — the hundreds of pages of overshare, plus the added negative publicity that will never end.
Who wins is irrelevant — in many ways she has already lost. There will be a day’s headlines if she prevails after two, three, even four weeks of lashing stories about her destructive ambition and unedifying obsession with her image. Meanwhile she is reducing the pair of them to supermarket magazine fodder, telling Harry he’s getting better, when he is in fact getting worse. She will brush the whole trial aside as yet another injustice, whatever happens: “See what they made me do,” she will say, by way of explaining the roomfuls of dirty linen about to be laundered. It’s as mad as a box of prancing kippers.
By the end of it, Harry will secretly wish to go back to the relative anonymity of being a royal, living in peace at Frogmore, able to fully disappear once he’s clocked out of the day’s work, just like a normal person would. Royals are the most anonymous celebs in the world — Prince William, for example, lives in obscurity. We don’t know where he buys his clothes, gets his food, even where he goes on holiday. He had a whole job and none of us knew anything about it. As he appeared outside his house on Thursday to clap the NHS, I realised I didn’t even know whether he would like his own front door. All those riches, and all that power and no effort — it is the dream, and Harry is probably already missing it.