Comment
DAN WOOTTON
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s biography is a massive own goal and proves their hypocrisy to the world
LET me start by cutting the crap and calling out the fibs surrounding Harry and Meghan’s biography Finding Freedom.
The author Omid Scobie is a fully paid up member of the Sussex fan club.
I don’t believe for a single second his weak claim that Harry and Meghan were not interviewed in some detail for this hagiography.
How else would we know Harry was drinking a beer and Meghan a martini on their first date sitting on velvet chairs at a private members club in Soho – and that they left the nibbles untouched?
But what’s so delicious in this whole PR debacle is that Harry and Meghan are proving their hypocrisy to the world.
Apparently, it’s OK for Meghan to sell stories to newspapers and set up paparazzi pictures in Canada when she was an aspiring TV actress, but it’s not alright for her to be photographed now she’s a Hollywood star and royal.
It’s OK for Harry to make bitchy comments about William via source quotes for a book, but it’s not alright for newspapers to run well sourced stories about the rows between the brothers.
It’s OK for Harry and Meghan to reveal the most intimate details about their private life and relationship, but it’s not alright for the public to want to know about it.
I would go so far as to say Finding Freedom is the most preposterous royal tell all in history.
Unlike Andrew Morton’s game changing Diana: Her True Story, there are no new bombshell revelations.
The desperate couple have simply allowed a former tabloid journalist to confirm a whole load of stories broken by tabloid journalists like me over the past four years, but spun with their own, often false narrative.
What’s most interesting to me is what Harry and Meghan have left out.
For example, in the published extract about the cold relationship between the duchesses there is no mention of the fact Kate raised with Meghan the rude way in which she was speaking to staff at Kensington Palace. I revealed years ago that’s what prompted early tension between the pair.
Harry and Meghan want to blame everyone else for what went wrong – rival members of the Royal Family, the establishment, the men in grey suits, racist Brits and, of course, the media.
Kate Middleton and Prince William hit back at claims Meghan Markle and Prince Harry felt shunned by Royal Family
As ever, they miss the fundamental point. Harry and Meghan were adored by the British public and our newspapers, especially The Sun.
But the Sussexes didn’t want reasonable, fair and, yes, at times, critical coverage. Instead, they wanted constant lavish praise.
When we started calling them out for hypocrisy like preaching to the public about our carbon footprints while taking four private jet flights in two weeks they didn’t like it.
They also didn’t like it when we started calling them out for wading into thorny political issues that are best left by members of a publicly funded and neutral monarchy.
There was not some great big conspiracy against this couple, like they have imagined up.
This book does them no favours – it’s a massive own goal that will further dent their popularity in the UK.
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