Throughout Prince Harry’s Spare, I was often left with the impression that Harry still has a hard time believing that much of the vitriol and hatred aimed at Meghan originated from royal quarters. While some of the smears were made up by a racist press machine, it was beyond clear (the whole time) that Kensington Palace, Clarence House and Buckingham Palace staffers were ALL in on it, with the implicit or explicit approval of their royal primaries. What Omid Scobie’s Endgame makes clear – in several chapters – is that KP leaked like a sieve and the all-white staff made it their mission to make Meghan’s life hell. Speaking of:
The book suggests that then-Prince Charles’ aides offered to help plan Prince Harry and Meghan’s wedding but were rejected by Harry, who feared details would leak via his father’s office. “‘Far too big for her boots,’ one of Charles’s staffers, a regular Daily Mail source at the time, moaned about Meghan. ‘Who does she think she is?’
“Just who does she think she is? This was a running theme throughout Meghan’s time as a working royal. Here was a woman who, in the eyes of many within the institution (consciously or unconsciously), wasn’t considered good enough to be part of it because of her class, her family, her ethnicity or her career history.
“This period was the birth of ‘Duchess Difficult’ one of the many nicknames given to Meghan by the Palace and tabloids over the years,” Endgame reads. “‘Me-gain’ (because it’s all about ‘me,’ a royal insider told society bible Tatler), ‘narcissistic sociopath,’ and ‘degree wife’ (this one supposedly by a senior royal because they felt her marriage would only last the length of a British university degree three years) are a few others. Inside the Palace was no different to a school playground, except this time the bullies had reporters on speed dial.”
The book details a barrage of criticisms Meghan faced in public but said it was “worse behind closed doors.”
“Some aides and staff found the name-calling funny,” Scobie wrote. “A few even believed Meghan got what was coming to her. One former aide shared with me that a colleague told them Meghan ‘kind of deserved it …for making our lives hell’ during the wedding planning.”
A former palace employee is quoted saying: “They basically meant she had opinions. People didn’t like that. They wanted Meghan to just go with everything that was suggested and not create any additional work. It was a combination of her not conforming with how women marrying into the family are expected to behave and certain individuals just being lazy.”
In early 2019, Meghan said she experienced suicidal thoughts while pregnant against the backdrop of a wave of negative articles about her and spoke to palace HR.
“Her supposedly ‘private’ meeting with Samantha Carruthers, the Palace’s head of HR, surfaced as Palace gossip within a matter of weeks,” Scobie wrote. “Various staff at Kensington Palace, Clarence House, and Buckingham Palace all tittle-tattled about Meghan’s personal crisis, and the chatter even reached some of the reporters in the royal rota.
“There were few who were sympathetic, and even fewer who did or said anything to help.” A former palace staffer told Scobie: “The feeling was that she needed to develop a thicker skin.”
“The institutional response was regrettably predictable,” Scobie wrote. “Instead of lending a hand, they gave her the company line, requiring her to demonstrate some of that clichéd stiff upper lip and suffer in silence, all part of a compulsory effort to protect the company brand.”
[From Newsweek]
Yep – so much of this (throughout 2018) was explicitly coming from palace staff, gleefully briefing the media about how much they hated Meghan and how she was “difficult” for merely… having opinions about her own wedding. I gave a little fist-bump when Scobie said outright that it was just a matter of laziness among KP staffers too – they were so used to their part-time royals barely doing anything at all, they seriously could not cope with a woman who (gasp) had opinions and didn’t want to do anything half-assed.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
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