Tom Bower

Betrayal

Bekki

‘It’s just really hard to see that she’s ever really been a leader of anything other than her own image creation.’

‘She’s tone-deaf to others,’ Robertson realised. ‘She just can’t do what we wanted. She’s toxic.’ Every organisation inviting the Sussexes, she concluded, would need to factor in disappointment and an inevitable storm. At the end of Meghan’s speech, the audience clapped politely.

She hated people who refused to recognise her importance, and wished to destroy those standing in her way to stardom.

The Queen was not surprised by Young’s report that the Sussexes weren’t coming back: ‘Of course not. They took the dogs.’

In London, Princess Anne predicted to a friend exactly what would follow. Meghan, she said, was gripped by ‘red carpet fever’. Nothing, it seemed, would deter her search for the spotlight.

Caught between his editors and Harry, Moehringer became ‘exasperated’: ‘My head was pounding, my jaw was clenched, and I was starting to raise my voice,’ wrote Moehringer. He explained to Harry, ‘Strange as it may seem, a memoir isn’t about you. It’s a story carved from your life, a particular series of events chosen because they have the greatest resonance for the widest range of people.’250 Harry was probably mystified. ‘But is it all true?’ an editor asked. ‘Factual errors,’ replied Moehringer, ‘can’t exist in an autobiography.’ Harry’s memory, Moehringer knew, was self-serving and faulty. Not least because he had learned from therapy that facts don’t matter. Only Harry’s version of the truth counted. In his mind, subjective belief cancelled out irrefutable facts.

For Harry, being with his grandmother was the prize he sought in order to reassert his credibility for both his book and the Netflix series. 

Meghan is a product of her own era, in that she has the entitlement of a celebrity but the talents of a nobody . . . Against the odds she found her way to the royals, the perfect pedestal for a narcissist.’278

‘Your case’, Green told Harry, ‘is based on total speculation without any evidential basis whatsoever.’ 

Harry blinked. It’s likely that no one had ever spoken to him in public like that before.

Joining the gunfire, Jeremy Zimmer, the chief executive of United Talent Agency, was blunt: ‘Turns out Meghan Markle was not a great audio talent, or necessarily any kind of talent.’ 

One commentator twisted the knife: ‘Just because you’re famous doesn’t make you great at something.’

Betrayal quotes

Join the club