Meghan is said to have realised past mistakes – but Chris Riches asks if it will be too little too late.
Good things come to those who wait but Meghan Markle reluctantly apologising to Prince William and Princess Kate for past Royal Family slurs sadly leaves no winners. When Prince Harry and Meghan fled the UK in 2020, their eyes almost lit up with dollar signs as Hollywood saw something new. Two loose-lipped royals with a big axe to grind. Soon the big money offers were flying in, a £100m Netflix deal and ‘reveal all’ chats spilling Royal Family secrets were lined up. The Sussexes realised they could live a life of luxury as royal ‘whistleblowers’. For decades we have seen books – the sort Harry would have raged at for breaching his privacy – make public stories and conversations from within the palace.
But nothing has betrayed palace confidences more than Harry’s own 2023 memoir Spare – or the Sussexes’ TV interviews, such as the infamous ‘racist royal’ claims in 2021 to Oprah Winfrey. Meghan sparked a global witch hunt when she told Oprah’s millions of viewers how, when pregnant with Prince Archie, there were “conversations and concerns” at the Palace “about how dark his skin might be when he’s born”.
Harry chimed in to add: “That conversation, I am never going to share. At the time it was awkward, I was a bit shocked.” Both refused to name the speaker, thus tainting all the Royal Family with racism – although Harry later said he viewed the remark as “unconscious bias” rather than intentional, racist malice.
During the Oprah show Meghan also stuck her stiletto blade into Princess Kate by saying: “A few days before the wedding [Kate] was upset about the flower girl dresses and it made me cry,” before adding: “I’m not sharing that piece about Kate to be disparaging about her.”
Why exactly did you share it with the world then, if not to be disparaging? So if Meghan is set to apologise to William and Kate – as exclusively revealed by the Express last night – for remarks she has said then that is surely a good and helpful gesture.
But the timing is awful. It’s like apologising to a friend for a past slur, after discovering they have just won the lottery.
Why apologise now, after the rancour and upset has taken years to freeze friendships, set in and harden hearts? Is it simply that now she and Harry are back, it opens up more commercial and social avenues if she can be seen to be contrite, without ego, selfless and open to healing wounds?
If the apology is made public somehow, then if William and Kate do not respond it implies they are the ones unwilling to thaw relations. It makes life easier for Meghan among the Cotswolds set if she can tell mutual acquaintances “well, I have tried to apologise but William and Kate won’t have it…”
If Meghan was genuinely sorry she would not have waited five years to utter it.
Kate, William, Harry and Meghan before Spare was published