The Mail’s Richard Kay had a somewhat interesting piece this weekend, all about the Duchess of Sussex and her disgusting father. Kay latched onto the Mail’s exclusive reporting about Thomas Markle’s now-abandoned storage unit in Mexico, a unit which contained boxes of depraved material. Kay pointed out that the Mail’s discovery of this material proves that the accusations about Thomas are not simply an interfamily dispute, that they are based on evidence and facts. Kay then expounds about how the more they learn about Thomas, the more sympathy everyone has for Meghan. Which… is interesting, given the hum of “how can we twist this to make it Meghan’s fault?”

His home in Rosarito played a key part in the Harry and Meghan story. It was where Markle, an award-winning former Hollywood lighting director, lived a reclusive life in a gated community. And it was where he found himself dragged into the global fascination with the relationship between his daughter and the late Queen Elizabeth’s grandson. He famously – and foolishly – collaborated with a photographer to manufacture pictures of himself preparing for the royal wedding. Humiliated when it was exposed as a stunt, he then declined to attend the wedding, having suffered a heart attack. The relationship with his daughter never recovered.

But as, little by little, more unsavoury details about Markle’s private life emerge, it is hard not to feel sympathy for Meghan and to understand why she has sought to put so much distance between herself and the Markle clan.

In retrospect, how relieved she must be that there are no wedding photographs of her and the Royal Family smiling with the man now engulfed in such seedy and squalid allegations. Had he led his daughter up the aisle of St George’s Chapel in 2018, Thomas Markle would have been in all the official pictures, almost certainly sitting on the front row with his daughter, the then Prince Charles, the Queen and Prince Philip. How toxic such images might look today.

Might this even explain some of her curious decisions to protect her children’s privacy by, for example, not posing with Prince Archie when he was born in 2019? We now know that four months before her son’s birth, Meghan was shown a letter – written by her father’s first wife, Roslyn Loveless – in which she is said to have warned a specialist police unit that assesses threats to royals and public figures about Markle’s apparent proclivities.

This letter is thought to have been shared with other senior officers close to the Royal Family, before it was subsequently ‘lost’ by the authorities. Now, of course, it is at the centre of another row involving Scotland Yard, which has reported itself to the police watchdog for its alleged failure to alert other law enforcement agencies about the message’s contents.

It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that, had the Yard done its job at the time, Mexican and US authorities might have investigated Markle seven years ago. Instead, it has fallen to the Daily Mail to uncover his sleazy secrets. Imagine Meghan’s distress at receiving such news while preparing to become a mother for the first time. With the benefit of hindsight, that disclosure is significant. She had always described herself as a ‘daddy’s girl’: that letter must have brought her world crashing down.

In this light, one exchange on the Oprah Winfrey sofa during that notorious 2021 interview may need to be reconsidered. Speaking about her estrangement from Markle, she observed: ‘I grieve a lot. I mean, I’ve lost my father.’

Now viewed in the light of the Mail’s shocking discovery, Meghan’s shielding of her children – including the refusal to issue newborn pictures and to continue to obscure their faces even as she posts pictures of them online – takes on a different and more nuanced complexion. Can we honestly say that private christenings, the obscured photographs and their absence from royal pageantry were necessarily proof that she was, as some critics insisted, ‘Duchess Difficult’? Instead, perhaps we now see a mother determined to build a wall around her family, protecting her young children from dark, sinister secrets despite relentless pressure.

Meghan, it seems to me, placed family before royal duty. Given what we now know, who really could fault her? For the King, this latest salvo of disclosures will also call for some recalibrating. There will certainly be no blame from Buckingham Palace that the allegations have overshadowed his important tour of the Caribbean. They are not Meghan’s fault.

He will naturally feel a Christian duty to offer her and Harry his support. Whether that translates into reconciliation and reintegration with the rest of the Royal Family, and in particular the Prince and Princess of Wales, remains to be seen.

‘There will be considerable sympathy for Meghan but that alone will not eradicate how family members feel she and Harry have behaved,’ says a close figure. The other question, of course, is whether public attitudes will soften, too.

[From The Daily Mail]

“In retrospect, how relieved she must be that there are no wedding photographs of her and the Royal Family smiling with the man now engulfed in such seedy and squalid allegations…” I mean, the Windsors and the British media did everything they could to get Thomas Markle into England so he could ruin the wedding. That was a major play, and it was not limited to the actions of a few tabloid journalists. Kay is whitewashing the British media’s role in creating Thomas Markle as well – of course there are extremely valid questions about what the Windsors knew and when (and why they didn’t do anything about it), but those exact questions could be and should be asked of tabloid editors and reporters and Piers Morgan and every TV show which gave Thomas a platform and a hate-script. And all of this “recontextualizing Meghan” is… odd. Meghan’s behavior was always perfectly reasonable and understandable IN REAL TIME. Y’all just hated every single thing about her. “She doesn’t want to show her kids’ faces, now we understand why!” It’s absolutely bonkers that the entirety of the British media is this invested in seeing Archie and Lili.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.