The Sunday Times’ haphazard cover-up piece on the Thomas Markle situation was fascinating. The Times managed to have some sympathetic coverage of the Duchess of Sussex while simultaneously platforming some truly nonsensical ass-covering from the Met Police, King Charles and Kensington Palace. As the British media’s forced sympathy for Meghan dissipates, they have to walk a fine line between not-exactly-blaming her but still trying to act like Meghan was the sole party in this situation with a duty to act. Running parallel to that effort, the press is calling bullsh-t on the idea that Charles, Prince William and KP staffers knew nothing. Let’s see how Robert Jobson walks this tightrope:

The Met Police did nothing: Seven years ago, police officers, whose job it is to protect the royals, received a warning about Markle Snr. In January 2019, a letter arrived at the Met’s Royalty and Specialist Protection Command, setting out serious allegations about Markle’s disturbing behavior abroad. The officers read it and passed it to the office of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, then part of the royal household. And then what? As far as anyone can tell, nothing. The Met has now admitted it never shared the allegations with any other police force, anywhere. It beggars belief! The force is reviewing how it handled the whole thing and has referred itself to the police watchdog. Frankly, it should.

Jobson doubts the information was limited to the Sussexes: Surely, this information was not confined to the Sussexes. Surely the King, then Prince of Wales, would have been informed. A protection officer doesn’t sit on something like this. Nor does a private secretary. It is unthinkable that the Palace wasn’t told. So, why did they not react? And if it really was kept from them, who made that crazy call? There’s a whole apparatus around the royals to see trouble coming and steer it away from the Crown. Why didn’t they see this one?…Here the letter wasn’t even hidden. It was handed to them. Either the system knew and sat on its hands, or it failed at the one thing it exists to do. Which is worse is anyone’s guess.

Why wasn’t there a more thorough background check on Thomas Markle? There’s been a lack of procedure here, a lack of observation, a lack of questioning from all sides. Royal Household staff are security-cleared by the Palace’s own Security Liaison team, working with the Metropolitan Police, with checks run against MI5 records. Surely there must be some basic checks on anyone marrying into the royal family and on their family too? If no checks were done, why not? Of course, they might not have found much when Prince Harry and Meghan got engaged in November 2017. Markle had no criminal record and a storied career in Hollywood having won a couple of Emmys for his work as a lighting director on ABC’s long-running soap opera General Hospital and hit sit-com Married… With Children. But that letter in January 2019 changed things. After that, somebody should have been asking questions, and it doesn’t look like anyone bothered. The lesson for the future is simple enough. Anyone marrying into the royal family should be properly checked and so should their family and their background.

Prince William was right to be suspicious of Meghan! Remember William’s warning. In Spare, Harry said his brother told him the romance was going too fast, too soon. Harry was livid. It was the start of the rift. William couldn’t have known about any of this. The letter hadn’t then been sent. But he wasn’t wrong. Slow down and know who you’re marrying into. They called it snobbery at the time. I would call it common sense.

What Meghan & Harry said about Thomas in their Netflix series: Then there’s the Sussexes’ odd own version of events. In December 2022, nearly four years after that letter reached their office, the Netflix series Harry & Meghan came out. When focus fell on Meghan’s falling-out with her father, the blame was firmly put on the press: the staged paparazzi photos, the intrusion. Harry even took the blame on himself. If Meghan wasn’t with him, he said, her dad would still be her dad. Did he just forget about the letter? Not one word about the allegations. A month later Harry’s memoir was published and he had a go at just about everyone; his brother, his father, his stepmother. He told us things about himself I’d rather not have known. But not one mention of this.

Meghan’s October statement: Last week Meghan finally spoke. She says she learned of the allegations years ago and was told they were being investigated. She says that was part of why she kept her father away from Archie and Lilibet. I understand that completely. Most parents would have done the same. But it’s not what we were told. We were told the press drove a wedge between a father and his daughter. Now it turns out, on her own account, there was something else behind it, and she kept quiet while newspapers took the flak. I’m not calling anyone a liar. But we were presented with half a story, and it’s a funny thing that the half we got put the press in the dock. And who told her it was being investigated? The Met says it never passed it to any other police force. So, who was doing the investigating? Did anybody check? Did the Sussexes ever chase it?

[From The Daily Mail]

Let’s play along with Jobson for a moment and imagine a scenario where Meghan was the first one to say it in the public sphere: “I stopped talking to my father after his ex-wife accused him of being a PDFile.” First of all, that would be false, because Meghan stopped speaking to him months earlier, when he did everything he could to derail her wedding, and he went on a tour of British talk shows, parroting deranged talking points. Second of all, Meghan was getting her own legal advice about what she could say about these accusations, which everyone should remember were JUST accusations at that point. Meghan is not a police detective. She cannot command a police force to investigate her father. She believed, in good faith, what she was told, which is that the Met Police would look into her already-estranged father’s activities. She was ALSO upset about everything Thomas had done before the letter, up to and including his collusion with the British media.

It’s interesting that Jobson doesn’t buy the cover-up that no one else in the institution knew about the letter, nor does he buy that the cops just sat on their hands. The part about William being right to be suspicious of Meghan… my god. Let’s hold everyone else to that standard, shall we? Why did William marry into a family with a wife-beating uncle and a debt-ridden grifter mother? Why did Meghan marry Harry, given his uncle trafficked girls with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell? Why does anyone want to get involved with the Windsors, given King Charles’ lengthy associations with known child predators?

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.