Kay: Princess Diana would have found Meghan ‘intriguing’ & ‘slightly liberating’

Most royal reporters and royalists twist Princess Diana’s memory to suit their own narrow purposes, imagining how Diana would have responded to various royal scenarios in vacuum-sealed hypotheticals. The reality is, both Prince William and Prince Harry would be radically different people had Diana lived. Her life would have had a butterfly effect not only on her sons, but on the Windsors and Britain entirely. The royalists want to pluck certain situations out and emphatically declare that Diana would have thought this or that about Prince Harry’s choice of wife/partner. They’re missing out on the better hypothetical: how quickly would Diana have cut Carole Middleton down to size? But I digress. I went into this latest commentary thinking it would be yet another “Diana would have hated Meghan” screed, but I was pleasantly surprised. Richard Kay has maintained, for some time now, that he believes Diana would have been proud of Harry for moving to America and that Diana would not have hated Meghan. Some highlights:

Richard Kay claims he was good friends with Diana: Richard Kay, the Editor at Large for the Daily Mail, has reported on the Royal Family since the 1980s, becoming Diana’s close friend ‘in the last five or six years of her life’. The pair would go for dinner, watch films at the cinema and take scenic drives along the Norfolk coast where the late Princess of Wales grew up. Indeed, Richard and Diana were so close that he was the last person she called before her tragic death in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris.

Kay was asked about what Diana would have thought about Meghan: Writing in the comments of the Daily Mail Royals YouTube channel, a viewer by the name of Debster asked: ‘About how long after meeting Meghan Markle would she [Diana] have sent her packing? I think five minutes, tops.’ Taking off his glasses, Richard said he had to ‘disagree’ with Debster. ‘None of us really know,’ he said. ‘But I think there is something about Meghan that Diana would have found not just intriguing but slightly liberating. I think she would have liked Meghan’s independence and the fact that she was able to offer Harry an escape route, if you like, from royal duty.’

Kay goes on to say that Diana would have hated her sons’ estrangement: But Diana’s close friend was also quick to point out just how ‘disappointed’ she would have been by ‘how things panned out’ between her sons. ‘I think she would have admired Harry’s decision to settle in America,’ Richard clarified. ‘She wouldn’t have admired, however, the rift with William…I think she would have been very disappointed by how things panned out but I think initially she would have been very welcoming to [Meghan]. That’s my view.’

Diana wanted to live in the US: ‘She talked about it right at the very end of her life to me – about settling for a time in the U.S,’ he said. ‘She loved the U.S. I think that if she could, she would have moved there and lived there.’ But what was holding Diana back? Richard believes it was her commitment to William and Harry who were 15 and 12 respectively at the time of her death. ‘She couldn’t just abandon them – they were young boys. I don’t think she had quite worked out how she could live in New York or California, for example, and maintain that close contact that she needed to have with William and Harry. As they got older, that might have changed and I could see her living there.’

[From The Daily Mail]

It’s always struck me that Harry is basically living the life his mother envisioned for her future: living by the beach in California, working in or adjacent to Hollywood/the celebrity world, and basically being a mostly private person with some high-profile charity work. That’s what Diana wanted for herself, and her dream became a reality for Harry. And honestly, she probably would have issues with her sons’ wives in general, but the money question isn’t “when would Diana have sent Meghan packing?” The real question is: how quickly would Diana have seen through the Middletons? And how disgusted would she be with Charles for how he’s treated their grandchildren?

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Cover Images.