Quinn: Princess Kate ‘is actually a much stronger person than Meghan in many ways’

Here’s Part 2 of our coverage of the new book which is getting a lot of headlines this week. The book is called Yes Ma’am: The Secret Life of Royal Servants, and it was written by royal expert/historian Tom Quinn. The Times of London published an exclusive excerpt and, as I said in Part 1, this reads like a choose-your-own-adventure soap opera, the way Quinn is trying to rewrite and reimagine these narratives. You see, *some* people did like the Duchess of Sussex during her brief time in the UK, but those same people also grew to hate her because she was so confident and American and because she didn’t want to be their voiceless doll. If I’m being honest, I’m a little bit surprised by how Quinn’s “sources” say some nice stuff about Meghan, but of course all of the nice stuff is immediately contradicted by “sources” saying that Meghan had a “messiah complex.” These people will never be okay.

Meghan saw quickly that Harry had always been neglected: Meghan’s experience of growing up was totally different. “She spotted immediately that Harry wasn’t quite as central to things as his brother, William,” said a member of the comms team who was particularly close to the duchess. “I don’t think Harry had even thought much about the fact that he was a spare until well into his marriage. I think she was oversensitive on Harry’s behalf and convinced herself he was being treated as completely unimportant.” The strongly held view among current and former royal staff is that Meghan felt she was standing up for her husband, telling “her truth” and encouraging him to tell his, but this was seen as deeply disruptive.

Meghan hated that shack: Moving into Nottingham Cottage in 2017 compounded the tension — “Meghan felt it was so small that it must be a reflection on how the royal family were belittling her husband. She just didn’t understand that real royals don’t care much about houses and material possessions because, having always had them, they take them for granted,” said one member of staff who helped out regularly at Nottingham Cottage. A rather beautiful house in the grounds of a famous palace hardly seemed to Harry the equivalent to being forced to live in a shed at the end of the garden. But for Meghan things were more complex. She saw Kate and William living just a few yards away in Kensington Palace itself with teams of live-in servants.

Meghan undoubtedly felt constrained by protocol. “Meghan quite rightly hated the fact that when she was in Nottingham Cottage, she had to agree well in advance what time she might leave for an appointment or an event and she had to make sure she didn’t leave at the same time as, or clash in any way with, a more senior royal leaving the palace,” a former Kensington Palace staffer said.

How Meghan treated staff: Another problem was the servants: Meghan both loved having everything done for her by the domestic staff and also hated it. As one former staffer said, “Through absolutely no fault of her own, Meghan wasn’t always great with her staff — she just wasn’t used to it as Harry was. So, one minute she would be really friendly, perhaps overfriendly, hugging staff and trying to make friends with them, and the next she would be irritated by the fact they wouldn’t respond instantly at all times of the day and night. At times it got so bad that I heard one of the senior staff mumble that Meghan should really have been employed in the palace kitchens. It’s true that her nickname for a while was the Duchess of Difficult, but she had other, friendlier nicknames, including Mystic Meg, which came about because she was so new agey, so woke, about so many things. She could be difficult because she was finding life difficult — trying to feel her way and work out the intricacies of a positively medieval, labyrinthine system. She couldn’t understand why Charles, for example, was so formal with his mother. She once said, ‘But they’re mother and son — why are they so completely stiff with each other?’ ”

Meghan had her supporters. Many of the ordinary staff liked the fact that she was feisty and wanted to change things for the better. “She was very straightforward and matter-of-fact,” said a former member of the Kensington Palace communications team. But the old guard was against her. One source said, “They [the older, public school-educated advisers] really had it in for Meghan and, to be fair to her, she really stood up to them. But, of course,if you make waves in the royal family, the senior royals will always back the courtiers, because in many cases the senior royals have been friends with the courtiers since childhood.”

Meghan just wanted to do her own thing: According to one of Elizabeth II’s former courtiers, Buckingham Palace grew really worried when they became aware that Meghan had plans for her life as a working royal that were not going to be part of a general strategy agreed with the staff — she just wanted to do her own thing. “But it was never going to be acceptable that Meghan should outshine Princess Anne, Prince Charles [as he then was] and the Queen. Quite rightly, the Queen always had to be the centre and focus of everything the royal family did and I don’t think Meghan understood why that would mean her doing things she didn’t want to do. She didn’t understand that when you join the royal family, you don’t do as you please, you do as you’re told.”

Meghan had a messiah complex! Harry, meanwhile, was delighted by the possibility of freedom, of doing things differently, that Meghan introduced into his life. Senior staff begged him to intervene with Meghan to try to make her toe the line, but by all accounts this was the beginning of what staffers describe as “Harry’s tendency to defend anything and everything Meghan says or does. She really did have a messiah complex,” one of the couple’s former staffers said, pointing out how Meghan was focused on how she could become the best-known and most loved member of the royal family. “I don’t mean that in a critical way because all her big ideas were about doing good. She once said, ‘What Diana started, I want to finish,’ and we took that to mean she wanted to become a sort of globetrotting champion of the poor and the marginalised. She has managed to do this to some extent, but she really wanted to do it as a princess and with the full backing of the royal family, but on a part-time basis.”

Meghan fought back: “You’ve got to hand it to her,” a former member of her staff said. “She really is a fighter.” One source said Meghan thought Kate was “just too eager to please, too much a goody-two-shoes girl”. Yet Kate did manage to negotiate difficult matters with staff and family relationships. The answer as to how is summed up neatly by a former member of the Kensington Palace staff.

Kate is a stronger person than Meghan: “Kate is someone who slowly and carefully absorbs the atmosphere of a place, the relationship between people and the rules. She doesn’t jump in straight away and try to change everything to suit her way of thinking. She bides her time and is very intelligent and intuitive about other people, what they do and how they behave. She was also coached — not just by William, who wanted Kate to avoid the problems his mother had encountered, but also by the staff. Kate was always happy to accept advice both from the lower staff, with whom she got on very well, and from the courtiers, even though some of them were initially very snooty about her. It was the same kind of backbiting gossipy criticism that Meghan had to put up with, but Kate is actually a much stronger person than Meghan in many ways. Yet what Meghan saw as Kate being pushed around, Kate saw as an essential part of being a member of the royal family.”

Meghan was a spare as well: “Kate’s view of Meghan was always implied rather than spoken, I think. It was that Meghan thought she knew better than an institution that had been in business for 1,000 years and more. Kate was never going to buy that.” The irony, given all that has been written about Harry being the “spare”, is that at Kensington Palace, it was clearly Meghan who felt she could not find her place; she too was a spare.

[From The Times]

As always, I’m sort of amazed by how much projection is built into these people’s assessments of Meghan. It’s not that Meghan ever said or indicated that she wasn’t happy in Nottingham Cottage, it’s that the courtiers knew that they were treating the Sussexes differently on purpose, and they projected those snubs onto Meghan and made it sound like she was irritated. It’s the same with “Meghan hated the protocol” – she hated that she was being controlled to a ridiculous level and she could see that other royal women were not being treated the same way. It’s also obscene to say that Kate is stronger – Kate was so insecure about Meghan, Kate spread racist lies about Meghan, openly suggested that Meghan’s Black child would look bad for the royal family, and Kate still style-stalks and abuses her sister-in-law to this very day.

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