Good morning everybody and welcome to the Sunday Royalist newsletter, which, as ever, is free to everyone. We have picked up a lot of new subscribers in the last few days thanks to all the exposure for our exclusive on the arrangements behind Harry's luxury private vehicles, so a very warm welcome to all of you. Good to have you here.
One for your diary before we get going: tonight at 7pm UK time (2pm in New York) the great Tom Bower is joining me live on the YouTube channel to go through the whole Markle debacle. We are going to try and co-stream it here on Substack too, for an ad-free experience, but no promises that it will actually work (!) so if it fails, head to YouTube.
Now, today's big story. As you can see from Sunday Times, Meghan’s story is basically falling apart. Even though this is, prima facie, a very sympathetic article, what Meghan and Harry have put out there about her father is coming apart at the seams.
Remember, first of all, that Meghan is the one who put the Roslyn Loveless letter into the story. If she hadn't released that statement last week saying the media had distorted the narrative around her father (when it was her who cut him off, and her who told everyone the media caused the problem with her dad), nobody would be talking about this letter. She is now saying, in effect, that she kept away from her father, and kept her children away from him, because she thought he was a pedophile. And the basis on which she thought he was a pedophile is this letter from Roslyn Loveless, which she put into the public domain by talking about it in her statement.
And what do we now learn? Just as I have suspected all along, the reason this letter was not acted on appears to be that it was dismissed as the sort of mad ravings and ramblings the police get all the time. Buried in this superficially supportive, sympathetic article in the Sunday Times is the very fascinating revelation that the letter is seven pages long (LOL), handwritten, "rambling" (their word), and that it contains potted biographies of other members of the Markle family and their "perceived indiscretions."
I mean, seriously. You're telling me the Metropolitan Police get a mad letter from a disgruntled ex-wife of 44 years' standing and they're supposed to drop everything and investigate? It is now very clear not only why the police didn't investigate AND why Meghan didn't follow up: because it simply wasn't credible.
You can tell how seriously Meghan took it by the fact that the extent of her assurance that the police were looking into it appears to be a personal protection officer, who cannot now be identified, saying, more or less, don't worry, we'll look into it. You can see it in the screen grab above: "Leave it with us, we'll investigate it."
That's it. That was the investigation. Nobody told Cressida Dick. Nobody told Neil Basu, who was in charge of royal protection. Samantha Cohen, Meghan's own private secretary, didn't know. Jason Knauf didn't know. Simon Case didn't know. It just wasn't taken seriously by anybody, Meghan included imho, and that is the reason Meghan's whole story falls apart.
And if I'm wrong, then publish the letter! Publish the letter and prove me wrong, and I will eat my hat and I will apologize. But I'm telling you now, this is what we used to call in newspapers a green ink letter, because they used to arrive from nutters written in green ink. I'm not saying this one was literally written in green ink. I'm saying it's that genre: the disgruntled, rambling, seven-page handwritten letter from somebody with a grudge.
The whole story that Meghan and Harry have tried to put out there is completely falling apart, because did they really, on the basis of this letter, conclude that Thomas Markle was a pedophile? It's absurd. I'm not saying he is or he isn't. Certainly the stuff being found in his storage lockers all over the world doesn't look very promising for him, but at the same time he hasn't had access to any of them for many years, and the courts will decide. The point is that this isn't really about Thomas Markle any more. It's about Meghan trying to make herself the victim of this story, trying to make herself the injured party in all of this. Because despite the fine words about the children, either you believed he was a pedophile, in which case you should have done something about it, or you didn't, and you are opportunistically using this letter (and perhaps always planned to use this letter) to explain away why you kept your family away from Harry and the King and the Queen.
And on top of what we already knew, which is that the letter was written by a woman who had not been with Thomas Markle for 44 years and who was, by some accounts, an alcoholic, you have to ask: if this woman from 44 years ago knew all about it, how come Doria didn't? Where is Doria in all of this?
Meanwhile the letter itself is being passed around. Favored journalists are being given juicy little morsels by the Sussex side. The Telegraph has seen it. We know that Brontë Coy has seen it. We know that ITV's Chris Ship has seen it. Interestingly, it appears that the Sunday Times has not seen it, which is why, I would say, they were allowed to be a little more candid about it.
William Randolph Hearst said that journalism is publishing something that somebody somewhere doesn't want published, and everything else is advertising. We are reaching a point now where there is a serious responsibility on these outlets, whose journalists have seen this letter but are pumping out what is frankly pro-Sussex propaganda, to publish it. Meghan is the one who says this letter is the key to understanding everything: her relationship with her father, her estrangement from her father, the "distortions" of the media about her. OK, right. You have made this letter part of the discourse. But we don't know what's in it. So how can you blame people for being incredibly suspicious?
If Meghan doesn't want to publish the letter, that's her business. But she cannot then be surprised that people are massively skeptical of what she is saying, especially when what is now emerging is that it is a rambling letter, that it is seven pages long, that it contains potted biographies of other members of the Markle family, and that it was written by a woman who had not been with Thomas Markle for 44 years.
I suspect that in the end it will be published, because it has been handed around so many people and so many journalists, and the organizations that have it are getting attacked for biased reporting and are looking like complete suckers and client journalists. The time has come. Publish and be damned.
