Given that the Metropolitan Police has never, historically, gone looking especially hard when it came to uncovering scandals affecting the Royal Family (love the column on this today) I think you can understand a certain amount of suspicion about the mysterious loss of a letter saying that the Duchess of Sussex’s father was a pedophile that was also deemed important enough to be handed to her.
According to The Times, when the Met went looking for it last week it could not find it and had to ask Meghan whether she still had a copy. The force has not publicly admitted the letter was lost, saying only that it is reviewing how the matter was handled in 2019 and “considering whether a referral to the IOPC is necessary.”
The facts, to the extent that we know them right now are as follows: In January 2019, eight months after the wedding of Harry and Meghan, Roslyn Loveless, Thomas Markle’s alcoholic first wife (married to him from 1964 to 1975, the mother of Samantha and Thomas Jr, who died last year), wrote to the police. She said her ex-husband had told her he went to the Philippines and Thailand “because 12-year-olds are legal there” and described him as “a high risk to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and to Doria Ragland”. The Met passed it to the Sussexes’ office “for their awareness” but shared it with nobody else: not the FBI, not the Philippines, not the police in Pennsylvania, where Markle was living at the time of the alleged offenses. Meghan says she was assured it was being investigated but it was not. Markle denies everything and nobody has been charged.
The brilliant , writing in the Mail, makes the point that this could be turning into a very nasty scandal for the police and the Royal Family. It simply beggars belief, Wilson writes, that these allegations were somehow forgotten, left at the bottom of some “incompetent junior copper’s in-tray,” which raises the notion that they were deliberately “suppressed.”
