Meghan Reaches Out to Her Father

0:17Hello listeners and welcome to the show. Right now Thomas Markle had his leg amputated last week. So major surgery. And it followed the doctors finding this like gargantuan 14 inch blood clot all the way up his thigh. But it also put this huge pressure on Meghan to reach out to her father and end this seven year impasse between them. Which has existed ever since he staged paparazzi photos for money in the days leading up to her royal wedding to Prince Harry. So it happened. Megan sent him a letter and it took quite a lot to actually physically get it to him. He's in the Philippines. She's in America.

0:55But also because of just the really complicated Markle family mess that is always there. So it was quite a dramatic few days, which included a kind of scramble from Megan to ring round hospitals in the Philippines. She didn't know exactly where he was. She was saying she'd emailed him and they were saying to the Daily Mail that they'd had no contact from her. and it all got very, very messy and it's caused this big new war of words with Meghan and the Daily Mail which is, you know, obviously an old nemesis. She once called them the Daily Fail after she won a lawsuit over a letter she sent to Thomas Markle.

1:31So history is repeating itself. But let me tell you, I'll start with the latest on what the two sides are saying by which I don't actually mean Meghan and Thomas, I mean Meghan and the Mail because this is where it's come down to. It's basically come down to a turf war between Meghan and the Daily Mail over Thomas Markle. So, the Sussex camp feeling has very much been that the mail are stopping Meghan from getting access to her father. And so this is what a spokesperson for Meghan said. Given that a Daily Mail reporter has remained at her father's bedside throughout, broadcasting each interaction and breaching clear ethical boundaries, it has been exceedingly difficult for the Duchess to contact her father privately, despite her efforts over the past several days.

2:14with the support of reliable and trusted contacts. Her correspondence is now safely in his hands. Now, they haven't said who those reliable and trusted contacts are, but the embassy, the US consulate in Cebu in the Philippines, where Thomas Markle has been living and where he's in hospital, actually went round to his hospital, went round to his room and saw him and spoke to him directly. So those are probably realistically the trusted contacts she's mentioning. Now, the Daily Mail hit back at this. And a spokesperson for DMG Media said, When Thomas Markle was taken ill in the Philippines, he contacted Daily Mail journalist Caroline Graham and asked her to travel from L.A.

2:56to be with him. As well as being a journalist, Caroline has been friends with Mr. Markle since 2018. 2018, by the way, is the year that everything fell apart between Thomas and Meghan. It's the year that Thomas staged his paparazzi pictures for money. It's also the year that Meghan sent a private letter to Thomas Markle begging him to stop talking to the media. The Mail then published it the following year after Thomas Markle gave it to them. So the statement continues. She has been with Mr. Markle in hospital every day, providing him with care and support. As soon as Mr. Markle gave consent for his contact details, the name of his hospital and his room number to be provided to his daughter's spokesman, Caroline shared them.

3:37It is entirely untrue that each interaction has been broadcast and the suggestion that Caroline has breached ethical boundaries is demonstrably false and vehemently denied. So there you go. It's all kicked off again between Meghan and the Mail. But they did deliver this letter from Meghan to Thomas, which no doubt the Daily Mail journalist will have been shown and will have read. and putting them in an interesting position, do they publish it like they did before, knowing that obviously Meghan will sue again and they will likely lose? Well, so far, no, it's not been published. But also, both sides have learned the lessons from last time.

4:16The mail have learned some lessons too, so they would know if they were going to publish anything from this letter again, not to quote it directly because that would breach copyright, because that was one of the grounds on which Meghan won last time. She won on grounds of breach of copyright. and they would know that there is very, very difficult to establish a public interest justification for printing private material from a letter in Britain. So they would have to, if they established a public interest justification they felt for doing it, they would have to really contain their story down to the absolute bare minimum that served that public interest justification because that was a big part of the reason why they lost last time is because they just published reams of Meghan's letter how she felt like her heart had been smashed into a million pieces by Thomas going out and doing all these interviews about her.

5:05So, you know, there are other possibilities here too. And part of the reason why the Mail on Sunday lost dramatically when Meghan sued them last time is because they're a UK publication and she sued them through the UK courts. But of course, the world is full of many different outlets. And if Thomas wanted to make a quick buck, there are other people he could try to send this letter to including news organizations that are based in America. So he has that option too. So it's all very, very interesting. But the other question sitting beneath it all is, should everybody get really outraged that Meghan hasn't gone out to the Philippines to see him?

5:43And in all honesty, I don't actually think they should. And it's a really fascinating relationship, actually, because Meghan, she's described herself as a daddy's girl previously. You know, she said her relationship with Thomas was really good. Like she sometimes felt a bit lonely, maybe when she was, you know, her parents divorced. Thomas had her on the weekends and Doria had her during the week. And this is Megan's account of it all anyway. And she sometimes felt a bit lonely. But, you know, that's only child syndrome, isn't it? And she has said she was raised as an only child, even though Thomas has these two other children, Tom Markle Jr.

6:19and Samantha Markle. so you know Megan has basically given Thomas you know the green light the thumbs up, the kind of parental seal of approval for her childhood you know she has not said she had a terrible childhood he was a narcissist when she was a kid and he's evil and he destroyed her emotionally with his terrible parenting she hasn't said that she's given him a kind of glowing review of of his parenting in her childhood. He made sure she got to her, you know, dance classes and so on, helped with the lighting arrangements at her school plays, paid for her university career, and she went to a fee-paying private school too in Los Angeles exclusive school, Immaculate Hearts.

7:06So from Megan's narrative, it all disintegrated because of this paparazzi thing in the build-up to the wedding. that he was out in Mexico living his life and news organisations were trying to throw money at him. And I think he was even bankrupt at that time. And he was saying no and turning everything down. But Meghan and Harry never went out to see him, I think is a big part of what went wrong with the Thomas Markle situation. He still never met Harry. And Harry did meet Doria and Doria was treated very differently to how Thomas Markle was treated. And so he was getting restless and getting restless and getting restless.

7:45And then I guess in the end he cracked. And he was very stressed, I think, about the prospect of traveling to Britain for the wedding. And so, yeah, he staged these pictures and it was humiliating for both sides because the Mail on Sunday, same newspaper that he's now kind of had at his bedside. It's not necessarily the same journalist, but they sent a reporter out to Mexico who pulled CCTV footage from outside an internet cafe where these photos had been taken of Thomas Markle kind of like browsing. I think it was travel agent websites and reading news stories about his daughter. Anyway, you know, these pictures that appeared in the tabloids were all very suspicious.

8:22It looked a lot like they were staged. So the mail on Sunday went and they just pulled CCTV footage and proved it. They proved that Thomas Markle had staged these pictures with the paps. but while they were preparing their story they'd obviously gone to the palace for comment and Meghan had said to Thomas Markle why did you stage these pictures with the paparazzi what is going on are they set up and he lied and he said no they're not I didn't do any of those things and then the CCTV footage came out and it proved him wrong and that blew up their relationship and she has never spoken to him since that time but he had two heart attacks back then and had to go to hospital.

9:02And that was what definitively, definitively, definitively ruled him out of going to the wedding. So his son, Tom Markle Jr., has given innumerable interviews, slagging off Meghan. Samantha Markle, Thomas Markle's daughter, trashed her from the minute that her relationship to Prince Harry became public knowledge back in 2016. The public are very accustomed to the reality that the Markle family is a complete mess and have a real axe to grind against Meghan and have humiliated her time and time and time again. And the public know that and they understand it. And even some journalists who are really quite relentlessly hostile to Meghan have expressed sympathy even now with Meghan's decision to not rush off to the Philippines to see Thomas, which it contrasts with Harry, who, you know, when Charles got cancer, Harry dropped everything and jumped on the next plane to Britain, even though he only got five minutes with his father and then jumped on the plane and came home again.

10:01So he flew halfway around the world to spend 45 minutes having tea with Charles because Charles had cancer. And Meghan has not done the same thing for Thomas. And it comes back to that very simple point. You know, she doesn't trust him. She feels betrayed by him. She feels humiliated by him. But she also feels that if she went out there, she'd be confronted with a Daily Mail journalist when she arrived at his bedside. And I think people, in all honesty, do understand that and they sympathise with Meghan because family can be a total, total nightmare. This is a very familiar reality to a lot of people.

10:31A lot of people have fallen out with members of their family and they may adore portions of their family, but then have people who they really struggle to see and they know they can't trust and they know that it won't go well. And that's where Meghan is. So I'm not going to sit here and kind of morally berate Meghan for not rushing off to see Thomas in person. But also there is something that I would just observe about this current situation, which is right now there is a bit of an information vacuum around how Meghan feels about all of this. And vacuums can be dangerous because people fill them with their imagination.

11:14And so I think that there could be some latitude for Meghan to issue some kind of a statement, And, you know, like, just accept the reality of who Thomas Markle is. Thomas Markle called the journalist to his bedside, right? They didn't invade his hotel room against his wishes and camp out, you know, in front of it. He invited them and that was his decision and it is his life. And he does have the right to do that. And a lot of people will think less of him for doing it, but he does have that right to do it. And so I think Meghan just needs to understand that this is who Thomas Markle is now. and she is entitled to find that heartbreakingly sad, but it is the reality.

11:54And, you know, you could even not exactly offer a defence of Thomas, but, you know, there are other celebrities whose fathers have done the same thing, betraying their famous celebrity sons and daughters, but who did it all behind closed doors, in the background, on the quiet, without that celebrity ever knowing about it. And so Meghan could be in that boat, which would be even worse. but my point is I think it would benefit Megan to start just accepting the reality that conversations with Thomas Markle are going to happen through the media and doing that herself like maybe it's a video on Instagram and obviously there's a bit of a risk that looks a bit tacky but she could also explain you know in the video like this is my means I have of contacting my father without having to go and you know, sit side by side with a Daily Mail journalist while I try and have a conversation with him.

12:46But that is something that can be played to Thomas Markle in his hotel room, not hotel room, hospital room, sorry, releasing, you know, a statement that can just be shown to him. Because the thing is about this letter is that it invites people to speculate on what it's going to say. And we all know it's not going to be the really simple message about, you know, oh I love you so much daddy please get better it's so distressing to hear that your leg's been amputated I just want the best for you it's not going to say that we know that's not what it's going to say it's going to be like the last letter which is going to have criticisms in it too I'm sure she will express sympathy for him but she will also be saying things like I can't talk to you when you have a daily mail journalist by you all the time and you're being puppeteered and all the rest of it So I think it might be better for Meghan to not try to have, to initiate any kind of meaningful, deep emotional connection or bond with Thomas Markle in which, you know, she tells him these difficult truths.

13:53but just to accept that the only possible relationship between them now is incredibly surface level and trivial with it. And just, you know, just start with, start there, start with a really simple, trivial, meaningless, you know, message issued publicly. That's devoid of the emotions she really feels under the surface. Cause that's what you have to do with people. Sometimes you have to compartmentalize and just be like, okay, this person, you know, the relationship she had in childhood with her father is dead. Like that's the reality of it is gone and it isn't coming back. But Thomas Markle may not have much longer to live.

14:33And there is a possibility that she could over time work to create, to build from in small steps, a form of some kind of surface level relationship that doesn't resolve the past. It doesn't resolve the problems. And yeah, he will probably give some stuff to the daily mail, But as long as she only says things that she's happy to be publicized, then that's that. You know, you can reconcile yourself to these things and make your peace with it and just decide not to care. And that is it goes back to that court case over Megan's private letter, because I always thought that court case was a terrible idea.

15:13And, you know, there was a big argument on over social media, big debate about whether this was unfair on Megan. and then when she won, people were kind of celebrating this huge victory over the newspaper, but it took so much out of her. And at the end of the day, all the letter said was stuff that, you know, Meghan should have been able to say publicly. Like, her heart was smashed into a million pieces when he betrayed her. Well, yeah, like, obviously, what did anybody else think she enjoyed it? Like, of course her heart was smashed into a million pieces. All of it was essentially truisms. It was just Meghan trying to almost kind of get her side of the story across to Thomas Markle.

15:53And she did say also to her press secretary at the time in emails that, in text messages that were made public via the court case, that she had written it with the possibility of it being leaked to the media in mind. So she had drafted it in a way where it would get her perspective on the situation across and her feelings about the situation. and you know the court ruled that it was still a private letter that she still had every right to keep it privacy and it still conveyed her private personal emotions about the end of her relationship with her father but like some people just like Thomas Markle you know he's the what's the name Caroline Quinn is it from Selling Sunset so I try to have a relationship with Caroline Quinn there's no point in trying to make it a normal relationship except it's going to be played out in the media, in the public domain, but say something to him so that he doesn't die while you're still in the middle of like a really toxic rift and then make your peace and close the box again.

16:59Like simple surface level, devoid of real emotion, have some kind of contact with him and then close the box and get on with your life again. But for me, if it was my real father who had given me an upbringing that I didn't think traumatized me, you know, cause this is very much Megan's position. She doesn't say Thomas traumatized her in childhood, you know, just do the right thing by that memory. Right. And have a surface level interaction and then move on again. That is my perspective on it, but I don't judge her morally. Like this is not me saying that she's a terrible person for not doing this.

17:39I just think that she will probably feel better about it if she can get to a point where she can leave that relationship just in a slightly better place than it's been so far. And I think the only other thing really apart from that to say is just, you know, Thomas Markle still hasn't seen, you know, his grandkids, Archie and Lily. Probably he's not going to, I think. I think even if Megan were to do what I'm saying, I still don't think they'd get to a point where Megan was willing to introduce her children to him. I kind of think that's fair enough. Like you don't have a right to see your kids.

18:12There was one point when there was this ludicrous idea kicking around that Thomas Markle could sue for access to his grandkids, almost as though he was a parent. And I just think that, you know, you do have to take responsibility for the decisions you take in life. And Thomas Markle was quite hostile and aggressive with Megan at a certain point. There was a period when he was threatening, basically, to do an interview with the media every month about Meghan, clearly inferring it would be a critical interview, until she agreed to see him again. And if you want to see your grandkids, that is not the way to go about it.

18:45So I think this whole idea that Thomas has never met his grandchildren, that is kind of on him, really. I don't think that's on Meghan. So I don't think that's a plausible reality, but I do think that she should do something more than she's doing right now. and for her own sake really like not necessarily even for thomas's sake for her sake on that note i'm going to take a quick break but before i do remember to rate and review the royal report on apple podcasts or spotify or wherever you get your favorite shows and if you're watching on youtube then you can like and subscribe and when i'm back i explore a crazy question which is could harry be about to move back to britain and that might sound bonkers but i will explain

19:32Hello and welcome back to the show. Now this is going to be a slightly odd segment, a slightly odd podcast because I'm posing a question here that I would have said was completely deranged about six months ago. But I will explain why I've suddenly started toying with the idea that Harry might be considering in some form like moving back to Britain or having more time in Britain or doing some kind of work in Britain in a more kind of permanent, ongoing way. But it all comes down to his five-year campaign he's been waging to try and get his police bodyguards back, which gets incredibly technical and complicated, which means it can be quite difficult for people to properly understand.

20:20But what I think you need to know for this moment is, so the new information is that the Home Office have commissioned a new threat assessment of the risk to Prince Harry conducted by something called the Risk Management Board. And that probably sounds kind of boring and complicated. But what's really interesting about it is that Harry was denied an R &B assessment for five years. And this is a big part of what his court cases against the British government was about. He said he was trying to get his police team back is the nub of what the cases were about, but the particular strategy that his lawyers wound up adopting in court was to say that the decision to take his police team away from him was unlawful because he hadn't been given an up-to-date risk management, a sport assessment, an up-to-date threat assessment.

21:10And so he said without it, the decision was unlawful. And the judge basically said, no, it wasn't. And that was the end of it in a nutshell to summarise that case. but now you know the home office having won that case seven months later have just turned around and given Harry the exact risk assessment he'd been asking for the whole time which is a strange thing to do when you win usually when you win you don't back down but so I went back through all the paperwork from the court case and the judgments from Harry's original high court case and also his court of appeal. I'm hearing that he lost.

21:45And I wanted to see why it was, I wanted to remind myself why it was they stopped the RMB assessment and think about why it is that they might suddenly do a new one. And what I discovered was that the Home Office, the chair of the very Home Office committee that takes the decision on who gets police protection and who doesn't, gave sworn testimony, a sworn statement, witness statement to the court saying that the decision to stop Harry's threat assessment was nothing to do basically with whether he was at risk or not. It was just that he was leaving Britain. He was moving to America. And the methodology of these threat assessments is built around the idea that you have a life in Britain.

22:30So that's what the R &B assessment does. They assess your life in Britain and what risks might be posed to you by the life you live. So it's not just about a kind of general question, do people want to kill you or hurt you? It's about what you do, what your routines are, what your regular way of life is, and whether that creates risk for you or not. So I want to read some extracts from the judgment. So this is this first one. It was a summary of Sir Richard Mottram was the chair of Ravek back in 2020 when the decision was made to strip Harry of his police team. And his evidence was summarised by the judge in the original High Court case, Judge Sir Peter Lane.

23:12So this is from his 2024 judgment, which lost Harry that case. And he says, as regards R &B assessments, the witness statement of Sir Richard Mottram explains that one consequence in the change of Harry's role and his decision to live mainly abroad was that the assessment of risk that the R &B had conducted in respect of the claimant, i.e. Harry, in April 2019 had been overtaken by events. Moreover, the methodology underpinning the assessments of the R &B, and then there's a bit of text that's redacted for security reasons, it says, Sir Richard Miltrum ultimately saw no merit, therefore, in conducting a formal R &B process for Harry.

23:53The decision to consider the case for redacted text was, in Sir Richard's view, a flexible and tailored approach which better matched Harry's revised circumstances. So what this means basically is that R &B risk assessments are what are given to the working members of the royal family who live in Britain, they work in Britain, they have a UK-based life to assess on the basis of risk. And so what the Home Office decided was that that didn't really apply to Harry anymore. So instead, they'd come up with this tailored approach where any time he wanted to come back to Britain, he would let them know and they would make an assessment then about whether he needed police protection or not.

24:33and so that's the system they moved to and so now that's what makes it so weird that they've now gone back and done a new R &B assessment. What are they assessing? Are they assessing a new plan, a change of circumstances? I want to read just a couple more bits. So there was a judgment in the later Court of Appeal case. So this was handed down in May and it read, Ravec had not considered commissioning a risk analysis from the Risk Management Board after February 2020. in essence, because that was, in the opinion of the relevant experts, unnecessary. And there are quotes from this statement by Sir Richard Mottram, who felt it made much more sense to assess the threat and risk issues from Harry's UK trips by reference to their particular context, rather than conduct a risk analysis for a principal who was no longer based in Great Britain and whose activities when he was present were not likely to be regular.

25:30So that actually, in a sense, is the key bit that sheds light on what the problem with R &Bing Harry was. You know, the R &B assessment is an analysis that is based on the regular patterns of life of the principles of the people at risk. And so when he moved to America, he no longer had a regular life in Britain to assess. so you know there's different ways you can look at this whole situation and harry's perspective on this has always been it was an establishment stitch up he said back in may when he lost his court of appeal hearing that all he's ever asked for is to for his father king charles to get out of the way and let the experts do their jobs so his perspective has always been that you know the big personalities of the royal family and the royal household intervened to stop him getting as police protection because they wanted to keep him under the roof was harry's words they wanted to sabotage his effort to build a new life in america and he always thought that it was a kind of personal vendetta um and i've never been able to sign up to that perspective and the judge in the original high court case and the judge in the court of appeal case didn't sign up either um they for me organizations like ravec and the home office you know these are the same people who deal with counter-terrorism, they deal with keeping Britain, some of Britain's most high-profile royal figures who are king as head of state, safe from terrorists.

27:04And power is not supposed to function in this way that you just come along and sweet-talk your way into getting your police team back or you sweet-talk somebody into taking your son's police team away from him because you want to ruin his plans. It's not supposed to function that way. It's supposed to be that there are systems and processes that operate. it's supposed to be that these people are unswayable and unbribable. And maybe I'm naive. Perhaps I am. But I believe the Home Office staff who give evidence that this was never a vendetta against Harry. It was just a reaction to the fact that Harry moved abroad.

27:40And you can kind of see some acknowledgement, I think, of that reality in the way that Harry's own legal team conducted those cases. because when Harry talks about this publicly, for example, on Oprah or in his book Spare, he makes very clear that he never wanted to lose his international protected person status. So that would have meant if he kept that, he would have had a metropolitan police team protecting him in California, in Canada, anywhere in the world he went. But by the time his lawsuit got to the high court in London, the Home Office had said the cohort of people protected reviewed by Ravek are all UK residents.

28:21They're people who live in Britain. And when Harry left Britain, he moved outside the cohort. And Harry's lawyers accepted that. And they confined their arguments to arguing that Harry moved back into the cohort every time he returned to Britain. So that he was kind of out of the cohort in America and back in the cohort when he visited. So in other words, they accepted something that Harry on a personal level had never been willing to accept that the simple act of moving to America to live moved him out of the cohort of people who receive Metropolitan Police Protection. But it is clearly true, because if it wasn't true, his lawyers would not have been in this position where they had to accept that.

29:02So, you know, if you're, I'm leaning, I see, I've always seen Harry's perspective on this, that it's a shadowy establishment stitch up as being a bit conspiracy theory laden. and so therefore I kind of tried to remove all of my personal biases and let me just be absolutely clear like I do not think that Harry would want to move back to Britain I don't think Meghan ever wants to go to Britain again all of my personal biases scream at me there's no way Harry will ever move back to Britain but I also want to kind of strip away my own personal biases and look at this almost a bit like a computer and just say what is the simple explanation for why the home office having won actually three lawsuits because harry filed two separate judicial reviews followed by his appeal hearing they won all three the home office why would they suddenly turn around and back down having won and spent that money fighting those cases why would they suddenly turn around well i do want to put some other perspectives across you know for balance because i might well be wrong and i'm not here saying that i now know definitively that harry's moving back I might well be wrong and the common sense royal perspective like the perspective as a royal correspondent would suggest that Harry would never want to do that but let's talk about the other alternative theories so one theory is Harry just sweet talked the Home Office so he apparently shared a train with the previous Home Secretary Yvette Cooper she was actually in the Foreign Office at the time but they both went out to Ukraine in September and he was on the train with her and maybe got a chance to speak to her, who knows, and sweet talk her.