Has Meghan finally won her battle against the press?

The judgment issued in the high court was lengthy and withering. After two years of legal wrangling over the privacy case brought by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex against the The Mail on Sunday and MailOnline (Associated Newspapers) Lord Justice Warby had heard quite enough. Associated Newspapers’ case was so weak it didn’t justify a trial, save for one technical point on copyright law. Its defence was chucked out, and a summary judgement issued.

It was uncomplimentary. The Mail on Sunday’s assertion of owning copyright in the letter she sent to her father Thomas in 2018, said the judge with obvious relish, “seems to me to occupy the shadowland between improbability and unreality” – a phrase right up there with Winston Churchill’s “terminological inexactitude” and ripe for the dictionaries of quotations. Any journalist, poignantly, can sense what fun Mr Justuce Warby must have had as he hammered the keyboard in his chambers: “It was, in short, a personal and private letter. The majority of what was published was about the claimant’s own behaviour, her feelings of anguish about her father’s behaviour – as she saw it – and the resulting rift between them. These are inherently private and personal matters ... Taken as a whole the disclosures were manifestly excessive and hence unlawful.”

No doubt costs and damages will be awarded to the duchess; more to the point, the hurt and anguish inflicted on Associated Newspapers will be entirely proportional. If The Mail on Sunday has a heart, it too would now be “shattered into a million pieces”, just as Meghan told her dad that hers was.

She made the most of the moment, milked it even, and you can hardly blame her:

“After two long years, of pursuing litigation, I am grateful to the courts for holding Associated Newspapers and The Mail on Sunday to account for their illegal and dehumanising practices. These tactics (and those of their sister publications MailOnline and the Daily Mail) are not new; in fact they’ve been going on for far too long without consequence. For these outlets, it’s a game. For me and so many others it’s real life, real relationships, and very real sadness. The damage they have done and continue to do runs deep.”

This was a landmark case and outcome that could scarcely have been dreamt up by the scriptwriters on Suits, the legal drama that made Meghan’s name before she went into the branch of showbusiness they call the House of Windsor. It will change the way newspapers work, for good or ill. Maybe if it had come sooner, in the duchess’s brief career as a “senior royal” (a curious phrase), then history might indeed have been different.

In the beginning, there seems no reason to doubt that Meghan Markle wanted her royal role to be a success. So did her in-laws. The first mixed-heritage member of the family since the eighteenth century was welcome, making the institution a little more reflective of the Commonwealth and the United Kingdom’s multicultural society. The monarch is there to unite, but there was a sufficiently large portion of the population who disliked the newcomer (a woman they’d never met and were unlikely to) that she became, through no fault of her own, divisive. Looking back at some of the acrid remarks about her in the comments sections of news websites (not least MailOnline) and in social media it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that much of it was racism. Charitably, you might put it down to snobbishness about Americans or telly stars, or unconscious bias, but most of it didn’t deserve such allowances.

The insatiable hunger for celebrity gossip – and “the royals” were now celebs just the same as the Kardashians or the inhabitants of Love Island – was fed by the tabloids and the paparazzi, just as it had been for decades. No doubt some of what they wrote might have been true; much of it wasn’t, but no one, except the Sussexes seemed bothered. Rifts with the Cambridges were exaggerated, tales of arrogance were invented, speculation masqueraded as facts. They cannot all have been true.

The engagement in November 2017 and the wedding at Windsor Castle in May 2018 were supposed to cement Meghan and Harry into the hearts of the nation. He was now rescued from a potentially dissolute existence; she was supposed to bring glamour and an instinct for good PR to the stuffy royal family. They were the modernisers. It was not entirely successful.

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By her own witness, nothing prepared Meghan for what was to engulf her, and she thought she, and her husband, could handle it, make it work, even dictate their own terms. In the interview she gave to Harry’s old friend Tom Bradbury of ITN in October 2019 she disclosed that before her marriage all her friends had been supportive, but her British friends warned her: “the British tabloids will destroy your life”. She said she didn’t understand how that could be possible, which is itself hard to understand when she would have had the most searing account from Harry as to what the media did to his mother, Diana. In his own interview with Bradbury, Harry certainly didn’t hold back as he tried to explain their decision to get out of the media hellhole: “I won’t be bullied into a game that killed my mother.”

When he announced “Megxit” in January 2020, the prince said that he and his wife had been “excited, hopeful and ready to serve”, but the media’s “powerful force” got in the way.

For Meghan, who had not grown up in such a way, she had had less time to get used to this intensity; and she quickly grew frightened. Megxit was driven by a desperate fear that made her want to end the traditional role, a decision her husband says was his. She told Bradbury she couldn’t go on: “It’s not enough to survive something, right? That’s not the point of life. You’ve got to thrive, you’ve got to feel happy. I really tried to adopt this British sensibility of a stiff upper lip. I’ve tried, I’ve really tried but I think that what that does internally is really damaging.”

There’s gossip now that Prince Charles and Prince William were worried that Harry was simply lovestruck by Meghan (to put it politely) and they married too quickly. If so then they were part-right, but they couldn’t veto it, and why should they be able to? Besides the general belief was that she was media-savvy.

Everything that led to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle stepping down

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On 4 August 1981, a few days after the marriage of Charles and Diana as it happens, Rachel Meghan Markle was born, and into a sort of showbiz family. Her now famous dad Thomas was a lighting director in Hollywood and and he used to take her on set. After college she considered a career in politics or public service, but didn’t do well enough in the exam for the US State Department. Maybe she failed because of the old adage that politics is showbusiness for ugly people. After a master’s in international relations and theatre from Northwestern University she went into acting. She won her first small uncredited role at the age of 14 as “student sitting on stage” in the TV sitcom Married... with Children. Better parts followed in her her mid-twenties though she did endure 34 episodes as a “briefcase girl” in the US quiz show Deal or No Deal, and she also modelled. Fame and a modicum of public attention arrived with Suits (2011-18). During these years Markle developed various blogs and lifestyle websites, a sign of her entrepreneurial flair that is coming into its own again with the Sussexes’ own brand vehicle Archewell Inc. (The name apparently has nothing to do with son Archie, and derives from the Greek Arche, meaning source of action and the English well. Not to be confused with the Private Eye nickname “archewelloff”).

Though nothing like the British royal family, Meghan’s own family has its share of heartbreaks, splits and complications. Her mother Doria Ragland, who did turn up to the wedding, seems to be a fulcrum of stability and trust in Meghan’s life, and discreet with it. Doria divorced Thomas in 1987. She lives 90 minutes away from the Sussexes now, and Meghan is obviously close to her. By contrast she is estranged from her two step-siblings from Thomas’s first marriage to Roslyn Loveless, Samantha and Tom Jr. Samantha is reportedly not in contact with many of her family members. In an interview with The Sun, she described her younger half-sister Meghan as “a shallow social climber”. Not to be outdone, Tom Jr used the pages of the Daily Mirror to label Meghan a “phoney”. Her relationship with her father requires no further elaboration, but it’s worth mentioning his inflated claim, carried in The Mail on Sunday that she’d have been “nothing without me. I made her the duchess she is today.”

The duchess herself was previously married (2011-13) to Trevor Engelson, a film producer, but things broke down due to “irreconcilable differences”. He has since remarried. A relationship with a celebrity chef, Cory Vitiello, followed, and ended in 2016. That year, she met Harry through a friend – it was a blind date. She thought him kind; he thought he was punching above his weight. They were both right, and, by the looks of things, still are. Both emerging as they do from families that have had their share of sadness and trouble seems to have brought them closer to one another, and the opposition, real or perceived, to their union pushed them into a comparatively happy exile. The miscarriage she suffered last June, which she wrote about in November, was another traumatic experience; it is a measure of the kind of inhumanity Mr Justice Warby referred to that some have claimed her cathartic account of the loss of a child is mere “attention-seeking”.

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Arguably, Meghan was also familiar with the kind of racially driven hostility that was to greet her in Britain even in her youth. She says she was held back in her theatrical career because she was “ethnically ambiguous” – “not black enough for the black roles, not white enough for the white roles...”. She has got past that, though. She says: “My dad is Caucasian and my mom is African American. I’m half black and half white. While my mixed heritage may have created a grey area surrounding my self-identification, keeping me with a foot on both sides of the fence, I have come to embrace that. To say who I am, to share where I am from, to voice my pride in being a strong, confident mixed-race woman.”

And so it has proved. Despite her sometimes unhappy life, Meghan was unprepared for what befell her after her marriage. Yet she did not accept this version of unhappiness, nor did she accept separation from her prince as the price she’d have to pay, driven out by the media and/or a gang of racist haters. Unlike others, she has acted well, to borrow a phrase, to make her life, and that of her husband and child happy – and kept them together. She has beaten the media into the bargain too, with at least the hope that they’ll let them have a private life. It is an achievement of some scale, and unprecedented.

The usual sorry pattern when an “outsider” marries into the royal family and tries to do things differently, or even retain some self-respect, is that ends badly. It did for Anthony Armstrong-Jones, who married the Queen’s sister Margaret, it did for Diana, and for Sarah Ferguson (though Prince Andrew is rather more damaged these days), and it almost did for the headstrong Prince Philip, who eventually knuckled down and made the best of walking two steps behind his wife for the rest of his (many) days. There was also the case of Mrs Wallis Warfield Simpson, an American divorcee who “stole the king”, Edward VIII, back in 1936. There are parallels there, but the impression in this modern case is that Meghan and Harry were very much taking the initiative and dictating their own terms, rather than being pushed out. In a way, Meghan is having her cake and eating it.

The term Megxit is a jokey one, but there is a lot in it. Redefining a relationship and a royal role in this manner is unprecedented. There are all sorts of contradictions about being simultaneously “royal” and also a private citizen, able to earn your own money but also expected to play a public role. A treaty of a sort has been written delineating the rules. There are more protocols to be agreed. There is even a Megxit “transition period” of a year, with a review next month. If all goes right Meghan and Harry will be permitted to continue to strike more lucrative deals as they have, via Archwell, with Netflix, Spotify and Disney. Unlike the long-suffering Windsors, the Sussexes are enthusiastic litigators, and are getting good at restraining intrusive photo agencies and Fleet Street hacks.

In ditching the formal royal role the Sussexes at a strike demolished the “public interest” justification for printing fiction or fact. It’s smart, and it seems to work. They will not draw on the British taxpayer, with the possible exception of personal security, but will be abe to perform semi-official duties, such as with the military and veterans. They will be non-political but still able to speak out on issues that matter, as with registering to vote, interpreted, rightly, as a thinly veiled attack on Donald Trump. If not, then the pair will just go ahead anyway. Whatever the eventual “Megxit deal”, it seems unlikely that it will destroy their happiness. The terrible irony is that if someone like Mr Justice Warby had been around a few years ago then Harry and Meghan would still be doing their royal thing.