What Thomas Markle said on Good Morning Britain about domestic violence was downright bizarre

In the run-up to the royal wedding, I felt awful for Thomas Markle, who seemed to be trying his best to do right by his daughter but stumbling from blunder to blunder. But I’m afraid his interview with Piers Morgan today set fire to any sympathy I had left and pissed on the ashes.

Thomas gave an interview this morning on Good Morning Britain, something which I think we can all assume Harry and Meghan won’t be delighted about.

Oddly enough, despite the fact that Piers Morgan gave Meghan Markle’s siblings a complete beasting for selling stories about her (one of the few times I’ve found myself unable to disagree with him) he had a cordial conversation with the newly minted Duchess’s father, who duly spilled all sorts of extremely personal details.

He talked about how he was sure Meghan had cried when she found out that her father wouldn’t be giving her away, and then he said something so extraordinary I was sure I’d misheard him: “Harry asked for her hand over the phone and I said, 'You are a gentleman, promise me you will never raise your hand against my daughter and of course I will grant you my permission.’”

He might as well have said, “Sure, marry her but don’t mow her down with your car, K?” or, “Yes, you’re welcome to get hitched but just don’t shave her head.”

The way Thomas Markle refers to domestic violence seems to imply that having your husband “raise a hand” to you is a normal but unsatisfactory outcome of marriage, like fighting over directions or listening to the other person snore.

As a parent, surely you would want to be assured that your child’s partner wasn’t violent towards them from the moment they started dating? If there was a single doubt in Thomas Markle’s mind that Prince Harry might have hit his daughter, shouldn’t he have been on a plane over to the UK in order to read him the riot act?

How could you be comfortable with your child getting to the point of marriage with someone if you weren’t sure in your absolute deepest recesses that they were not violent?

Setting aside the bizarre nature of Thomas Markle’s stipulations, I’m also struggling with the idea that Harry needed to ask permission to wed Meghan.

It seems absolutely astonishing to me that a woman in her mid-thirties who has already been married, lived on a different continent and achieved enormous success as an actress could need “permission” to get married to the man she’d most recently fallen in love with.

When I got engaged, one of the reasons I was so sure about saying yes was because my now-husband asked me first, then rang my parents up to ask for their blessing after he knew how I felt. There was no sneaking around, letting my parents in on a massive life event before me, having me – 50 per cent of the future marriage – be the last to know.

There’s no other aspect of your life where you expect your parents to have consent when you’re an adult. My landlord and my boss don’t need to chat to my dad before they can offer me a lease or a job. Because I am an adult woman and if I want my parents’ input on my life choices, I will ask them myself.

Yes, asking a father can be a show of love or a show of respect, but there’s no good reason to place the love and respect you have for your in-laws above the love and respect you have for your future spouse by asking them first.

When you get married, the idea is that you’re becoming a team. If you don’t treat each other like equals, you’re not going to last very long as husband and wife.

I can’t help but think that the entire statement from Thomas Markle is designed to paint him as more of a “real” dad. An understandable goal, given recent events. But clutching at outdated trappings of fatherhood, like giving permission for your child to marry, doesn’t make you more of a father.

Being a father doesn’t mean retaining control of your child, especially when that child is comfortably into their adulthood and only a few short years off 40 like Meghan is.

Perhaps the problem here is that while being a woman has evolved away from staying at home until you get married and moving straight into your husband’s house, the role of the father as protector and gatekeeper hasn’t followed suit.

This myth that being a father means controlling who has access to your daughter is why we see prom photos of men holding guns pointed at their daughter’s dates. It’s the reason that men buy t-shirts which say “Anything you do to my daughter, I’ll do to you”.

Loving your child doesn’t mean taking ownership of them or getting to control who has access to them romantically. I can see why grasping for control and wanting to be able to “give permission” must help if you feel alienated or distant from your child, but it’s a sticking plaster.

Thomas Markle seems like a man who is adrift, caught between the children who sell stories about Meghan and her graceful, beautiful mother who was the only family member present at her wedding. There’s no doubt in my mind that he knows he humiliated his daughter during an enormously important time in her life.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that he is making sure that the world knows he was asked for permission, he was going to give her away, he was afforded all the traditional sacraments of fatherhood. But the thing about being a father is that it’s about knowing when to step up and when to step back. And if Thomas Markle really wanted to be a good dad right now, I think we all know that he’d be doing the latter.