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Meghan Markle saw Princess Diana as a royal "superstar" that she wanted to emulate but forgot that "for 16 or 17 years Diana worked like a dog within the royal family doing a great deal of very humdrum assignments," author and former editor of Vanity Fair, Tina Brown, told ITV show host Lorraine Kelly on Wednesday.
Brown's comments come after the release of her latest book, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor, the Truth and the Turmoil, which has laid forth various claims including that Meghan "hated" her 2018 tour of the South Pacific and that the Sussexes underestimated life outside the royal family.
Reported by the Daily Mail, Brown puts Meghan's apparent struggle in adapting to life as a member of the royal family down to her "fundamental sense of misunderstanding" as to what her role actually was.
"The whole representational job of suppressing your own views and representing the monarchy, for her, was just an anathema," the author told Kelly.
"I think that was her fundamental sense of misunderstanding of what was going to happen when she joined the royal family—she saw the palaces and Diana as this global humanitarian superstar, but forgot that for 16 or 17 years Diana worked like a dog within the Royal Family doing a great deal of very humdrum assignments.
"It was her charisma she brought to the job that made her so extraordinarily special."
Brown has been vocal in her belief that both Meghan and Harry have misinterpreted Diana's legacy since stepping down as full-time working royals, looking at her as a maverick who walked away from the royal family.
"She didn't leave the royal family because she said 'I'm out'," Brown told Kelly. "She got divorced. Her husband wasn't in love with her, that was the agony for her.
"After she was out of the royal family she became much more global, not only because she wanted to be, but because she couldn't really be anything but that because she was part of the royal machine."
Speaking about The Palace Papers with the Washington Post in April, Brown reiterated her opinion that Diana was keenly aware of the power she possessed by being inside the royal sphere and how important it was that she keep within it once she divorced Prince Charles in 1996.
"Diana always saw the power of changing within the structure of monarchy. She didn't want to be out of the monarchy," Brown told former editor of Marie Claire, Joanna Coles.
"She wanted to hang on to her HRH [Her Royal Highness], which was confiscated. She stayed living in Kensington Palace. Nothing would have prized her out of that. She saw that the royal imprimatur was always going to be the best, you know, leverage, the best convening power, you know, to promote the causes that she cared about.
"So, I don't know that she would have ever really advocated, you know, going off to live in Montecito without any of the patronages and any of the platform of the powers."
Despite her criticisms of Meghan's perception of her royal role, Brown feels it is unfair to lay the blame on her for everything that has transpired between Prince Harry and his family since she married into the royal family in 2018.
On the breakdown of the relationship between Harry and brother, Prince William, Brown reportedly told Kelly that, "The common wisdom is Meghan broke up the brothers, that's unfair—she reinforced it."
Previously in conjunction with her book, Brown voiced her opinion that the real break between the brothers can be traced back to Harry's leaving the army in 2015. According to Brown, speaking to The Daily Telegraph, Harry's leaving the structure, discipline and defined career path of the armed forces left him "rattling around not really knowing who he was."
It was shortly after this that "along came Meghan," the author told The New York Times' Sway podcast. Harry "suddenly had a woman in Meghan who was worldly enough, experienced enough, to say, 'look, you're a star in your own right. You don't need all of this. You can do it on your own.' And that's really where the great division became between Harry and William."
This year marks Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee and a central weekend of celebrations are due to take place in June. After making a private visit to see his grandmother on the way to the Invictus Games in the Netherlands in April, Harry told Today show host Hoda Kotb that a jubilee visit still wasn't confirmed owing to his ongoing dispute about security.
In response to being asked if he and his family would be in London for the Platinum Jubilee, he told the host: "I don't know yet. There's lots of things with security issues and everything else. This is what I'm trying to do, trying to make it possible that I can get my kids to meet her."
Harry and William have not been seen together in public since the unveiling of a statue to their mother, Diana, at Kensington Palace in July 2021.
About the writer
James Crawford-Smith is a Newsweek Royal Reporter, based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on the British royal family ... Read more