Tom Bower

Betrayal

Bekki

‘It’s just really hard to see that she’s ever really been a leader of anything other than her own image creation.’

‘She’s tone-deaf to others,’ Robertson realised. ‘She just can’t do what we wanted. She’s toxic.’ Every organisation inviting the Sussexes, she concluded, would need to factor in disappointment and an inevitable storm. At the end of Meghan’s speech, the audience clapped politely.

She hated people who refused to recognise her importance, and wished to destroy those standing in her way to stardom.

The Queen was not surprised by Young’s report that the Sussexes weren’t coming back: ‘Of course not. They took the dogs.’

In London, Princess Anne predicted to a friend exactly what would follow. Meghan, she said, was gripped by ‘red carpet fever’. Nothing, it seemed, would deter her search for the spotlight.

Caught between his editors and Harry, Moehringer became ‘exasperated’: ‘My head was pounding, my jaw was clenched, and I was starting to raise my voice,’ wrote Moehringer. He explained to Harry, ‘Strange as it may seem, a memoir isn’t about you. It’s a story carved from your life, a particular series of events chosen because they have the greatest resonance for the widest range of people.’250 Harry was probably mystified. ‘But is it all true?’ an editor asked. ‘Factual errors,’ replied Moehringer, ‘can’t exist in an autobiography.’ Harry’s memory, Moehringer knew, was self-serving and faulty. Not least because he had learned from therapy that facts don’t matter. Only Harry’s version of the truth counted. In his mind, subjective belief cancelled out irrefutable facts.

For Harry, being with his grandmother was the prize he sought in order to reassert his credibility for both his book and the Netflix series. 

Meghan is a product of her own era, in that she has the entitlement of a celebrity but the talents of a nobody . . . Against the odds she found her way to the royals, the perfect pedestal for a narcissist.’278

‘Your case’, Green told Harry, ‘is based on total speculation without any evidential basis whatsoever.’ 

Harry blinked. It’s likely that no one had ever spoken to him in public like that before.

Joining the gunfire, Jeremy Zimmer, the chief executive of United Talent Agency, was blunt: ‘Turns out Meghan Markle was not a great audio talent, or necessarily any kind of talent.’ 

One commentator twisted the knife: ‘Just because you’re famous doesn’t make you great at something.’

At the Golden Globes in Los Angeles, Netflix’s chief Ted Sandaros was asked by the host Jo Koy why Harry and Meghan had pocketed ‘millions of dollars for doing absolutely nothing’. Meghan’s normally loquacious neighbour just smiled. He could do without the embarrassment. The American Riviera Orchard and polo series were on the horizon. The Sussexes were excited, but they were also scrabbling.

With a love for good food, she had toured restaurants across the world with her first husband, looking for new culinary experiences. But she could not cook. Her limit was roast chicken and hamburgers. It wasn’t just Italians who would be baffled by her recipe for cooking spaghetti – the uncooked pasta was laid on top of vegetables in a frying pan.631 Even the two pizza ovens in her garden were not used.632 Her producers persuaded Meghan to avoid suggesting she was a skilled chef.

‘Hi,’ Meghan greeted Chandauka, then turned her back, heading with Williams to a marquee. ‘Champagne,’ she ordered, pointedly ignoring the long-standing sponsor’s drink, Royal Salute World Polo whisky. ‘And I want an ice bucket.’ No ice bucket was available. ‘Buy one,’ Meghan’s publicist ordered. At once the mood changed. Meghan’s staff barked their imperious demands and Sentebale’s events manager stood paralysed. Tears began to flow. ‘You heard,’ snapped a Meghan staffer. The manager withdrew. Unwilling to confront Meghan she was told to buy an ice bucket instantly. Back in the tent, Meghan refused Chandauka’s invitation to mingle with the event’s supporters.

Before Meghan re-emerged, the wife of Nigeria’s president, Oluremi Tinubu, was recorded criticising Meghan’s outfits. ‘We do not accept nakedness in our culture,’ she said about Meghan’s favoured off-the-shoulder dresses. ‘It’s not beautiful at all.’ One half of Nigeria’s 230 million population is Muslim.

Ich glaub ich muss kotzen, wie selbstverliebt kann man sein

Instinctively, Meghan equated herself with Lima. ‘Oh, Jamie,’ Meghan said with total sincerity, ‘I feel like we haven’t talked about our blood type. But yours is probably an A positive like mine. Because even my blood is overachieving.’ 692

‘She’d throw around phrases like “lack of accountability”, “disappointment” or “we know what you did, and yet we still decided to support you”. But when staff tried to get clarity, asking what exactly they had done wrong, she’d dismiss them with lines like, “I think it’s best we keep it to ourselves and not advertise it in front of the team. We’re here to protect you, not throw you under the bus.”’

"Du spielst nicht richtig! Nicht so schnell! Spiel langsamer, sei fröhlicher! Der Teufel soll wissen, was du spielst!"

Sie weinte und spielte, tief über die Tasten gebeugt, damit niemand ihre Tränen bemerkte.

As Ever’s motif was two palm trees with two hummingbirds. When describing the design, Meghan cited two palm trees in her Montecito garden and how, soon after they bought the house, a hummingbird had flown into a room. 

Her genius was to merge the two as symbols of ‘resilience and joy’. 

The Spanish town of Porreres was unconvinced. Her logo was identical to the town’s coat of arms adopted in 1370. Since her Tig lifestyle blog days, Meghan had been famous for surfing the internet for ideas. 

Her super-controlled narrative crushed any natural warmth. Fearful of critics, she threw up barriers for self-protection. An impediment was her word salad. To deflect any suggestion that her ideas were shallow, everything she said was spoken with deep affirmation. ‘I’ve always loved taking something pretty ordinary and elevating it,’ she told People in a room filled with flowers. ‘I think about flowers like an outfit,’ she continued solemnly. ‘What story are you going to tell?’ she asked rhetorically, without an obvious answer.

It's a joy to watch a narcissist get outed more and more for what she is :) 

Betrayal

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