JAN MOIR: It’s not Meghan’s hypocrisy over her father, it’s the pity,
Where is the Duchess of Sussex at the moment? High above the Pacific, making a last-gasp mercy dash to see her father?
Thomas Markle is gravely ill in a Philippines hospital and his prognosis is not hopeful. Who knows what could have happened by the time you read this. None of it good.
The journey from Montecito mansion to Cebu island would take the best part of a day, including an 18-hour flight. And for once no one would complain if the eco-minded Duchess leant on one of her carefully cultivated, fiercely rich friends to lend a private jet.
However, given her past intransigence, it seems unlikely that Meghan is much in the mood for reconciliation, despite the peril of the hour.
After all, she has shown no compassion over the past few years, not one drop, as her father suffered one health blow after another, from two heart attacks on the eve of her wedding to a massive stroke in 2022 that robbed him of the power of speech.
He was only able to talk again after extensive therapy and, when he did, he once more voiced a wish to see his grandchildren Archie and Lilibet before he died.
Now it seems likely he will go to his grave without ever meeting them – nor indeed his son-in-law, Prince Harry.
As family schisms go, could this one-sided cliff of rancour be any deeper or bleaker? Or more incomprehensible?
Yes, Mr Markle made a foolish mistake in collaborating with the paparazzi but he did so with the best of silly intentions – because he thought the new photographs would show him in a better, smarter light.
His punishment for this intransigence has been severe, despite the fact that Harry and Meghan’s piercing betrayal of the Royal Family on Oprah, in print and elsewhere has been a thousand times worse.
Mr Markle has been exiled, banished, cancelled and snubbed for seven long years by the Sussexes; treated like an embarrassing sack of family rubbish hurriedly put out with the bins while the Duke and Duchess get on with their gilded lives.
In a big week for the Sussex camp, including the global launch of Meghan’s Christmas special on Netflix and Harry making an appearance on an American chat show, Mr Markle’s health crisis couldn’t have come at a worse time.
Indeed, it might simply be bad timing but it is difficult to see how Meghan could gaily continue with her bountiful hostess charade and luxury lifestyle brand as her stricken dad lies in a hospital bed 7,000 miles away. Unfortunate as it is, it would make her look like a stone-cold career plotter and not a dutiful daughter, ten parts Cruella to one part Nigella in the bitter cocktail of life.
For he remains the great unmentionable in her showbiz narrative, the spectre at her festive feast.
The pre-recorded Christmas special finds our heroine back in the fiction of her own kitchen and matching onsite luxury craft barn in Montecito, talking about her children and her mother and even shoehorning in a sly reference to the Christmas cracker habits of the Royal Family, but without ever mentioning her own father.
She makes treats and cosy memories for loved ones while simpering about warmth, love, friendship and family.
On the Netflix set, an eager crew of celebrities and ‘new friends’ – ie total strangers – have gathered to grease up the old Duch as if she were a fattened goose and the onscreen mood is very come-let-us-adore-her, oh Christ, the lard.
Meghan bakes cheese puffs and quiche cups and cinnamon stars as her guests nod and bob under the fluffy blanket of her relentless juice bar philosophising.
‘It is all about grace, and grace is making people comfortable,’ she says, without even a blush. ‘I love having a tree up, you are able to encapsulate your family story,’ she simpers elsewhere.
If that were true, hers would be a smoking stump.
And Meghan is not the only one scattering the ashes of disapproval on this bonfire of Sussex vanities.
In his 2023 autobiography Spare, Prince Harry writes that he did not approach Thomas Markle to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage because his future father-in-law was ‘a complicated man’.
A pathetic excuse and a rather weighted observation that he repeats later in his book.
Sometimes those who shout the loudest about their own mental health problems are curiously unsympathetic to the struggles of others.
Suddenly caught in the crosshairs of international media interest, Thomas Markle was always someone who needed compassion rather than censure but it is too late for all that now.
At the time of writing, Meghan has failed to address her father’s condition on her Instagram posts, while Harry has stayed quiet about the father-in-law he has never bothered to meet.
Whatever happens next, no one emerges well from this sadness.
Particularly not a Duke and Duchess whose entire professional and commercial status is now predicated on and anchored in their supposed philanthropy, their charity works and their international standing as celebrity humanitarians.
Show up, do good, is the sanctimonious motto on their Archewell website. You get the feeling they would crawl over broken glass to hold the hand of a stranger whose gender wasn’t being respected by their/her peers, or a bullied child, before showing up and doing good for the welfare of their own kin.
It’s not the hypocrisy that gets me, it is the pity of it all.
