Ideally, Thomas Markle, father of Meghan, would now stop saying mean things, in public, about his daughter. Even at their most asinine, few observations by the British press – on, say, Meghan’s tights, her shambolic leg-crossing, her “exotic” potential to reboot the royal gene pool – have come close to her garrulous progenitor’s latest contribution, to the effect that he doubles as her Professor Higgins.
In another of his increasingly unguarded interviews, Markle, almost as if he were anxious to warn off challengers to his new courtesy title, the father-in-law from hell, told the Mail on Sunday: “What riles me is Meghan’s sense of superiority. She’d be nothing without me. I made her the duchess she is today. Everything that Meghan is, I made her.”
While this is probably excruciating for anyone who cares about the duchess, it’s dismal, too, for those of us who, before he turned on his child, had begun to cherish Markle senior’s derisive commentary on royal affectations. “Suddenly I’m being told that I needed help apologising, as if there’s a special way to apologise to the royal family.”
From his earliest days as a fount of copy to a generation of scandal-starved royal correspondents, Markle promised to become a kind of updated, real-life Hank Morgan, hero of Mark Twain’s 1889 novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. After Hank, raised “in a wholesome free atmosphere”, is accidentally sent back in time 1,300 years, his unimpressed account of Camelot (which, incidentally, anticipates all “good sir knight” Python sketches), features, mid prithees, agelessly pertinent commentary on the English establishment. “It is enough to make a body ashamed of his race,” Hank writes, “to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people that have always figured as its aristocracies – a company of monarchs and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions.”
Hank was writing, of course, long before Vogue recognised the work of palace reformers, Beatrice and Eugenie: “We are young women trying to build careers and have personal lives and we’re also princesses and doing all of this in the public eye.” Did the girls, in fact, ever get sufficient credit, for merely smirking – rather than openly guffawing – at an enthusiastic pastor at the royal wedding?
As for Markle, his personal attacks have ensured that he, an old man trying to enjoy his retirement and have a personal life and doing all of this in the public eye, is now reportedly the subject of royal crisis talks. Compare with the Middleton family’s achievement, in never doing anything worse to discomfit the Queen than collude in Pippa’s spin-off book.
It follows that the appearance of Markle – dishevelled, loose-lipped – also represents, for Prince Charles, a glorious deus ex machina, probably one of the best things ever to befall his own reputation, right from the moment that his substitution for the absent (resulting from palace ineptitude) bride-giver was read as evidence of surpassing benevolence. Which dad did it better? Yes, the one who once made his young sons walk, in front of 2 billion people, behind their mother’s coffin.
The latest Markle solecisms could not have been better timed to deflect attention from evidence, extracted from Charles by the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse (IICSA), detailing his support for a determined paedophile, the convicted former bishop, Peter Ball. Charles had housed Ball – after the bishop had accepted a caution for gross indecency and railed at the “monstrous wrongs” supposedly suffered by him. The inquiry discovered that Charles believed, in the 1980s, that “people such as bishops” were worthy of trust and confidence, a courtesy he never extended, one recalls, to contemporaneous doctors and architects.
Should the Queen, given the scale of this embarrassment, intervene? Or should Markle just be left to keep talking?
So long as fresh Markle dramas allow the portrayal of Charles and his family as comparatively reliable, it’s possible the prince’s habit of confiding in men – Laurens van der Post and Jimmy Savile having preceded Ball – who struck others as questionable and repellent, will, once again, be forgotten. Or, at least, be attributed to bad luck. Or, to take a more Bracknellish line – “to befriend two paedophiles, your royal highness, may be regarded as a misfortune; to befriend three…” – to carelessness. As opposed to indicating a self-regard so fathomless as to leave the heir to the throne, surrounded by his habitually grovelling court, vulnerable to any appropriately qualified sycophant.
What would that tell us about Charles’s fitness to inherit? Even Jonathan Dimbleby, in his doting 1994 biography, suggests that a less susceptible reader than the prince might have gathered, from van der Post’s insinuating twaddle, that this shameless charlatan was also “a flatterer and a self-publicist”.
The seer (reportedly still revered by Charles) was discovered, after his death, to have had sex with, that is, raped and then impregnated, a 14-year-old girl who had been entrusted to his care. This is not to suggest that Charles should have somehow detected – where, similarly, did none of Mrs Thatcher, BBC executives and any number of Ball’s devout co-workers – that his favourites were also sex offenders. For those accomplished liars, Ball demonstrates, the same, deferential conditions that disgusted Twain’s Hank meant every establishment patron won him more protectors.
But as Richard Scorer, representing some of Ball’s victims, told IICSA, Charles’s failure to investigate Ball’s caution resembles “wilful blindness”. If Thomas Markle wasn’t already out there, causing such an unprecedented crisis, it might be quite a worry.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
