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“We just don’t know,” an old family friend of Prince Harry’s said when asked if Finding Freedom, the new biography of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle by Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand, is going to be the damning, receipt-brandishing account of racism and sexism within the palace that friends of the couple have threatened and courtiers have long feared.
The friend added, “The hope, obviously, is that everyone is just hyping it and it will actually be less of a big deal than they say, but nobody really knows.”
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Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time that publishers have talked up a new book as being the definitive, inside, ultimate story of this, that or the other for the printed matter to turn out somewhat less explosive.
And there must be some hope, behind palace walls, that Harry and Meghan would be reluctant to burn bridges with his family; they are understood to be still receiving a significant financial support from family coffers and may be more grateful for it that they had once imagined they might be, as the launch of their commercial career is on hold due to COVID-19.
Plus, dunking on a 94-year-old and 99-year-old (as the queen and Prince Philip, all being well, will be in August when the book is due to publish) might not be the greatest look for a couple who, the book’s description makes clear, want to be seen as international humanitarians.
The likelihood of Harry’s friends making indiscreet revelations is low. Harry is deeply distrustful of journalists and the media in general. Harry is also only too aware of how badly his mother ultimately fared after co-operating with Andrew Morton on his book, Diana: Her True Story.
Harry and Meghan’s camp are certainly keen to play down the narrative that the book will contain bombshell revelations, with insiders telling The Daily Beast that the book is not official, not endorsed, does not feature interviews with the couple, and that they have not given interviews for it.
“Over-exaggerated” is how one source described reports of the book being some explosive piece of nonfiction to The Daily Beast last week. The full title, Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family, certainly suggests the authors are unafraid of a little well-chosen hyperbole.
However, a description of the book on Amazon as being “written with the participation of those closest to the couple” is likely to have stimulated the palace’s collective amygdala, and will be interpreted as code that Harry and Meghan have given friends tacit or explicit authorization to speak to the writers.
A friend of the couple told The Daily Beast that while it was true that “the authors have spoken to a lot of people over the years, some of whom will have been very close to the couple,” they had no reason to believe the book “is going to include anything at all about accusing the family of anything,” adding that such talk was no more than “a lot of wild internet speculation.”
One writer who worked on a previous book about Harry with the palace’s co-operation says that, when writing a book about members of the royal family, it is only possible to get staff and friends to talk if they have explicitly been told it is OK to do so, and this is what is called “co-operation” not to be confused with “permission” or indeed “authorization”. It also means the palace does not seek to actively block the author in their work, and may help provide access to official paperwork etc.
This author told The Daily Beast they would be greatly surprised if Harry’s friends would divulge anything that could be remotely described as a bombshell—but the situation vis-à-vis Meghan’s friends could be more interesting.
“The British, upper-class people who are friends of the royals tend to be respectful of the traditions of the royal family, and they also mistrust journalists by default, so I would imagine Harry’s friends’ comments would be pretty tame. But the Americans really don’t give two hoots about the royal family, and so lots of her friends might well think it’s a great idea to talk to two journalists they have been told are friendly,” the writer said.
The template many royal experts are looking to is the interview famously given by “five friends” to People magazine which has now become a central part of Meghan’s privacy and copyright case against the Mail on Sunday.
The British newspaper claimed that it was entitled to reproduce parts of a letter Meghan wrote to her dad because she had already effectively put its contents in the public domain by, they said, briefing some of her friends about its contents who then sat down to do the interview with People magazine.
In a written filing, Meghan said that she had no idea the friends were doing an interview with People, and it is, therefore, interesting to see that Meghan’s camp are effectively making the same claim about her friends’ alleged co-operation with this new book, with one source telling The Daily Beast last week: “We don’t know who they [the authors] have spoken to.”
In fact, the details about the letter made up a relatively small part of the final piece. The interview majored instead on cute but ultimately inconsequential details (which conveniently bathed Meghan in a beatific glow) such as the fact that Meghan cooks for herself and Harry “every night” and leaves slippers and a robe out in a candlelit room for friends who came to stay with them when they lived in their London cottage.
The interview was oddly silent on the issue of the feud between the Sussexes and the Cambridges, and the way it went about discussing the one meaty issue it did tackle, Meghan’s relationship with her dad, has now become a central bone of contention in the forthcoming court case.
The reality is that attempts so far by Meghan and Harry’s friends to influence press coverage about them have not exactly been a triumph, and one can’t help wondering if the Sussexes might have been better off sticking to the queen’s maxim of never complaining and never explaining.
If this book ends up being long on details of the blissful domestic bubble the Sussexes occupy, with an extended list of the causes they support and their good works in aid of them, no-one is going to get too worked up about it.
But if it seeks to stoke controversy and settle scores, then Harry and Meghan will likely pay a high price.
Like Harry’s mother before them, they will likely be unceremoniously expelled from the royal family.
Of course, it’s a price they may just be prepared to pay, and that possibility is what will be keeping courtiers awake between now and August.
