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The Daily Beast has frequently heard from Prince Harry’s old friends of their amazement at his transformation from posh, politically incorrect party boy into woke Los Angeles social-justice warrior. Indeed, The Daily Beast understands that vanishingly few of Harry’s old pals are still in regular contact with him, such is the order of the metamorphosis.
Now, author Tom Bower, in the latest extract from his new book on Harry and Meghan, Revenge: Meghan, Harry, and the War Between the Windsors, details one of the first incidences in which Harry’s old and new worlds collided, and the astonished reaction of his old friends to his unlikely new girlfriend.
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Bower alleges, in an extract excerpted in The Times of London, that not long after the couple went public with their romance, Harry invited Meghan to meet 16 of his best friends and their wives and girlfriends for a shooting weekend at Sandringham, the queen’s lavish country estate in Norfolk. Bower writes that the group, disproportionately heavy on land-owning Old Etonians, “were bonded by common assumptions, principles, and loyalties.”
Harry settled down for a weekend of “banter, jokes—and a lot of drinking.”
Meghan was not amused.
Bower writes: “He had not anticipated Meghan’s reaction. Their jokes involving sexism, feminism, and transgender people ricocheted around the living rooms and dining rooms. Without hesitation, Meghan challenged every guest whose conversation contravened her values. According to some of Harry’s friends, again and again she reprimanded them about the slightest inappropriate nuance. Nobody was exempt. Harry’s world would not be her world.”
Bower says that after the party, the group sent each other amazed texts: “OMG what about HER?” said one, “Harry must be fucking nuts.”
A similar conflict between Harry’s old and new worlds was witnessed when the couple attended the wedding, in Jamaica, of one of Harry’s oldest friends, Tom “Skippy” Inskip.
Meghan, once again, did not hit it off with the wider group, which included parents of his old friends. Bower says, “Not only did she quibble about the food, but behaved ‘princessy,’ refusing to engage with Harry’s friends, some said. ‘She wasn’t interested in us,’ said one mother.”
