New Book Reveals Harry and Meghan’s ‘Mutual Addiction to Drama’

Tina Brown’s new book “The Palace Papers” details insider accounts of the couple’s shared predisposition to drama. In 2020, the couple shocked the world when they announced they were stepping back from their royal duties. Palace insiders are now revealing what led to their departure.

British journalist Tina Brown, founder of The Daily Beast who has edited such publications as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, has just released a tell-all book exposing the House of Windsor as we know them today- or more accurately, as we don’t know them.

The book leaves no stone unturned in 570 pages which detail the Royal Family which, since Princess Diana’s death in 1997, has become somewhat of a mosaic over the years. The family is now made up of widowers, divorcées, estranged siblings, and a disgraced uncle whom Brown referred to as a “coroneted sleaze machine.”

The book’s revelations leave nearly no senior royal untouched, particularly Meghan Markle, who bears the brunt of blame in response to her and Harry stepping down from their royal duties in 2020.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle first married in 2018 in what appeared to many as a fairytale wedding. Following the nuptials, however, Meghan’s treatment by the UK press was not very nice; to say the least.

In their shocking interview with Oprah Winfrey in March 2021, the couple said they had stepped down from royal duties after Meghan’s racist treatment by the UK press, as well as a comment made by a royal family member about the skin color of their unborn child, Archie.

But “The Palace Papers” reveals that what was shared in the interview with Oprah may not have been the only motivators which influenced Meghan and Harry’s decision to step away from the royal family and subsequently move to Meghan’s home state of California.

Brown takes her readers through an insider’s account of what transpired behind closed doors in Harry and Meghan’s relationship. Though the book mainly focuses on the women within the royal family, some details addressing Harry’s tumultuous past “before Meghan” sheds light on why he was so willing to leave behind his family in the U.K.

Harry had a particular affinity towards his mother as a little boy, and while Princess Diana’s death shocked the world, it particularly rattled Prince Harry, who once shouted “I hate you, I hate you, you make Mummy cry!” at his father during one of the many fights between his parents Charles, Prince of Wales and Diana, Princess of Wales, while she was still alive.

Following his mother’s death, Harry struggled in school. Brown writes that as a teenager, Harry “regularly got into fights that turned physical, ending up on crutches after kicking in a window during a dispute with another student over a girl.”

According to Brown, Harry’s temper didn’t simmer down until he enrolled at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 2005, which “saved [him] from going off the rails.” After the army, though, Harry was back to his manic behavior of “acting belligerent, carousing all night”.

His relationship with his father and stepmother was also strained. He communicated to his father mostly through private secretaries, and felt aggravated by his stepmother, Camilla, who he said made him feel like a “visitor” at Highgrove.

Actress, model, and aristocrat Cressida Bonas, his then-girlfriend, apparently couldn’t handle Harry’s temper tantrums. She said he had taken up boxing at one point because he was always “on the verge of punching somebody,” and eventually asked him to seek out a therapist.

Bonas and Harry broke things off in 2014, leaving each other on good terms, and though he believed he would be single for the rest of his life, he met Meghan Markle two years later in July 2016.

When the two met, both were impatient to settle down and start a family. Meghan was working on the show “Suits” at the time, and her then-boyfriend Canadian chef Cory Vitiello wasn’t ready for marriage. So when Meghan and Harry met, things moved fast.

After just two dates, Harry swept Meghan away to Botswana to stay in a $2,000 deluxe tent at a Kewna safari camp, to which his brother William said, “You do realize this is the fourth girl you’ve taken to Botswana.”

William was nervous at the speed at which his brother and his new flame were moving in their relationship. William became familiar with his wife, Kate, ten years before the two tied the knot in 2011, so it’s no wonder he was taken aback. William was also nervous about Meghan having to move to a country that was unfamiliar to her.

And Harry’s brother wasn’t the only one who was nervous about the American woman coming to the UK.

Meghan’s promise to “hit the ground running” in order to take on the daunting task of becoming a royal reportedly filled Buckingham Palace with “dread.” On the one hand, there was Meghan, “someone who had no context through which to comprehend the institution,” a former palace insider tells Brown. “And in the palace, you had an institution that had no context for understanding Meghan.”

“Harry, who had always chafed at the hierarchy himself, was the last person to tell her to slow down,” Brown surmises. “They were both now drunk on a shared fantasy of being the instruments of global transformation, who once married, would operate in the celebrity stratosphere once inhabited by Princess Diana,” she adds.

William said his brother’s infatuation towards Meghan was something like he’d “never seen.” It was also rumored that the two found solace in each other concerning their childhood traumas, as well as their shared grievance of being close to the center of attention, but never really being the center of attention. Meghan was sixth on the call sheet of her show, while Harry is sixth in line to the throne.

“The Sussexes fueled each other’s distrust of everybody else,” Brown observes, “and Harry’s wife was as temperamentally combative as he was.”

There were also rumors of Meghan being a “bridezilla,” a woman who allows stress to take over her emotions in planning her wedding, resulting in a tyrannical and demanding bride-to-be. There was a rumor that Meghan yelled at a junior employee because they “held an announcement back because it clashed with something scheduled with the household of another senior royal.” Harry spoke to his wife, who then apologized.

Meghan has denied allegations of bullying royal staff members.

And as William correctly predicted, Meghan didn’t understand her role as a senior royal. She didn’t enjoy their first royal tour as a couple to Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji in 2018, and found their itinerary of engagements “pointless,” according to Brown. But unlike William and Kaye, Harry did not want to make Meghan bend to the same royal rules he himself had been vehemently fighting for so long.

“Their new complicity required Meghan to fight all the norms he had kicked against for so long. She was now his comrade in arms. An aide described their confrontational stance to me as a mutual ‘addiction to drama,’” the book says.

“The Palace Papers” also digs into Queen Elizabeth II, who is now 96. Brown describes her as conflict-avoidant and remote, while her favorite child Prince Andrew is a fat-fingered pervert, and Prince Charles is “the male version of Calamity Jane.” Camilla, however, somehow managed to escape Brown’s scrutiny in the book, which comes out on Tuesday.