The TRUE cost of Meghan's baby shower: Friends may have picked up the £330k bill, but Diana’s former top aide PATRICK JEPHSON fears the Duchess is making the same mistakes as Harry’s mother - and risking the Royal Family's reputation
The Duchess of Sussex was in New York this week, catching up with friends, having lunch and doing a little light shopping. It was a private visit so there was no additional cost to the British taxpayer.
She is already back at work, flying the flag for Britain on a high-profile official visit to Morocco, where she and the Duke will promote diplomatic relations, boost UK interests and support humanitarian causes.
Just another week in the everyday story of royal folk? Hardly. As Princess Diana’s private secretary, I learned to recognise that the line between official and private travel is never just about the money. It’s a code that opens a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences.
Rich people’s jets — in this case a Gulfstream reportedly paid for by George and Amal Clooney — always come with a bill attached, even if it’s not the kind you can pay with a Duchy of Cornwall credit card.
Favours must be returned, obligations quickly multiply and pretty soon royal free-riders are handing over their most precious assets: credibility and dignity, if not, please God, their lives.
The uproar created in some quarters by Meghan’s brief, but undeniably extravagant, Big Apple excursion could hardly have been greater if she had run naked down Broadway and burned a Union Jack in Times Square.
But let’s keep a sense of proportion here. A high-profile former actress, she happens to have rich celebrity friends and, if they behave as rich celebrities usually do, then good luck to her, surely.
Anyway, other members of the Royal Family, notably Prince Charles and Camilla, have often been known graciously to accept favours from the mega-rich, especially if there’s a jet, a yacht or a private island on offer. Just don’t tactlessly mention the environmental damage.
This whole subject is a high-hypocrisy zone, so instead, relax, enjoy the exotic pictures and remember the words of Jimmy Stewart’s character, the cynical hack Macaulay Connor in The Philadelphia Story: ‘The prettiest sight in this fine pretty world is the privileged class enjoying its privileges.’
Royal dramas of this kind tend to fizzle out pretty quickly, fit only for tomorrow’s recycling bin.
There will surely be some courtiers this morning (not least in Casablanca with the Duke and Duchess) who are trying this explanation on for size. Perhaps it will all blow over, they hope, and the British public’s love for its excitingly-disruptive American newcomer will resume undiminished.
After all, it seems only yesterday that Her Royal Highness was winning hearts with her ‘bananagrams’ for sex workers in Bristol, recipe-sharing with women in the Grenfell community kitchen, and speech-making on women’s education and women’s suffrage on a hugely successful tour Down Under in October.
Taking a tough line: Patrick Jephson with Princess Diana. Patrick Jephson was equerry and private secretary to HRH The Princess of Wales 1988-96
Away she goes: Markle was seen leaving The Mark on Wednesday night an hour after her five-day baby shower holiday
Then again, perhaps this time it won’t blow over.
Here’s why. The juxtaposition of the baby shower excesses of New York — even if the celebrations were, as reported, funded by her friend the tennis player Serena Williams — and the sober mainstream royal duty of Morocco represents a critical crossroads for the new Duchess. Which path she chooses will determine not just her own future, but also that of the Monarchy itself, whose fortunes are now linked by marriage and genetics with her own.
To quote the fictional Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey: ‘The truth is neither here nor there, it’s the look of the thing that matters.’
From any angle, the look of Meghan’s Manhattan partying is pretty unedifying. Not just for its excess — though that’s impressively unsettling — but for its calculated recklessness.As befits a self-declared champion of ‘women who work’ as opposed to ‘ladies who lunch’ (her own words) she owns this one: chaos, candy floss, flower charity, Gulfstream, the lot.
In a prelude to this week’s junket, it was these friends who monopolised an issue of People magazine to ‘set the record straight’ about how the Duchess was being victimised and bullied by some members of her own family.These same friends kept the media and the Twittersphere intimately informed of every breathless detail of the very un-British custom of the baby shower — including the presence of a harpist and tuition in flower-arranging (the finished creations were donated to charity).
We might ask if this is merely a dreary attempt by Meghan’s friends to catch a bit of royal limelight for their own ambitions, social and professional (coincidentally, George Clooney has a new TV show, Catch-22, to promote), or if there is some other strategy at work in which these are just the early moves. Because, intentionally or not, Meghan seems to be assembling an array of PR firepower which should make any palace press office sit up.
Somewhere in the bowels of Buckingham Palace, I suspect anxious courtiers might reasonably be pondering that if this People stunt is how she treats her own flesh and blood, what might she be willing to do to her in-laws if they were ever to similarly incur her displeasure?
The apparent decision to keep those men in suits in the dark about this private PR initiative will certainly add to their anxiety and cause them irritation. I should know: Harry’s mother did it to me, especially her ill-judged Panorama interview in 1995.
Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, prepares personalised messages on fruit in the charity kitchen with volunteer Sue Creighton
In reality, if you’re a front-rank member of the Windsor brand, there’s no such thing as a ‘private’ visit to the City That Never Sleeps (left: Harry and Meghan's wedding. Right: Duchess of Sussex on stage during The Fashion Awards 2018)
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