them.” In the eighties and nineties, Kay
covered Princess Diana, whose modus
operandi was very different: she called
broadcasters and newspaper editors or
invited them to lunch, in the hope that,
if they knew her, they would report
more favorably on her. Prince Harry is
about as likely to start inviting editors
to lunch as he is to embark upon a
Ph.D. in astrophysics.
The memory of Diana colors any
discussion of Prince Harry. A few years
ago, he began speaking in public about
how thoroughly he had suppressed his
grief following the loss of his mother,
who died when he was twelve, in a car
crash in Paris, while being chased by
paparazzi. In 2017, Harry gave an inter-
view to Bryony Gordon, the host of
“Mad World,” a podcast on mental-
health issues, in which he admitted that
he had been “very close to a complete
breakdown on numerous occasions,”
and that he had sought professional
help. Last fall, while the Sussexes were
in Africa, on a foreign tour on behalf
of the Queen, Harry and Meghan spoke
with the journalist Tom Bradby. “Every
single time I see a flash, it takes me
straight back,” Harry said. Markle re-
vealed that she had been encouraging
Harry—or Aitch, as she calls him—to
reconsider his impulse to press dutifully
on. “It’s not enough to just survive some-
thing, right?” she said. “Like, that’s not
the point of life. You’ve got to thrive.”
Judging by Harry’s recent remarks,
it appears that, in the years since his
mother’s death, Markle was the only
person close to him who persuaded him
to exchange a stiff upper lip for a trem-
bling lower one. In a documentary that
aired in July, 2017, twenty years after Di-
ana’s death, Harry made the startling
admission that, after her funeral, he’d
cried “maybe only once.” A person’s mo-
tivations for falling in love are often
mysterious, but it seems evident that
Markle not only showed Harry the com-
passion he’d been deprived of when
Diana died; she also gave him an op-
portunity to serve as the protector he
hadn’t been able to be for his mother.
Before the Africa trip was over, the news
broke that Markle was suing the Mail
on Sunday for publishing portions of a
letter she’d written to her father. Ac-
cording to Markle, the extracts—which
quoted her telling her father that his
“actions have broken my heart into a
million pieces”—were misleading, and
constituted both a breach of copyright
and a violation of privacy. (The news-
paper is contesting the lawsuit.) In a
forceful statement, the Duke complained
that Markle was being subjected to
ceaseless criticism, and expressed a fear
of “history repeating itself.” He wrote,
“I lost my mother and now I watch my
wife falling victim to the same power-
ful forces.”
Harry shares a temperamental kin-
ship with Diana, Tominey told me: he
seems genuinely enthused by charitable
work, and has a rapport with children.
“He is one of the most impressive roy-
als I’ve seen in action,” she said. “I remem-
ber being in a hospital with him, in Bar-
bados, with profoundly disabled children,
and he was so good with these kids. I just
said to myself, ‘He’s the real deal. He’s
got the touch—his mother’s touch.’”
In 2014, not long before leaving the mil-
itary, Harry helped create the Invictus
Games, a sports competition for wounded
ex-servicemen and women. In their royal
roles, the Sussexes were expected to fol-
low Diana’s emotive, empathetic model,
providing a counterpoint to Prince Wil-
liam and his wife, Kate Middleton, the
Duchess of Cambridge, whose publicpersona has been closer to that of the
Queen: irreproachable and inscrutable.
The Duchess of Cambridge, after expe-
riencing considerable vilification in the
early years of their relationship—she was
called Waity Katie, on account of the de-
cade it took the couple to get to the
altar—is now widely cherished, but she
remains something of a blank screen.
The novelist Hilary Mantel, in a subtle
essay about royalty and femininity, called
her “gloss-varnished.”
Tominey noted that Harry’s restless-
ness with his prescribed destiny pre-
dated his marriage. In 2007, he publicly
expressed a wish to move to Lesotho,
where he had founded Sentebale, a char-
ity for children with H.I.V. Tominey
said, “This idea that ‘I don’t like that
part of me is owned by the public’—we
can all sympathize with that,” adding,
“I wouldn’t want to be part of the Royal
Family for all the tea in China.”T
he thorniest aspect of Megxit has
been the debate over whether crit-
icism of the Duchess was motivated by
racism. Reporters who cover the royals
are indignant at the suggestion, and like
to note that Harry himself used to be
accused of racial insensitivity. (In 2005,
he notoriously wore a Nazi outfit to a“I feel like this could have been a threatening e-mail.”