Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and the Daily Beast and the author of multiple books about the British monarchy, has some pretty scathing things to say about Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s post-royal experiment.
In a new podcast interview, Brown blasted Meghan for having “the worst judgement in the world” and portrayed her 40-year-old husband as “a child” and a “lamb to slaughter” who “blindly” followed his American TV actor wife to California and renounced the one job he was good at — being a prince.
“I think he’s pretty much in the thrall of Meghan,” Brown said in an interview with The Ankler podcast’s Janice Min. “He’s the lamb to the slaughter in this situation. I mean, he was terribly impressed by Meghan. He thought that she knew it all. She persuaded him that she was the savvy Hollywood wheeler dealer, who would come in and make them stars and all the rest of it. And he just sort of blindly followed her like a child, really.”
But the couple’s efforts to become media moguls and global thought leaders hasn’t worked out the way they had hoped when they acrimoniously left royal life in 2020 and moved to the United States. Brown lays much of the blame on Meghan, whom she previously depicted as a minor TV actor — “sixth on the call sheet” — in her book, “The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor, the Truth and the Turmoil.”
“The trouble with Meghan is that she has the worst judgment of anyone in the entire world,” said Brown, who is authoring a new Substack newsletter entitled, “Fresh Hell.” Brown said, “She’s flawless about getting it all wrong. She really is.”
With regard to Meghan’s apparent lack of business sense, or her inability to lead people into executing grand ideas, Brown said: “Her issue is that she doesn’t listen. She has all these people, asks them their opinion, and then doesn’t follow it. She does what she wants to do. And all of her ideas are total crap, unfortunately.”
Brown is no doubt referring to Meghan and Harry squandering their multimillion-dollar opportunity to produce groundbreaking podcasts for Spotify, or to helm blockbuster shows and feature films for Netflix — a reported, five-year, $100 million deal that may not be renewed, according to a report by Puck.
Meanwhile, Meghan appears to be struggling to launch her lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard, and she’s faced an onslaught of reports about staff turnover and renewed accusations that she’s “Duchess Difficult” and not nice to work for.
In a bombshell story in September, the Hollywood Reporter interviewed a dozen current and former employees who said that she “belittles people,” doesn’t take advice and is a “dictator in high heels” who fumes, barks out orders and bombards her staff with 5 a.m. emails.
Presaging Brown’s new assessment about the couple, a source also told the Hollywood Reporter that both Meghan and Harry are “poor decision-makers.” While Harry can be charming, he also enables his wife’s worst tendencies.
“Unfortunately, she made every mistake in the book, and she’s kind of run out of road, actually,” Brown said. “I mean, I don’t know where Meghan goes.”
Meanwhile, Harry “could make a comeback,” Brown said. After all, “he’ll always be Prince Harry. He’ll always be the grandson of the Queen and the son of Diana. You can’t take that from him, whatever happens.”
Brown noted that Harry — who never really trained to work, except for his years in the British army — is good at going around the world and playing the role of prince, showing support for his favorite causes — as was the case on his recent tour that took him to New York, London and Africa.
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“When he goes on these much mocked foreign trips, he’s just really good at it,” Brown said. “He’s charming, he’s funny, he’s sweet, he’s authentic again. He has a real sense of being true and real, and he’s flawless at it.”
“So it’s actually very sad that he can’t go back to England and play that role, which is desperately needed, because now the monarchy is a skeleton of itself,” Brown said, referring to the fact that both King Charles III and Kate Middleton have been sidelined to varying degrees by cancer.
“It is so ironic that Prince Charles, for all those years, talked about the slimmed down monarchy,” Brown said. “It’s been so slimmed down now that it’s anorexic.”
“You’ve basically got Charles, who’s got cancer. You’ve got Kate, who’s been through this terrible cancer bout herself and had to leave the stage for nearly a year, and William, who’s so curtailed by all the anxiety on his shoulders—his wife and his father and the whole thing—that they could use, an upbeat, joyful ambassador to the world who would be Harry.”
But Brown said she doesn’t see Harry being welcomed back, largely because of the animosity between him and his older brother, William, who will one day become king.
“The problem is very much the same problem that I talked about with Princess Diana and Charles, which was known as the ‘upstage problem,’” Brown said. “I mean, he does upstage William. There’s no doubt about it.”
Brown also said that “the hostility” between the brothers is such that William probably will never “want Harry back.”
But if William isn’t keen to forgive his brother, what about the British people? Harry’s popularity in the U.K. plummeted after he left his home country, and he used interviews and his memoir, “Spare,” to publicly criticize his family, according to various polls.
But Brown believes the British people would be happy to have Harry back, but only “if he came back alone” — meaning, without his wife, who is viewed even less favorably in the U.K. For her part, Meghan reportedly has no great desire to ever spend any time in the U.K ever again.