Finding Freedom review: Harry and Meghan whinge for Britain in a self-pitying, juicy moanathon

Finding Freedom is one massive moanathon – a one-sided, highly biased, self-pitying account of the relationship between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. And it’s utterly gripping.

The authors deny they’ve interviewed Harry and Meghan. Still, their authors’ note acknowledges they have been “accompanying, observing and interacting with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex”. The juicy details are so precise and private that they can only have come straight from the horses’ mouths.

The Sussexes’ main whinge is against the press’s skewed view of their relationship. But when the Sussexes air their one-sided account in this extraordinarily sycophantic book, somehow that’s OK.

Two worlds – and two forms of PR – collided when Harry and Meghan got together. One is the American, schmaltzy, gushing, self-serving, highly litigious world – and this book is clearly written for the American market (“Harry deeply craves normalcy”). The other is the Queen’s world – never apologise, explain, give interviews or go to law. One form of PR led to the departure of the Sussexes from royal life after barely a year. The other has seen the Queen reign peerlessly for 68 years.

But then the Queen doesn’t take offence like the Sussexes do – on an Olympian scale. For example, there’s Prince William’s innocent advice to his brother soon after he met Meghan: “Don’t feel like you need to rush this. Take as much time as you need to get to know this girl.”

In the words of “this girl”, according to Scobie and Durand, “Harry heard the tone of snobbishness that was anathema to his approach to the world… There was a thin line between caring and condescending.”

The supposed slights continue. Meghan refused to go to Pippa Middleton’s wedding service because of the Sun splash that day - “It’s Meghan v Pippa in the Wedding of the Rears”.

The final straw came at this year’s Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey. William and Kate sat with their backs to the couple, only chatting with Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex, also behind them. Meghan apparently tried to make eye contact with Kate but the duchess barely acknowledged her. According to a friend, after that cold shoulder, she never wanted to set foot into “anything royal ever again”.

Harry and Meghan (or Meg, as he calls her) go ballistic at the slightest slight, like Henry VIII on a bad day. Yes, the tabloids can be pretty rough but, actually, the British press – and the British people (barring a few disgusting racists) – welcomed Meghan with open arms. But if you’re looking for offence, you’ll always find it.

Before their wedding, Harry went nuts when Angela Kelly, the Queen’s trusted dresser, didn’t get a tiara to her for a “tiara hair trial”. The tabloids said Meghan insisted on spray-bottle air fresheners to spritz around “musty” St George’s Chapel. In fact, according to Meghan's version in this book, “the discreet, Baies-scented air diffusers… had been okayed by all parties involved.” If you’re going to pick a row, why have one over Baies-scented air diffusers?

Whatever the truth is, you won’t get an objective account from this book. It lauds the “go-get-’em approach Meghan has had ever since, aged 11, she wrote a letter of protest to national leaders, including Hillary Clinton, over a sexist soap ad”. We hear about “Meghan’s willingness to help others and her drive to excel”.

Like so many rich and famous people used to getting their way, they’re astonished when they don’t. Harry tells a friend, “I’m tired of people covering engagements and then going off to write some rubbish about what someone is wearing.”

Surely Harry realises he can’t dictate his own headlines? Meghan isn’t much brighter, judging by the bons mots from her lifestyle blog The Tig: “Being yourself is the prettiest thing a person can be”; “Travel often – getting lost will help you find yourself.”

In their pampered bubble – sashimi is delivered to their cottage at Soho Farmhouse; they sit by an open fire tended by a butler at Babington House, Somerset – they can’t bring themselves to defer to the royal system that delivers those privileges.

At their crucial Sandringham meeting with the Queen, “Harry felt as though he and Meghan had long been sidelined by the institution and were not a fundamental part of its future.” That was reflected, he thought, in the pictures on the Queen’s desk in her Christmas message: the Cambridges and their children, Charles and Camilla, Philip and George VI, but nothing of the Sussexes or their baby son.

They wanted a future as semi-working royals – having their cake, eating it and not accepting the diminishing returns you get the further you get from the throne. The Queen made it clear it wouldn’t work.

What a needless, never-ending nightmare that fairytale wedding has turned into. As Meghan herself said in March this year, as she hugged Omid Scobie, “It didn’t have to be this way.”

Harry Mount is author of How England Made the English (Penguin)

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