A RUTHLESS SOCIAL CLIMBER DUMPED HER AILING DAD FOR A PRINCE

Sorry George, but Meghan’s no Princess Diana and it’s not the media that’s vilifying her - it’s her own family who she abandoned for celebrities like you

By Piers Morgan

Daily Mail
February 12, 2019

I was recently told a rather sad story about Prince Harry’s wedding to Meghan Markle.

It came from someone who knows the couple well and involved the lavish party they threw after the televised nuptials, for just 250 handpicked guests at Frogmore House near Windsor Castle.

Three of Harry’s closest male friends weren’t invited.

These guys aren’t just casual mates, they go back a very long way with him.

The lack of invitation was apparently wounding enough to them.

But their dismay at the snub was somewhat exacerbated when they saw who HAD got the Willy Wonka lucky tickets instead – a load of celebrities like the Beckhams, Elton John, James Corden, Idris Elba, Serena Williams, Priyanka Chopra, and George and Amal Clooney.

‘We’ve been ditched for people more famous than us,’ they observed, ruefully.

This was a sentiment shared by Meghan’s entire family, none of whom – with the exception of her parents – was invited to either the wedding or the party.

In the end, Meghan’s father Thomas didn’t make the trip for ‘health reasons’ after being caught posing for paparazzi pictures, meaning her mother Doria Ragland was the ONLY member of her family in a huge guest-list of 600 people.

The Markle seats in church were taken by stars like Oprah Winfrey, a somewhat mystifying spectacle for anyone who believes weddings are supposed to be about family.

I wasn’t entirely surprised though given my own bizarre ‘ghosting’ experience with Ms Markle that suggested to me she’s a ruthless social climber.

No wonder then that her family feel less than enamoured towards the newly ennobled Duchess: she’s dumped them all like a sack of rancid potatoes, lest they poison her perfect new privileged royal well.

I thought of this today when I read George Clooney’s impassioned defence of Meghan over recent negative headlines.

He attacked the media: ‘They’re just chasing Meghan Markle, she’s being pursued and vilified.’

Then he directly compared her to Harry’s mother, Princess Diana: ‘She is being pursued and hunted and chased in the same way that Diana was, and it’s history repeating itself.’

He ended with a chilling warning: ‘And we’ve seen how that ends. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to see that.’

Hmmm.

There is a certain irony in Clooney saying all this just days after Meghan directed five of her best friends to speak to People magazine and knife her poor father in the back.

Just as there was when Diana harangued the media for intrusion, but would repeatedly collude with newspaper journalists (I know, I was one of the people she colluded with!) to get herself positive press coverage and settle scores with people she didn’t like.

Clooney at least is consistent; he furiously blamed the media entirely for Diana’s death.

To him, there is no correlation between using the press to promote or spin your brand, and then being scrutinised by the same press, sometimes critically.

To me, there is.

When she met Harry, Meghan wasn’t some naïve young 19-year-old virgin like Diana. She was a 35-year-old divorcee with a successful acting career who knew exactly what she was doing.

She landed her handsome, much younger Prince, and now enjoys the spectacularly opulent lifestyle of palaces and servants that comes with marrying into the British royal family.

She has milked all the global fame and attention that’s subsequently come her way with obvious glee.

And honestly, if this is the life Meghan’s always dreamed of, then good luck to her.

But there is absolutely no comparison between the amount of media attention she gets and the amount Diana experienced.

Diana was the biggest star on the planet; Meghan isn’t even in the top three biggest stars currently living at Kensington Palace.

And Clooney is not just wrong about that.

He’s also wrong to blame the media for negative headlines driven largely by Meghan’s own family.

They are the ones vilifying her because she has disowned them all, and they understandably feel hurt about that.

Meghan’s letter to her father, that he only disclosed this week after the People magazine cover story came out, was a template in the modern scourge of celebrity victimhood.

It was all about HER feelings, HER marriage, HER life, HER pain.

But what about her dad’s feelings - HIS life, HIS pain?

I’ve interviewed Thomas Markle twice, and get the impression he’s a decent guy who hasn’t had a clue how to handle the enormous media scrutiny that came when his daughter married a prince.

Yes, he’s made mistakes, like posing for staged photos with the paparazzi, and he’s admitted to them.

But he’s also lost his little girl, the one he helped bring up, educate, nurture and succeed. The one who posted a touching Father’s Day card on Instagram just weeks before she met Prince Harry, telling Thomas how much she loved him.

Meghan can try to pin all the blame on her dad for this mess, as she’s now doing, but has she really been as blameless as she would have us all believe?

It’s staggering to me that Harry still hasn’t met the man whose daughter he married.

It’s staggering to me that neither Meghan nor Harry has bothered to go see Thomas, even after he suffered a heart attack.

It’s staggering to me that Meghan thinks the way to resolve this bitter dispute is to unleash her friends to attack her dad in People magazine.

And it’s staggering to me that George Clooney now believes it’s a good idea to blame the media for everything, and compare Meghan to Diana.

Clooney is a smart guy.

He must have sat in the church at the big wedding and secretly shared everyone else’s view that it was very odd to see just one person from the bride’s entire family there amid a sea of celebrities.

The problem here isn’t the media, which has largely given Meghan a very positive ride.

The problem is Meghan’s incredibly toxic relationship with her family that shows no sign of abating and in fact, gets worse by the day.

A real friend would tell her to get on a plane with her husband, and make peace with her ailing, flailing father – before it’s too late.

But is George Clooney a REAL friend, or just another famous person Meghan’s latched onto at the expense of those who until recently, she professed to care about most?

The biggest problem here may lie in the answer to that question.