Tom Bower’s new book about Meghan Markle and
Prince Harry is out now – here’s how to read the biography
‘Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the war between the
Windsors’ is said to feature interviews from insiders, including those ‘who
have never spoken before’
Eva
Waite-Taylor
Thursday 21
July 2022 10:52
The book,
which has been written by Tom Bower – an investigative journalist and the
so-called master of unauthorised biographies – will likely provide a unique
insight into the royal couple. The title is more than a year in the works, with
Bower interviewing royal insiders, friends, and foes – including those “who
have never spoken before”.
As such,
the latest release is eagerly anticipated and is said to uncover every part of
the Sussexes life, including their early courtship and their friend’s opinion
of their relationship, as well as Meghan and Harry’s relationship with the rest
of the royal family.
Before
publication day, exclusive extracts of Revenge were released by The Times and
The Sunday Times, which exposed further details of the forthcoming book,
including how Meghan Markle’s guest editorship of the September issue of
British Vogue caused a stir as it came as a surprise to Buckingham Palace.
This latest
royal release comes a year after it was announced that Prince Harry was writing
an “intimate and heartfelt memoir”, which is expected to be published later in
2022. But if it’s Bower’s Revenge you’re looking to read next, here’s
everything there is to know about the title and how you can buy it now.
News that
Tom Bower was penning a title about Meghan Markle and Prince Harry was
announced in March last year following the royal couple’s infamous Oprah
interview. Spending more than a year meticulously researching, Bower
interviewed royal insiders, friends and foes, including those “who have never
spoken before” to reveal and learn everything that he could about the Sussexes.
Before the
book was published, exclusive extracts were released by The Times, which
provided some details about what we could expect from the 464-page unofficial
biography. One such revelation was that when Meghan Markle guest edited British
Vogue for the September 2019 issue, Buckingham Palace was not informed of her
decision, which, according to the book, caused a rift between the magazine and
the palace.
Revenge is
said to include all facets of love, betrayal, secrets, and revenge, and will of
course reveal new elements of the royal couple, including their relationship
with other members of the royal family, notably between Harry and his brother
Prince William.
The couple
has had no involvement in the book, but if you enjoy reading about the royal
family, we’d recommend ordering it now and discovering more about Meghan and
Harry.
This article is more than 4 months old
Meghan a threat to the royals? That’s one way to
sell a book of tawdry gossip
Catherine
Bennett
The
biographer Tom Bower makes no attempt at balance in a hit job on the Duchess of
Sussex
Sat 23 Jul
2022 19.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/23/meghan-harry-tom-bowers-biography-piers-morgan
The
respected biographer, Tom Bower, has been giving some extraordinary interviews
about his new study of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. His book, the calmly
entitled Revenge, is not merely, we learn, a comprehensively negative
assessment of the couple: Bower would like it actively to damage them. “This
book may hasten a downward trend at which I wouldn’t be sad at all,” he told an
enchanted Piers Morgan, “because they pose a real threat to the royal family.”
The public
should not, you gather, be reassured by the Sussexes’ departure, some time
back, for California. Nor deceived by their very minor role at a jubilee widely
considered a triumph for the royal family. Nor taken in by the couple’s
replacement occupation, now they are non-working royals, of supplying bland,
homiletic content to US clients. It is not enough that every display of Sussex
sanctimony is already made safe by Bower’s tireless allies in the UK media,
with an answering volley from royal experts and body language professionals.
Harry’s recent address to the UN was, for instance, immediately brought down
with blasts of Sarah Vine and, still struggling to get over Meghan’s ghosting,
Piers Morgan.
Bower still
scents danger from the deceptively dormant Meghan, “a very scheming, very
clever woman”.
After
watching her with Oprah, he concluded: “This woman is doing something quite
terrible to Britain and Harry has fallen in love with her, you know, in a
ludicrous way, and has gone along as her accomplice.” If only Harry had fallen
in love with the former actress in a sensible way, like, say, Prince Charles
did with his now-venerated Camilla Parker Bowles.
So if
Bower’s book, no less than the related interviews, seems suffused with a wild
malice, perhaps it comes from a good and loyal place. It is to give the Queen a
“final happiness” (that “Meghan and Harry seem determined to deny”) that Bower,
as well as detailing Meghan’s ex-lovers, her early hustling for acting roles
and determined forging of a personal brand, is compelled to supplement his case
against her with insults. He volunteers, for example, that when the former
Suits star was interviewed by Larry King, “Meghan looked unusually unattractive
with greasy hair, rumpled clothes and peaky eyes”. Finding this still harder to
accept than Bower’s conviction that reliance on notorious Markle-haters is a
persuasive approach, I had a look. Judge for yourself, but to this viewer the
contrast between Bower’s description and Markle’s actual (appealing) appearance
is something his editors might, for the sake of reader confidence, have checked
on. As it is, they must already hope that a response from one quoted detractor,
Sam Kashner, published in the Times last week, will be the last to raise doubts
about authorial bias. “I found Ms Markle,” Kashner wrote, “to be exceptionally
warm and gracious and admired her intelligence and her remarkable courage, as I
still do.” Bower retorts: “That just shows the power of Meghan.”
Bower still
scents danger from the deceptively dormant Meghan, 'a very scheming, very
clever woman'
If the
reader sometimes feels more balance might have strengthened his case, the
experienced Bower perhaps felt a greater responsibility to awaken a nation yet
to comprehend the threat of a controlling woman who is tellingly – a point not
previously stressed – not tall. Schemingly, Meghan often wears high heels, but
Bower is not fooled. If he’s not the only tall man to betray some pride in
having grown himself so successfully, it’s still unusual to see this quality
transformed into a royal threat-detector. At Wimbledon with Kate: “The physical
comparison was unflattering to Meghan. On her own, Meghan’s radiance won
universal applause but beside the taller, authoritative future queen the
duchess appeared diminished.” Perhaps this could be deleted in any volume
likely to be picked up by the Queen (5’3”), at this delicate point in her
reign?
But no
logic, in this protracted bitchfest, governs what Bower won’t gleefully cite in
the Sussexes’ disfavour, while overlooking similar lapses among his favourites.
Harry’s Oprah suit is “ill-fitting”. Thomas Markle looks… like Thomas Markle
(the more than sartorial shortcomings of Princess Michael’s “blackamoor” brooch
are likewise ignored). The Sussexes’ favourite journalist Omid Scobie, has a
face, Bower adds by way of another irrelevant ad hominem, that “changed after
working in Japan”. Presumably surgery is being referenced here, as opposed to
the climate. “Some would say,” Bower adds, “that as the royal editor for
Harper’s Bazaar, the Anglo-Iranian is a propagandist.”
Whether
intended as an elegant malice-diffuser or handy gossip-vehicle the some said/would
say locutions perform heroically throughout the book, as in one passage about a
charity executive: “Some would even say he was besotted by her.”
Some would
say, incidentally, that it’s unfortunate in a book that twits Harry for using a
wrong word (“recipe” for formula) that Omid Scobie appears on one page as “Omar
Scobie”.
To turn to
the “explosive” new content promised by Bower’s publishers, the most prized
revelations appear to be: Meghan was mean on a fashion shoot; the Queen was
glad Meghan didn’t attend the funeral; the Vogue staff didn’t like her either;
Meghan, with an outsider’s disregard for British niceties, vexed some of her
betters with complaints about their hateful language.
Definitely
new is Bower’s diagnosis, without any obvious evidence, of Meghan’s “terrible
envy”. With his legal hat on, he suggests that an upheld judgment against a
Mail newspaper’s publication of her private letter happened because, “as a
class, Britain’s judges were unsympathetic to the Mail newspaper group”.
Returning
to the facts, the author concludes that the couple’s messy departure for the US
brought the Queen, Charles and William together. “They were forging a united
front against the Sussexes.”
Some would
say – to borrow again from Bower – that this observable royal resilience makes
a further nonsense of his claims about vengeful, Montecito-based “agents of
destruction”. As for his book’s contention that the whiny – though threatening
– couple never had a thing to complain about: if they didn’t then, they do now.
Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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