The Markle Debacle: Has Poor Palace Management Caused A Pre-Wedding Crisis?

It was all going so well. Since their engagement was announced by the Palace last winter, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s personal rom-com had been progressing smoothly towards its final scene: a royal wedding that would see things done their way, swapping a Westminster Abbey spectacular for a low-key service which would ‘reflect the personalities of the bride and groom’ (and still be watched by millions of people around the world, naturally). But, just days from the ceremony itself, the finely-honed royal PR machine has become completely unstuck.

Even in the early days of preparation for Harry and Meghan’s wedding, a question mark was hung over the bride’s father, Thomas Markle Sr – and, more specifically, whether this ‘reclusive’ former lighting director would be the one to walk his daughter down the aisle. But when an extensive briefing from Kensington Palace was released earlier this month, confirming that Markle Sr would take a major role in proceedings, a line had been drawn under such speculation – or so we thought.

Just days after the Palace brought out another statement, this time asking the press to stay away from the 73-year-old, it transpired that the pap shots conveniently showing Markle Googling pictures of his daughter and her royal fiancé (in a very public Internet café) weren’t as authentic as we’d assumed – and that sums of up to $100,000 had been exchanged for said pictures. Another plot twist saw Mr Markle give a series of no-holds interviews to American gossip site TMZ, detailing how he wouldn’t, then would, then again wouldn’t be attending the wedding. This ricocheting saga of ‘will he, won’t he?’ hasn’t just threatened to overshadow Saturday’s happy event; it has also raised the question of who exactly is in control of this particular narrative. Indeed, the Palace appears at once to have mismanaged its new relationship with Meghan's father, and its long-uneasy relationship with press in the UK and beyond.

As of today, the Palace have finally taken (some) action, releasing an official statement in which Meghan confirms that her father will not be present for her wedding day. She goes on to shares her hope that ‘he can be given the space he needs to focus on his health’ following heart surgery. It's brief, but also quite heartbreaking, and it's certainly it’s too little, too late; a move that can’t help but smack of last minute damage control. Whoever walks Meghan down the aisle on May 19th (whether that’s Doria, the Prince of Wales, her future brother-in-law or perhaps no one at all), the media’s investment in the saga of Thomas Markle (neatly framed as ‘the Markle Debacle’ in newsprint headlines) is unlikely to intensify any time soon. So, how could the Palace’s idiosyncratic approach to media management have contributed to this mess?

While the Palace has been happy to slowly drip-fed superficial details of Harry and Meghan’s nuptials – there’ll be a father-son horse duo! Named Storm and Tyrone! Prince George will definitely be there! – they’ve been remarkably slow to respond to comment requests from media pertaining to anything a little more difficult – with the non-response to the Markle Debacle serving as a case in point. In doing so, they’ve created a vacuum which has been filled by uncorroborated gossip and, most recently, TMZ reports. In a new investigatory piece fromBuzzfeed, the Sun’s long-standing royal photographer Arthur Edwards has said that ‘Nobody actually knows [what is happening] because it’s one website in America putting out this news and it could be totally inaccurate. But we don’t have anyone confirming things at Kensington Palace.’ If crisis management is often casually referred to by PR as fire-fighting, this has been a case of sitting and watching the whole thing go up in flames.

This adversarial stance has naturally been traced back to Prince Harry's own tense relationship with the media. The press, of course, is hardly blameless: having grown up with first-hand experience of the horrifying ways in which the paparazzi treated his mother Diana, it is no surprise that Harry would be deeply suspicious of the media circus that surrounds the royal family. At the start of his relationship with Meghan, Harry took unprecedented measures to stand up to attacks in the press, issuing a dramatic statement detailing a ‘wave of abuse and harassment’ that was indicative of ‘outright sexism and racism’ in the British press’s handling of his new girlfriend. ‘Harry’s attitude towards the press is that he doesn’t like the press,’ former Sun royal editor Duncan Larcombe commented in a recent Town & Country feature. ‘The chance of leaving journalists out in the street for the royal wedding is a gift for him […] In Harry’s mind, it was the press that killed his mother.’

The tabloid press’s interest in the royal family – and, in particular, royal women – is certainly disturbing in many instances. But this is a machine which, for better or worse, needs special handling, and in failing to participate in the media game (let alone to shift the game onto their own terms) in this most recent instance, the Palace’s actions have arguably had a contradictory effect, causing harm which could have been averted by early intervention (with Thomas Markle as collateral damage). Meghan’s father could, surely, have been eased into this new life. As another former Sun reporter, Phil Dampier, notes in Buzzfeed’s piece, ‘They should have flown out there months ago and met her father, or a senior courtier should have gone out there, put an arm around him and told him how to handle the press.’ Perhaps they tried to do so and were rebuffed: we can, after all, only speculate about what happens behind Palace doors, but the fact remains that Meghan’s father has not yet even met his future son-in-law, an oversight which has fueled a number of negative narratives (not least from within Meghan's own extended family).

At this stage, all we can hope is that this saga has a happy ending - and that the Palace and the press can build a more positive relationship from the fallout of this spectacularly messy episode.

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