Jeremy Vine said something on Channel 5 that royal commentators have spent eight years treating as unthinkable. Looking back at the Sussex wedding, he suggested that William and Kate, “or more likely people on their behalf,” got worried about how popular Harry and Meghan had become and decided to cut them down to size. In doing so, he said, they broke the whole ladder. The Sussexes did nothing wrong, he added, and were briefed against horribly.
The coverage of his comments was telling. Celebitchy quoted the Mail calling it a bizarre theory; the version online now just says theory. The Mail’s headline turned “people on their behalf” into William personally plotting out of jealousy, a much easier claim to laugh off. Under pressure, Vine himself shrugged that he couldn’t really know.
You don’t need to know what Vine knows. You just need a calendar.
May 2018: The wedding is a global sensation, and for a few weeks the coverage is almost entirely glowing.
October 2018: The Sussexes’ tour of Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Tonga draws huge crowds, and they announce Meghan’s first pregnancy at the start. The same month, Jason Knauf, the Kensington Palace communications secretary, sends an email raising bullying complaints about Meghan. It stays private until The Times publishes it days before the Oprah interview in 2021.
November 2018: Weeks after the tour, the Telegraph reports that Meghan left Kate in tears during a bridesmaid-dress fitting. The palace doesn’t correct it. In 2021 Meghan says the reverse happened: Kate made her cry, then apologized with flowers and a note. Harry’s memoir later tells the same story.
December 2022: In the Netflix series Harry & Meghan, Harry says he and William agreed never to brief against each other after watching their parents do it, and that William’s office went on to do exactly that. Neither office has ever responded.
So the most damaging early story, the one that set “difficult Meghan” in stone, appeared right after the Sussexes outshone everyone on tour. It was wrong, and nobody with the power to correct it did.
To be fair, briefing hasn’t been one-way. Evidence in Meghan’s 2021 privacy case showed she had authorized her communications secretary to help the authors of Finding Freedom, and she apologized to the court for not remembering it. Everyone’s people talk. The difference is power: one side had the palace machinery and the friendliest papers, and the palace’s silence did the rest.
If that culture ended when the Sussexes left, nobody told the papers. In one week this October, the Mail priced Meghan’s afternoon tea down to the champagne she didn’t drink. It ran a dining guide that cast her as the upmarket diner and William and Kate as down-to-earth pub regulars, and filed her pub lunch under Harry. Then it itemized Kate’s suit for a hospice visit and stopped before the boots, the earrings and a sapphire worth hundreds of thousands. Even its story about Vine ends with an unnamed source sneering that Harry seems to think everyone has forgotten the last few years. A piece about briefing closes with a briefing.
What’s actually new here isn’t the theory. Readers have been pointing at that 2018 timeline for years. What’s new is a mainstream broadcaster saying it out loud on national television, and the Mail having to report it.
The jealousy theory isn’t bizarre. What’s bizarre is pretending the last eight years happened by accident.
