Due to relatively low pay and long hours, staff turnover is pretty common at the palace. What made this story different, according to Scobie and Durand, was the explicit defense of Toubati, even though Meghan and Harry were actually disappointed in her work and not sorry to see her go. “Meghan wondered if someone at Kensington Palace, where Melissa had some good friends, was more interested in protecting one of their own than her,” the journalists write in Finding Freedom. Later, they add that the toxic internal politics of the palace promoted competition and leaking. One aide told a newspaper editor that he was able to “handle anything after putting up with one of Meghan’s temper tantrums,” according to the book, and another bragged that about their ability to place a story in the tabloids whenever they wanted.
At that point, the couple had already begun to plan their move to Frogmore Cottage on Queen Elizabeth’s relatively isolated Windsor estate. The tabloid stories continued to get more scathing, and outlets continued to rely on internal sources for damaging and dubious stories. The relationship between the couple and palace staff only got worse, and by the time Archie Mountbatten-Windsor was born, they were down to two full-time employees at Frogmore, a housekeeper and an assistant, who were not live-in.
The willingness of palace aides to talk also affected the way Harry felt about his family. After an interview where he told Tom Bradby about the tension he had experienced with William, he was disappointed that William didn’t reach out to him even as his aides spoke to the media, according to Finding Freedom. “It’s these games the couple was hoping to get away from,” one source told Scobie and Durand. “Harry felt that William and the people around him were too concerned with press coverage.”
In the palace, there are communications staffers and a whole array of other aides and courtiers, some of whom find out their internal information from gossip or from overheard conversations in the bustling palace halls. Looking back on the coverage of Meghan’s years in the royal family, it can be hard to tell what is coming from people in the position to know, what is reputation management from the disgruntled, and what is more akin to workplace legend. In Scobie and Durand’s telling, different staffers struggled for different reasons. There’s a group of people whose jobs got significantly more difficult when Meghan joined the fold for a variety of reasons, but mostly because of the invasive press attention. Then there was a group of traditionalists who didn’t didn’t like Meghan from the jump, and were attacking her before it became clear if she was actually going to join the family.
So whether or not there was an actual conspiracy to push Meghan and Harry away, it’s clear that the stress of living in the fishbowl of Kensington Palace intensified the couple’s problems and gave their internal detractors more fodder to start a tabloid war. Scobie and Durand did set out to tell Meghan and Harry’s side of the story, but it doesn’t take much behind-the-scenes knowledge to see that Meghan wasn’t welcomed with open arms.
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