Back in March 1992, Lady Colin Campbell published Diana in Private: The Princess Nobody Knows. Although the book became a bestseller, there was some doubt around some of the more sensational claims, notably its revelation of Princess Diana’s eating disorder, and her and Charles’s various extra-marital entanglements, including Di’s affair with James Hewitt. Later that same year, Andrew Morton published Diana: Her True Story, a bombshell biography written with the princess’s cooperation that laid bare all kinds of Windsor dirty laundry—and confirmed many things Campbell had claimed in her earlier book.
According to Campbell, this is because Diana had contributed to her book, too, but writer and subject had “fallen out” because of Diana’s “determination to propound a version of her tale so heavily slanted in her favour that it was more propaganda than fact.” Morton, by that logic, had no such qualms about advancing Diana’s agenda as she laid the groundwork for her exit from The Firm.
Fast-forward to 2020, and we find ourselves in an eerily similar set of circumstances: Diana’s son and his wife have parted ways with the Windsors, the reasons for their exit mirroring her own—chafing against an institution that didn’t support them, fleeing a press that persecuted them, striking out to redefine royalty on their own terms. And right now, as in 1992, there are two books that purport to tell the “true” version of Meghan and Harry’s experiences within the Royal Family. Off the blocks today is—cue spooky music—Meghan and Harry: The Real Story, written by none other than Lady Colin Campbell. Coming out on August 11—but excerpted in the press over the past week, possibly to scoop Campbell—is Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family. The latter is thought to have been written with some level of cooperation from Harry and Meghan’s camp—despite a Sussex spokesperson’s strenuous denials that either of them were interviewed for it—and is co-authored by Omid Scobie, a journalist they’re known to favour with a scoop.
Lady Colin Campbell’s new book is not a particularly flattering portrait of either Meghan or Harry, painting a picture of a damaged man in the thrall of a charismatic woman who possesses many of the qualities that made his mother a star—and a right royal headache, too. (Campbell, who moved in the same social circles as Diana, frames her as a complicated woman who, while genuine much of the time, also manipulated people and the media like a chessmaster.) Campbell, 70, is an aristocrat of the old school, the sort of stickler for noblesse oblige who comes down hard on Meghan for daring to say she’s “pleased to meet you” rather than the protocol-approved “How do you do.”
