Of all the problems Meghan Markle anticipated in her transformation from actress to duchess after marrying into the Royal Family, this was surely the one she least expected.
So imagine what must go through her mind when she reaches for the telephone to call her father. Hardly a day goes past without a headline that seemingly emanates from the private thoughts of Thomas Markle.
Just this week we’ve had reports of his sadness at not receiving a Father’s Day card from his daughter and a bizarre outburst about Donald Trump’s meeting with the Queen next month.
‘If the Queen is willing to meet our arrogant and insensitive president,’ he was quoted as saying by the U.S. gossip website TMZ, ‘she has no excuse not to meet me, I’m nowhere near as bad.’
All this has followed hot on the heels of his bombshell interview with ITV’s Good Morning Britain, in which he repeated private conversations he’d had with his new son-in-law Prince Harry and discussed Meghan’s desire to have children. It is, of course, an unwritten rule that the royals never discuss politics, yet here he was giving Harry’s views on Brexit and Donald Trump.
As upsetting as having such intimacies aired undoubtedly is for the Duchess of Sussex, she is also facing the accusation that she has now cut her father adrift.
According to reliable sources close to 73-year-old Markle, the father of three has not spoken to either Meghan or Harry since his interview with Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid 12 days ago.
For his daughter there is understandable anxiety about whether she can call her father for fear that everything she says to him seems likely to appear somewhere or other in public.
It is a unique predicament for the royal family because, until now, in-laws have almost always been discreet — you need only to think of the sensibly silent Middleton family.
But discretion seems to be something that Thomas Markle either doesn’t understand or chooses not to understand. What an absurd, tawdry and decidedly unroyal mess the Markle affair has become.
From the moment he announced he was pulling out of the wedding just days before he was due to walk his daughter down the aisle at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, the unworldly Thomas Markle has run rings round the so-called sophisticates of Buckingham Palace.
To begin with, there was nothing but sympathy for the retired Hollywood lighting director and his brutally honest explanation that after his collaboration with the paparazzi over staged photographs his presence at the wedding would be a distraction.
He admitted the collusion had been a ‘serious mistake’.
Then came the news that he had suffered a heart attack and was not well enough to travel to Britain even if he wanted to.
While this seemed a plausible — if convenient — excuse, there were the first stirrings of discomfort inside Kensington Palace regarding Markle’s habit of making his announcements via the media.
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