Betrayal by Tom Bower: 2-star review

Tom Bower is good at drily juxtaposing just how tone-deaf Meghan can be. For instance, take this speech: “I’m looking at this time as my chapter of joy. My intentionality is to enjoy this chapter and be able to love through every piece of this as best we can.” She delivers this word salad to an audience in Colombia who have witnessed assassinations, torture, rape and murder. At the end of this trip, Meghan’s publicist is so physically and emotionally drained that she collapses on the plane back to California. “The flight attendant,” she recalls, “thought I was actually dead.”

Bower clearly loathes Meghan with a passion, and there is, to my mind, a whiff of misogyny here and there. Of the Duchess’s notorious Netflix show With Love, Meghan, he writes: “The gender-equality campaigner was shown posing in the kitchen wearing a white tank top and then a ballgown, doing a range of domestic tasks – arranging hydrangeas, whisking in a bowl, pouring a drizzle of olive oil on to hummus.” Does he know that it’s possible to believe in women’s rights and bake a cake at the same time?

Prince Harry comes across as a more pathetic figure, anxious and muddled, and “apparently fully converted to Meghan’s gospel that the Royal family was racist”. Oh, and “seemingly fixated with his penis”: this is a reference to Spare, Harry’s memoir. Bower has gone to the trouble of counting the number of times the royal appendage is mentioned. It’s eight for “penis” and six for “todger”, if you’re wondering.

Bower can be slapdash with attribution, and you’re never quite sure whether assertions are his own or based on conversations he has had with anonymous sources. Clearly, he’s not too worried about it. Taken together, his book Betrayal creates a cohesive, if dull, picture of a grasping duchess and a lost duke, trying to make their way in a world losing interest in them by the day.

Betrayal is published by Blink at £25. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books