<\/p>\n
Tom Bower is good at drily juxtaposing just how tone-deaf Meghan can be. For instance, take this speech: \u201cI\u2019m 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.\u201d 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\u2019s publicist is so physically and emotionally drained that she collapses on the plane back to California. \u201cThe flight attendant,\u201d she recalls, \u201cthought I was actually dead.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bower clearly loathes Meghan with a passion, and there is, to my mind, a whiff of misogyny here and there. Of the Duchess\u2019s notorious Netflix show With Love, Meghan<\/em>, he writes: \u201cThe gender-equality campaigner was shown posing in the kitchen wearing a white tank top and then a ballgown, doing a range of domestic tasks \u2013 arranging hydrangeas, whisking in a bowl, pouring a drizzle of olive oil on to hummus.\u201d Does he know that it\u2019s possible to believe in women\u2019s rights and bake a cake at the same time?<\/p>\n Prince Harry comes across as a more pathetic figure, anxious and muddled, and \u201capparently fully converted to Meghan\u2019s gospel that the Royal family was racist\u201d. Oh, and \u201cseemingly fixated with his penis\u201d: this is a reference to Spare<\/em>, Harry\u2019s memoir. Bower has gone to the trouble of counting the number of times the royal appendage is mentioned. It\u2019s eight for \u201cpenis\u201d and six for \u201ctodger\u201d, if you\u2019re wondering.<\/p>\n Bower can be slapdash with attribution, and you\u2019re never quite sure whether assertions are his own or based on conversations he has had with anonymous sources. Clearly, he\u2019s not too worried about it. Taken together, his book Betrayal<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n