Bower still scents danger from the deceptively dormant Meghan, “a very scheming, very clever woman”.

Definitely new is Bower’s diagnosis, without any obvious evidence, of Meghan’s “terrible envy”. With his legal hat on, he suggests that an upheld judgment against a Mail newspaper’s publication of her private letter happened because, “as a class, Britain’s judges were unsympathetic to the Mail newspaper group”.To turn to the “explosive” new content promised by Bower’s publishers, the most prized revelations appear to be: Meghan was mean on a fashion shoot; the Queen was glad Meghan didn’t attend the funeral; the Vogue staff didn’t like her either; Meghan, with an outsider’s disregard for British niceties, vexed some of her betters with complaints about their hateful language. After watching her with Oprah, he concluded: “This woman is doing something quite terrible to Britain and Harry has fallen in love with her, you know, in a ludicrous way, and has gone along as her accomplice.” If only Harry had fallen in love with the former actress in a sensible way, like, say, Prince Charles did with his now-venerated Camilla Parker Bowles. Returning to the facts, the author concludes that the couple’s messy departure for the US brought the Queen, Charles and William together. “They were forging a united front against the Sussexes.” Tom Bower’s new book about Meghan Markle and Prince Harry is out now – here’s how to read the biography

verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ The respected biographer, Tom Bower, has been giving some extraordinary interviews about his new study of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. His book, the calmly entitled Revenge, is not merely, we learn, a comprehensively negative assessment of the couple: Bower would like it actively to damage them. “This book may hasten a downward trend at which I wouldn’t be sad at all,” he told an enchanted Piers Morgan, “because they pose a real threat to the royal family.” Whether intended as an elegant malice-diffuser or handy gossip-vehicle the some said/would say locutions perform heroically throughout the book, as in one passage about a charity executive: “Some would even say he was besotted by her.” Some would say – to borrow again from Bower – that this observable royal resilience makes a further nonsense of his claims about vengeful, Montecito-based “agents of destruction”. As for his book’s contention that the whiny – though threatening – couple never had a thing to complain about: if they didn’t then, they do now.