Telegraph review of Betrayal:
‘The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have described Tom Bower’s new biography, Betrayal, as “deranged conspiracy and melodrama”. Count me in! If I were the publisher, I’d slap that quote on the cover. Alas, with their unerring ability to get things wrong, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have done Bower a favour by making this book sound far better than it is.
Revenge, Bower’s first book on this subject, was a comprehensive takedown of “Duchess Difficult”, stuffed with anonymous bitching from those unfortunate enough to encounter Meghan during her climb to the top. This sequel takes us from the 2018 wedding, via Megxit, to the present day. That’s a long time to spend in the company of an unhappy couple. The Sussexes are fading into irrelevance, so why would we want to read about their miserable lives over 43 chapters?
To be fair to Bower, it starts well. He’s managed to find someone who will go on the record about Meghan being a nightmare. Ella Robertson, whose mother co-founded a charity called One Young World, recalls Meghan appearing as a conference speaker in 2022. Robertson ran her eye over Meghan’s speech and saw that the Duchess intended to say “I” nearly 50 times in 10 minutes. Addressing an audience of young people hoping to feel inspired about changing the world, Meghan proceeded to talk about herself. “She’s tone-deaf to others. She just can’t do what we wanted. She’s toxic,” is Robertson’s icy verdict.
From there we return to 2018, the Sussexes just back from their honeymoon, and a “conciliatory” tea with the Prince William and Catherine, Princess of Wales, which ends with insults flying and Meghan snapping at William: “If you don’t mind, get your finger out of my face.” Juicy stuff. Give us more!
Invited to design her own coat of arms, Meghan apparently asked for a songbird with its tongue cut out. (She was persuaded to have a nightingale instead.) There is some amusing stuff about the couple’s Netflix deal and the hiring of production crews, which involved vetting people to check they had not said anything anti-Meghan on social media, making them all sign NDAs, and instructing them “never to speak to the Sussexes unless they were directly addressed by the couple”.
But mostly Bower raids the cuttings library, covering Harry’s court battles, trouble at his Sentebale charity, and the breakdown of relations between Harry and his family, all in exhausting detail. This makes up about 80 per cent of the book, and it’s boring as hell. It isn’t even clear why Bower has called the thing Betrayal. Who is being betrayed? The Royal family? The great British public? Literature?
It’s best to skim most of the chapters and seek out the hilarious high-handedness. At a Sentebale polo tournament, Meghan orders champagne, then adds: “And I want an ice bucket.” The organisers say there isn’t one. “Buy one,” Meghan’s publicist orders. When Meghan goes to read The Bench, her children’s book, to a class of youngsters in Harlem, the local media spokeswoman drafts a nice press release explaining that the Duchess was “reading aloud” to the children. Meghan’s team want this changed to “contributing to community support”.
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.’