Saturday 1 October 2022 11:06 PM Mystery behind Meghan Markle's bloodsoaked' earrings from Saudi prince is ... trends now

On their tour of the South Pacific, Harry and Meghan were going down a storm. Massive crowds turned out to see them, and the Duchess’s refreshingly informal approach was proving a hit. 

Behind the scenes, however, it was a different story. Although she enjoyed the attention, Meghan failed to understand the point of all those Royal walkabouts, shaking hands with countless strangers.

According to several members of staff, she was heard to say on at least one occasion during the 2018 tour: ‘I can’t believe I’m not getting paid for this.’

Palace officials knew that a lot was riding on Meghan Markle. Her racial background – she has a black mother and a white father – and the fact that she had a successful career as an actress also meant they couldn’t afford to repeat the mistakes made with Princess Diana.

Back then, the Palace hadn’t done enough to make Diana feel welcome or to understand her needs. But lessons had been learned, and perhaps people tried harder to help the latest addition to the Royal Family than Meghan has acknowledged.

Before her wedding to Harry, she had a meeting with Miguel Head, William’s private secretary, who told her that the Palace would do everything it could to help her.

There was no need to think she had to take on her new role in a particular way, he said. She didn’t have to be straitjacketed.

As Meghan had already made it clear she had no wish to carry on her acting career, they spoke about related work she might do – as a producer or director, for instance, or a writer – and whether she might work in the charitable sector.

What Head was telling Meghan was: none of this is closed off. We can talk about it.

Meghan thanked him, and said she wanted to concentrate on her humanitarian and philanthropic work, and to support Harry as a member of the Royal Family.

As one source said: ‘The entire place, because of everything about her, and because of what Harry’s previous girlfriends had been through, was bending over backwards to make sure every option was open.’

Since then, it’s been suggested that it was only when things started going wrong for Meghan and Harry that their advisers scrambled to find a solution. Not so: long before any kind of crisis, senior courtiers were making considered and imaginative attempts to help them navigate the next few years.

Sir David Manning, the former Ambassador to the US who was William and Harry’s foreign affairs adviser, had actually been drawing up proposals before Harry and Meghan got married – indeed, before Manning had even met her.

Aside from Royal duties, he felt, there should be time for them to pursue their own philanthropic and other interests. Harry’s love of Africa and deep-seated interest in conservation should be built into the programme. And Meghan should have private time to keep in touch with her roots in the US.

So far, so obvious, perhaps. But Manning had another thought.

Soon after the Queen and Prince Philip married, they’d lived in Malta, while William and Kate had started married life in Anglesey. Harry and Meghan could also go away for a while, said Manning. A year in South Africa seemed the obvious choice.

A paper was written outlining the options, and the couple were said to like the idea of a year in Africa.

In the end, however, the idea never took off. Money and security were probably the two big problems that scuppered it.

‘It ran into the sand,’ said Manning. ‘The problems were real, and there was not a willingness to find the resources.’

The Queen had also been keen to help. At her request, the Lord Chamberlain, Earl Peel, the most senior figure in the household, met Meghan to explain how the Palace worked. While this Royal tutorial was probably of limited use, Manning, Head and others were doing their best to help her.

What they hadn’t bargained for, however, was Meghan and Harry’s growing sense of frustration – coupled with their suspicion of the Palace establishment.

In the Sussexes’ view, the efforts of well-meaning courtiers – even back in 2017 – just weren’t good enough. This was a pattern that would be repeated time and again.

A few days after Meghan and Harry got married, Buckingham Palace announced that Samantha Cohen, the Queen’s former assistant private secretary, would be stepping in as their interim private secretary.

At the time, Cohen had been planning to leave after 17 years at the Palace, but the Queen, who had a high regard for her, had asked her to stay on to help the newlyweds.

This was not the Queen imposing her own stooge on them. Instead, she was coming to the rescue by persuading one of her most valued members of staff to guide them through their first six months of married life.

Harry knew Sam Cohen well, as did William, and was very fond of her. The feeling was reciprocated, and she was determined to make her new job work.

She was soon to discover, however, that making Harry and Meghan happy was a bigger challenge than she had anticipated. One source said that Cohen was bullied.

Another said: ‘They treated her terribly. Nothing was ever good enough. It was, “She doesn’t understand, she’s failing.” ’

In fact, the source said Cohen was ‘a saint’ and the best organiser of Royal tours they had ever known.

In autumn 2018, she accompanied the Duke and Duchess on an official trip to Australia, Fiji, Tonga and New Zealand. On the journey from Tonga to Sydney, Cohen was said to have had a particularly torrid time, according to one source. ‘Sam had been screamed at before the flight, and during.’

After that, Cohen warned other staff to stay away from Harry and Meghan for the rest of the day. And that evening, her colleagues tried to arrange matters so she didn’t have to see the couple any more than was necessary.

According to one source, Sir David Manning – always a reassuring presence on tours – would say: ‘You are dealing with a very difficult lady.’ He wasn’t referring to Cohen.

In February 2021, the Duchess’s lawyers denied that Cohen had been bullied, saying the couple were always grateful for her support and dedication and that she ‘remains very close’ to them.

During their tour, Harry and Meghan spent 48 hours in Fiji. On the first night, they attended a state dinner hosted by the president, at which the Duchess wore an eye-catching pair of diamond earrings. Kensington Palace said they were loaned, but refused to say from whom. Even by Palace standards, this struck reporters covering the tour as unnecessarily unhelpful.

The reason for this reticence would not become apparent until more than two years later, when I revealed that the chandelier earrings had been a wedding gift from the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman. At the time of the wedding, there was nothing controversial about the gift. However, on October 2, 2018, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a leading dissident, was lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he was murdered and dismembered before his body was disposed of. In the run-up to the Sussexes’ tour, the murder was a major international news story.

As early as October 12 – four days before the start of the tour – suspicions were growing that the Crown Prince had personally ordered the killing. Then, on October 20, three days before the dinner in Fiji, Saudi Arabia admitted its officials were responsible for his death.

The idea that Meghan would, at a state occasion, knowingly wear earrings given to her by a man accused of having blood on his hands was surprising – to say the least. Meghan’s staff, in particular, were bemused that she should wear them, given her previous public advocacy for women’s rights in Saudi Arabia. So the Kensington Palace briefing that the earrings were loaned had been misleading. But who was responsible?

Sam Cohen told colleagues at the time that the earrings had been borrowed from the jeweller Chopard. This, one presumes, is because it’s what she had been told. It was not true, however.

A couple of months after the dinner, a sharp-eyed reader of a blog called Meghan’s Mirror spotted that they were from a collection by the Hong Kong jeweller Butani. So, not Chopard, and not borrowed from the jeweller. Was it an honest, if surprising, mistake? Or was someone lying? And if so, why?

The earrings were given another outing three weeks after Fiji, when Meghan wore them to the Prince of Wales’s 70th birthday party at Buckingham Palace on November 14. At that time, Cohen still appeared to be under the impression that they’d been loaned by Chopard. However, others knew the truth.

When the earrings had first appeared in photos, London-based staff responsible for registering details of all Royal

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