Prince Harry’s Friends Blame Meghan Markle for His ‘Woke’ Turn, Says Royal Author
Now, it appears that criticism wasn’t limited to the palace walls.
“Meghan was blamed for… making Harry ‘too woke,’” Quinn said.
“One of Harry’s best friends said, ‘I can’t understand what Harry sees in her. She’s a tree hugger. She’s so woke.’ For Harry’s traditional friends, being woke was not a good thing. But I think Harry was, in a way, entranced by the fact that Meghan was able to offer him an alternative world from the one he’d always known,” he said, the news outlet reported.
Royal author Tom Quinn used this quote to illustrate the growing disconnect between Prince Harry and his old circle, pointing out how Meghan Markle’s worldview and values created a noticeable shift in the prince’s life—one that didn’t sit well with his long-time friends.
In his book, royal author Tom Quinn reportedly interviewed hundreds of former and current palace staff to understand what it’s like working behind the scenes at Windsor Palace.
One incident he shared with Fox News Digital highlighted the tension between Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s long-time friends — an experience that reportedly stood out to them.
“There’s a famous occasion where Meghan went with Harry and some of his friends from school and from the army — she went on a pheasant shoot at Sandringham, the royal family’s country home,” Quinn told the outlet.
According to Quinn, Meghan found the event deeply uncomfortable due to the type of humour shared among Harry’s group.
“She hated it because all of Harry’s friends were making the sorts of jokes that suggested they disliked everything to do with ‘woke.’ They made rude comments about tree-huggers. They just don’t like that kind of thing because, to a large extent, it’s seen as left-wing. They just didn’t like it,” he said.
Gradually, Prince Harry began aligning more closely with Meghan Markle’s perspectives — a shift that reportedly didn’t sit well with his long-time friends, according to royal author Tom Quinn.
“With Meghan, [Harry] shifted across… He became much more sympathetic as she is about wanting to do good in the world. The idea of Harry being worried about those things before Meghan — it would never have occurred to him. I think Meghan really took him away from that [old] world, and they didn’t like that,” he said.
Quinn suggested that Harry’s increasing empathy toward social issues and his changed worldview mirrored Meghan’s influence — something his inner circle viewed as a departure from the traditional values they were used to.