It’s safe to say Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle don’t see eye-to-eye, but there was a time when they appeared to be starting a close friendship.
The two royal women joined forced with their husbands – Prince Harry and Prince William – in February 2018 to promote their new chairtable endeavor, the Royal Foundation.
However, it seems tensions were brewing despite the smiles on stage. Harry opened up about the feud, describing an “awkward moment” between Meghan and Kate.
“Meg asked to borrow Kate’s lip gloss. An American thing. Meg forgot hers, worried she needed some, and turned to Kate for help,” Harry began in his bombshell memoir Spare.
He continued, “Kate, taken aback, went into her handbag and reluctantly pulled out a small tube. Meg squeezed some onto her finger and applied it to her lips. Kate grimaced. Small clash of styles, maybe? Something we should’ve been able to laugh about soon after. But it left a little mark.”
Harry suggested Kate’s surprising response was due to her being “on edge,” as she knew she was then “going to be compared to, and forced to compete with, Meg.”
And that wasn’t the only awkward moment that day.
In his book Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the War between the Windsors, royal author Tom Bower pointed out how Harry allegedly interrupted Meghan with a whispered comment after she reportedly created an awkward atmosphere with some of her comments.
Bower fumed, “You’ll often hear people say, ‘Well you’re helping people find their voice’ and I fundamentally disagree with that, because women don’t need to find a voice. They have a voice, they need to feel empowered to use it, and people need to be encouraged to listen.”
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However, as Bower noted, while the royals are patrons of the Foundation, they have limited influence on its direct activities.
He continued, “That power was exercised by the Foundation’s executives, an unimpressive group criticized for ineptly moving the royals around like chess pieces. While William, Kate and Harry had become accustomed to their motley behavior, Meghan’s arrival as a natural recruit for the Foundation’s philanthropic work disturbed the rhythm of the executives’ habits.
“Her feminism also upset their ingrained conservatism. She had not been invited to join the Royal Foundation to reinvent the Royal Family’s customs.”
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