Samantha Markle’s mother died six weeks ago. They had been estranged for many years. Things had been rocky anyway, but the nail in the coffin of their relationship, Samantha claims, was when her half-sister Meghan got engaged to Prince Harry, and the whole world turned its attention to the Markle family, in all its dysfunction.
‘And everyone sucked up to Meghan, even on the fringes of the family,’ says Samantha. ‘It was like the Emperor’s New Clothes. Unfortunately, my mother fell prey to it.’
It is sad when families become estranged, and the Markles seem almost to have made an art form of it, the breathtaking capacity to hold a grudge most famously evidenced by the Duchess of Sussex’s apparent disowning of huge swathes of her birth family, her (and Samantha’s) father Thomas included.
Yet, perhaps against all odds, it seems parallel hostilities between Samantha and her mother Roslyn – Thomas’s first wife, whom he divorced in the mid-Seventies – had ceased, to a point, before Roslyn’s death in early October, and the pair were reconciled, messaging each other daily.
It is about an hour into our interview and the tears are rolling down Samantha’s face, taking her mascara with them.
I have interviewed her several times before and seen her angry, defiant, even petulant, but never an emotional mess.
Meghan Markle at her half-sister Samantha’s graduation in 2008
Samantha, a mother-of-three who suffers from MS and is wheelchair-bound, apologises. ‘I am about to turn 60,’ she says (her birthday is tomorrow; and no, she is not expecting Meghan to turn up with a card and a pot of homemade jam). ‘I should be old enough to be able to deal with the death of a parent, but I think I’m still in denial.’
Samantha is often accused of being quick to blame others, but today she is full of mea culpas.
She speaks to her father Thomas ‘every day, sometimes several times a day’, but Meghan has not been in contact since before her wedding. Thomas Markle has had two heart attacks and a stroke. He is 80, she points out, ‘and we don’t know how long he has’.
Her anger returns. ‘Meghan has no idea what she is missing out on because when my dad goes, it will be too late. Believe me, I know. You can’t get back that time. It leaves a hole in your heart.
‘When my father passes away, I hope she can feel, and remember he loved her more than life itself – or she will never be able to look in the mirror.’
She hasn’t finished. ‘Maybe Harry can learn something from me too,’ she continues, turning to the subject of the perhaps more complex distancing of the Duke of Sussex from his blood family, and his perceived punishing of his father for crimes that Samantha can’t quite fathom.
Speaking of Harry and Meghan’s infamous 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey she says: ‘I don’t know the Royal Family. I’m just a human, watching from across the pond, but I couldn’t believe it.’ In particular, she was incensed by Harry’s implication he never had fun with Charles, and wasn’t able to go bike riding with him as a child.
Samantha, 60, a mother-of-three, suffers from MS and is wheelchair-bound
Samantha says she never thought she ‘would see Meghan do what she has done to the Royal Family’
‘Then we saw all those pictures of him rolling in the grass with Charles, laughing, riding on the back of his bike. I want to say to him “Why did you say it? Do you know what a gift that is? Maybe you didn’t get that every day, but you had it, and your family gave you those experiences”.’
‘I’d ask Harry “What did you give them? Heartache? Grief?”.’
If Samantha could, she would march both Meghan and Harry to their respective parents and force them to beg forgiveness. Her critics would say that she’d probably do it with a camera crew in tow, but it’s still hard to quibble with the underlying sentiment.
‘As souls, we don’t want our kids to pay us back. My dad doesn’t want Meghan to pay him back. But you want love from them because there is a pain in your heart if it isn’t there. I didn’t want my mom to die feeling she was alone, and not loved. I almost left it too late. They could both learn from me.’
Where to start with this catch-up with Meghan’s big sister?
The last time I met her was in her living room, in the small town of Ocala in Florida, on the day of Meghan and Harry’s wedding in May 2018. We watched the TV coverage together.
My most surreal memory is of having to explain to her who TV presenters Richard and Judy’s daughter Chloe Madeley was, and hazard a guess at why she might be at the wedding of the decade, while Samantha (and the entire rest of the Markle and Ragland clan, save for Meghan’s mother Doria Ragland) were not.
Today Samantha scoffs at that ‘charade’. ‘We know now that most of those celebrities – George Clooney included – didn’t even know why they were there either.’
‘Dad paid for so much when she was growing up. If we’d been at the wedding, people would have been talking about that because at wedding receptions, families talk when they start drinking champagne.’
Samantha talks to her father Thomas, pictured with a teenage Meghan, ‘every day, sometimes several times a day’. Aged 80, he has had two heart attacks and a stroke
These seem petty matters, but it’s a fact that since the wedding many more of Meghan and Harry’s ‘truths’ have been contested.
Who can forget, for example, when Harry told listeners during his guest editorship of Radio Four’s Today programme in December 2017 that the Royals were the big family Meghan ‘never had’?
Does Samantha now feel a sense of vindication that raising questions about the Sussexes accounts of themselves has become something of an international sport?
‘I feel vindicated that now the world knows how they operated,’ she says, pointing in particular to Tom Bower’s explosive 2022 biography Revenge, about the war between Harry, Meghan and the House of Windsor. Still, even Samantha could not have predicted how things would go.
‘I never thought I would see Meghan do what she has done to the Royal Family. She’s done what she did to her own family to so many other people, too. I knew my dad had suffered, but I thought she would stop at the Queen.’
Samantha tells me ‘a line was crossed’ when Meghan mimicked curtseying to the Queen during the couple’s 2022 Netflix docuseries. ‘What a flagrant, nasty mockery of lovely royal protocol. And Harry sat there smiling, like a buffoon. He allowed it. In counselling [Samantha is a trained counsellor] we call this “enabling”.’
Samantha’s view of her brother-in-law Harry has evolved over the years. ‘I used to think Harry was the victim here, that he had arrested development over the death of his mum and Meghan manipulated it. But there was no excuse for the things he said in his memoir Spare. There is no excuse for hurting people like that.
‘Now I think of him as the teenage delinquent who throws stones at the windows of the school then sets it on fire, yet has the audacity to play the victim and say, “Oh I’ll come back to school on these terms”.’
From the off in this ongoing panto, Samantha was cast as the wicked step-sister. But she too is a complex character.
In our very first chat, just after Harry and Meghan’s engagement announcement, she spoke with warmth about playing with her little half-sister, who was a regular visitor to the family home.
Samantha says there have been ‘so many missed opportunities for love and real family’. Meghan is pictured as a baby with her half-sister
She recalled walking around with Meghan on her hip, doing Daffy Duck impressions and making her laugh.
She was at pains to stress how proud she was of her and despite the 17-year age difference, how the relationship was emotionally close, even if not geographically so.
Who, for example, can forget that warm picture of a young Meghan congratulating Samantha on her 2008 graduation? Yet Meghan has since argued that she was an only child and barely knew Samantha, something that has been the subject of recent libel action (Samantha lost her case; but an appeal may be pending).
The hurt on Samantha’s part is real. ‘Yes, when she went to Canada (to take an acting role in Suits in 2011), she distanced herself – from Dad too, but we gave her the benefit of the doubt there. She was a young woman spreading her wings. I wasn’t going to say: ‘Oh, you should phone your sister in a wheelchair more.’
‘No. Maybe she did prefer her new life to the ordinary family one. But we loved her.’
Actually, the ‘ghosting’ that Samantha talks about pre-dated Meghan meeting Harry. As Meghan’s acting career took off, there were fewer and fewer calls home. ‘But there wasn’t a rift, as such. It was just that she didn’t want to involve us in her new life.’
The sisters last spoke in 2016 and the tone was warm-ish. ‘I remember her saying ‘Let’s keep in touch, Babe’. She always called me Babe.’ Samantha sounds baffled, now. ‘Why would you say that if you didn’t mean it?’
Almost from the off, though, Samantha – always ready to share her views – was a problem for Meghan. Suddenly, the whole clan was in the spotlight. Already fraught family relationships simply had no chance as rival media outlets moved in; and the Palace – fatally, you could argue – stepped back.
Samantha argues that Meghan could have stopped all of it.
‘I still don’t understand why she couldn’t have just acknowledged us, said to the world, ”This is my family and I am proud of them. We are like any family – good and bad.”’
And now? Where once there might have been affection, there is something closer to contempt.
The subject of American Riviera Orchard and Meghan’s lifestyle venture comes up – so far we’ve seen some jam and dog biscuits.
‘Is it in the shops? I don’t think it got beyond the PR stage,’ she muses ‘In the 70s, Tom [Samantha’s brother] and I would spend our summers with Grandma Markle and she did make jam, but that was long before Meghan was around. By the time she was interacting with Grandma Markle, she was in a care home and she certainly wasn’t making jam.’
While Samantha desperately wants Meghan to get in touch with their father, she is more lukewarm about the idea of a cessation of hostilities between the sisters. ‘If you accept an olive branch, you are asking to be hurt again. I think that would be weird. It would be hard to trust that she was doing it for the right reasons.
‘I think what makes me sad now is there were so many missed opportunities for love and real family.’
What of Archie and Lilibet – the nephew and niece she has never seen, and the innocents in this unholy mess?
She says it would be better for those children to know their families, in all their messy reality.
‘If they would [allow it], when we are all gone, when Meghan and Harry are gone, these kids won’t be left floundering because they’ll have a sense of family, aunts, uncles, cousins. That’s life and it’s cool. Everyone needs family. It’s the only thing that matters. If you love said children, you want them to have a larger sense of family and you put your differences aside.’
Samantha returns to the subject of how she failed her own mother.
‘I keep thinking of the words of the Willie Nelson song, ‘Maybe I didn’t love you/quite as good as I should have’. I have so many regrets. There were so many years I wanted to catch up on, and now it is too late.
‘It really sucks that human beings sometimes need tragedy to wake us up.’
