Tom Bower is the only celebrity biographer who does his job properly. All his biographies are unauthorized, from his first essay in the form, the life of the Nazi sadist Klaus “Butcher of Lyon” Barbie, to his latest, Betrayal, on Meghan and Harry’s campaign of self-enrichment and revenge. On the way, Bower has done the dirty on British politicians (Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown) and been sued by the media magnates Robert Maxwell, Richard Branson, Conrad Black, and also Richard Desmond, who made his money in pornography and then sank to newspaper publishing.
Betrayal is the sequel to 2022’s Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the War Between the Windsors. These horsey folk are not Bower’s only entrants in the donkey derby of royal biography. He has also exposed Harry’s dad as a pampered philanderer (2018’s Rebel Prince, lately enthroned and expanded to Rebel King), and David and Victoria Beckham as a marketing exercise in human form. The subtitle of the Beckham biography was Money, Sex and Power. Reading Betrayal, you get the impression that Prince Harry is on short rations of all three.
The first third of Betrayal is a recap of Revenge. These opening chapters are a reminder that nothing Meghan and Harry say can be trusted. They describe how Meghan, who claimed she didn’t know who Harry was despite having collected biographies of his late mother Diana, snagged Harry, who really didn’t know who he was and was also captivated by the Diana myth; and how the British people took the young couple to their calcified hearts because they pitied Harry the motherless son, and because the toothless hordes like a dusting of Hollywood glamor now and then.
The fairytale wedding of 2018 turned into the media nightmare of 2021’s Oprah with Meghan and Harry. Meghan accused Harry’s family of being racist snobs, Harry nodded along, and Oprah bathed in their fresh bile. For Harry’s family, and his ailing grandmother Elizabeth II in particular, the treason of a foolish prince and an American divorcée revived memories of the most shameful acts in the history of modern British monarchy. No, not Sarah, Duchess of York, having her toes sucked by the Texas millionaire Johnny Bryan, or Prince Andrew partying with Jeffrey Epstein, but rather Wallis Simpson curtsying to Hitler in 1937 and Edward VIII speculating against the British pound in the summer of 1940. For Harry’s father Prince Charles (now Charles III), it revived memories of the most shameful period of his life: his ex-wife Diana using a TV interview to denounce him as a false husband whose idea of phone sex was to imagine being his lover’s tampon. His lover is now the Queen of England.
It was not clear what Harry expected to happen next. Traditionally, a second son with blackhearted treason in mind commandeers a herring barque to France with a gang of malcontent noble blades, intrigues with the bastard King of France, kisses the sand on a remote Scottish or Welsh bay, raises an army of swineherds and disenfranchised aristocrats, and fights his brother the king-in-waiting in a field in the English Midlands whose precise location will be discovered in the early 21st century during renovation works to a municipal car park. But this is the 21st century.
In Betrayal, Meghan and Harry exchange the gilded cage of British royalty for the cage fight of American celebrity. Meghan seems pleased with the bargain, Harry less so. For Meghan, royal life was a three-year role-play, a detour from Hollywood, but for Harry, it was who he was and all he had ever known. For her, the royal association paid off, at least for a while. It was a shortcut to a status she could never have won as an actress; even among the real A-listers, only Fergie can match Meghan’s claim to be a duchess. But Harry does not want the relatively simple status of a celebrity, who exists by being seen.
Harry expects the hereditary perquisites and privileges of a British royal—money and status, and privacy by right—even as he denounces his family and cashes out in California. Harry claims that he fled to California to spare Meghan and himself from what he called the British tabloids’ “constant harassment (online and off), intimidation and abuse.” From his fortress in Montecito, he sallies forth to the law courts of London to sue the British papers for intruding into his privacy. Yet, as Bower shows, Harry also feeds stories to a Daily Mail journalist from a Facebook account in the name of “Mr. Mischief.” He is so entitled and dim that when he leaks stories via WhatsApp messages, he signs himself “H.,” so no one can guess who he is.
Harry’s strategy for winning privacy was Meghan’s strategy for winning visibility. As soon as they land in L.A., Bower reports, their new agent advises that Netflix will pay more if the Sussexes “delivered hours of private video shot in their most intimate moments.” His new life is even more unreal than his old one. At first, he and Meghan pocket “millions of dollars” by paring morsels of royal gossip and slander. But once they have done Oprah and Harry has issued an autobiography ghostwritten by someone who evidently despises him, the cupboard is bare.
As their celebrity stock falls, their more famous Montecito neighbors turn down invitations to appear on their Netflix show and Meghan’s podcasts. They ask for Beyoncé. They get Beyoncé’s mother. Meghan reboots as a jam-making wine mom, but it turns out that someone else already owns the name of her brand, American Riviera Orchard. If she had hired a professional to run the company, she would have spared herself the embarrassment, but she didn’t. Similar failures of judgment lead Harry into a public slanging match with his African charity.
Meghan and Harry’s images crack through repeated self-exposure. Two High Court judges doubt Harry’s veracity. Their Archewell nonprofit loses more than 20 senior staff in four years. In 2024, only three years after their American relaunch, disgruntled ex-staff tell the Hollywood Reporter that Meghan is an incompetent bully. A Vanity Fair profile entitled “American Hustle” calls her a “Mean Girl teenager.” Tina Brown opines that they’ve “run out of road.” Their Archewell philanthropic venture fails and is rebooted as a for-profit that doesn’t make any money. Their second Netflix series reaches number 383 on the Netflix chart. America is not renewing its option. As Timon of Athens rues when his friends disappear as the money runs out, “ceremony was but devised at first / To set a gloss on faint deeds, hollow welcomes.”
We have to admire how Meghan holds her “rictus Hollywood smile” despite the failed ventures and public snubs. Her As Ever Christmas collection includes a candle scented with “Moroccan mint, cardamom and tea leaves” that evokes “the freshness of a day in the English countryside,” where none of these plants are native (yours for $64), a Signature Fruit Spread gift set ($42), and a relabeled bottle of “unexceptional” white wine ($89). But Harry follows up in the rear with a “perma-scowl.” By autumn 2025, they are “running out of money.” According to Bower, Mr. & Mrs. Privacy now monetize their young children by posing them for Instagram posts.
Some of Betrayal‘s British reviewers felt that Bower, having slaughtered the impostor couple in Revenge, has wasted his investigative talents by returning to the scene of the slime. But the Bower method of forensic detail and telling context is a perfect fit for subjects who fudge their details and manipulate their contexts. They present themselves as an ethical media phenomenon. Bower shows they are unscrupulous freeloaders.
In 2024, Colombia’s left-wing vice-president Francia Márquez invited Meghan and Harry to make a “state visit.” Márquez, Bower writes, is an “anti-imperialist” seeking reparations from the former European powers. She takes Meghan at her word, and thinks that Meghan sympathizes with “her battle against white supremacist exploitation of black people” and seeks “the end of capitalism.” A “state visit,” even a fake one, might also boost Márquez’s standing in a country where the poverty rate has risen from 30.9 percent in 2016 (already above the Latin American average of 24.1 percent) to 34.5 percent in 2024.
George Soros’s Open Society Foundation secretly funds Meghan and Harry’s trip.
Dressed in a $2,150 metallic jacquard dress, wearing $875 Jimmy Choo sandals, and a gold Cartier necklace and rings valued at $23,550, plus a Tank Française watch inherited from Diana, Meghan arrived at the National Arts Center (CNA) to watch a dance group. Next, the Sussexes joined a panel discussion with Márquez in a half-filled room about the perils of fake news on social media for social cohesion. The audience was more interested in Meghan’s metallic outfit.
Meghan changes outfits for the next event, because that is what the people in a country with a 34.5 percent poverty rate expect, and slums it in “White Mango and Banana Republic with a Cesta Collective basket bag handwoven in Rwanda.” Cesta, Meghan tells the plebes, taught her “how many women’s lives were being impacted and uplifted through their work.” The Rwandan women, Bower notes, work in mud huts where their uplift is priced at 10 pence (13.7 cents) an hour. The women earn $3.38 for a bag that is “sold in America for $724.” Meghan’s fans can buy her clothes and handbags via the ShopMy page of her Instagram and give the hard-strapped duchess a commission. Imelda Marcos would have loved the internet.
This goes on for three miserable days, though Harry, who discussed his use of hard drugs in his autobiography, surely enjoyed the visit to Cali, the “capital of the cocaine cartels.” At the end of the trip, Márquez tries to shake down the tourists and explains that Meghan and Harry were “expected to make a serious donation to match George Soros’s Open Society’s donations.” In 2024, Bower writes, Open Society’s operating budget was $400 million. Archewell’s was $2 million. Instead of cash, Meghan offers soundbites and self-care. Colombian women should “empower each other,” she says, and “wash things over with love, kindness and generosity.” At the end of the year, Archewell’s accountants claim a tax-free donation of $8,310.
Back in Britain, King Charles fires his creepy younger brother Andrew from The Firm. He also cannot trust Harry, because Harry will sell the contents of their conversation. As King Lear says, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!” Prince William lets it be known that Harry is “an embarrassment.” Harry’s fate, Bower believes, now depends entirely on William, and William sees Harry as Edgar does his half-brother Edmund in Lear: “A most toad-spotted traitor.” Harry, like Andrew, was denied the right to wear his military uniform at his grandmother’s funeral and Charles’s coronation. He sold a thousand years of royal style for a mess of media pottage. There can be no way back, and there is no way forward. Accept no imitations.
Betrayal: Power, Deceit and the Fight for the Future of the Royal Family
by Tom Bower
Bonnier, 464 pp., $39.99
Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
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