Tina Brown has never hesitated to speak plainly about the House of Windsor, but her newest remarks about Meghan
Markle may be the most razor-edged the royal commentator has ever delivered. In a series of brutally incisive observations,
Brown argues that Meghan has not simply drawn inspiration from Princess Diana—she has systematically replicated, curated, and weaponised
Diana’s legacy to manipulate public sympathy, secure her own narrative, and exert psychological influence over Prince Harry. The allegations are not subtle, and they strike at the core of the Sussex brand: authenticity, trauma, and the myth of the modern Diana.
To Brown, the pattern is unmistakable. The sweatshirts, the red gowns, the Diana-style off-duty jeans, the Lady Dior bag, the Disneyland photo recreations, the carefully timed “emotional tributes”—they are, in her view, not emotional impulses but calculated moves. As she put it, with disarming bluntness, “For Meghan, Diana isn’t a memory. She’s a marketing strategy.” The line has reverberated across royal circles, tapping into a suspicion many insiders have whispered for years: that Meghan’s fascination with Diana has crossed from admiration into something far more self-serving.
Brown goes even further in analysing Harry’s role in this dynamic. She argues that Harry, long shaped by the trauma of his mother’s death, is uniquely vulnerable to anyone capable of invoking Diana in the right way. Meghan, she insists, has done precisely that—not to honour Diana, but to justify herself. “Meghan doesn’t emulate Diana to honour her. She emulates Diana to justify herself — especially to Harry.” In Brown’s view, Meghan’s strategic invocation of Diana provides Harry with emotional reassurance that his choices—however erratic—are aligned with what he imagines his mother would have wanted.
This, Brown suggests, has created a scenario in which Harry no longer acts as an independent agent but as an emotional extension of Meghan’s narrative. And she delivers the harshest criticism of all with surgical precision: “Harry didn’t marry a partner. He married a woman who studied Diana harder than any biographer.” It is a damning assessment, one that paints Meghan not merely as someone influenced by Diana, but as someone performing her—studying her, impersonating her, and inserting herself into the emotional space Diana left behind.
Brown argues that this constant performance has had consequences—not merely for Meghan’s public image, but for Harry’s dignity and behaviour. His media outbursts, his emotional oversharing, his erratic public appearances, and his repeated attempts to frame himself as a persecuted figure are, in her analysis, expressions of a man acting out a script written for him. Harry, she suggests, has become a character rather than a person—a man trying so hard to protect Diana’s memory that he has allowed Meghan to reenact it through him.
The result, in Brown’s view, is a prince who behaves “like a court jester in his own tragedy,” unable to see that the narrative he believes honours his mother actually distorts her. Diana, she reminds readers, was spontaneous, flawed, magnetic, and deeply human. Meghan, by contrast, presents Diana’s struggles as a curated brand—“pain with a filter,” as one critic put it. Brown argues that Meghan takes the most marketable pieces of Diana—victimhood, glamour, rebellion—and discards the nuance, the insecurity, and the authenticity that made Diana beloved.
Brown’s critique does not stop at psychology. She points to the public evidence: the carefully timed wardrobe tributes, the recreated photographs, the speeches reminiscent of Diana’s interviews, even the emotional language Meghan uses when discussing feeling “unprotected” or “silenced.” Each instance, Brown argues, reinforces the branding of Meghan as the “new Diana”—a branding that Harry embraces because it soothes old wounds. But soothing, Brown warns, is not healing. In her eyes, Meghan’s Diana-fication of herself has kept Harry tied to his trauma, not liberated from it.
What makes Brown’s remarks particularly biting is her insistence that Diana would not have approved of any of this. Diana did not carefully stage her vulnerability; it erupted from real pain. She did not calculate tributes to herself; the world created them after she died. Meghan’s attempt to reverse the order—constructing legacy first, emotional reality second—is, to Brown, the fundamental betrayal.
And therein lies her final, blistering conclusion. The trouble is not that Meghan admires Diana. Many women do. The trouble, Brown suggests, is that Meghan has taken possession of Diana’s image, repurposing it as an emotional instrument over Harry and a public-relations force field for herself. In doing so, she has pushed Harry into a performance of grief that makes him appear, in Brown’s words, “less a prince than a parody of one.”
Brown’s commentary stings because it combines intimate knowledge of Diana’s life with an icy understanding of media strategy. Whether one agrees with her or not, her remarks have reignited a fierce debate: Has Meghan honoured Diana’s legacy—or commodified it? And more importantly, is Harry a partner in this performance, or its most tragic casualty?