King Charles is a Revenge Target for Meghan, Insider Claims: She Can "Smell Weakness a Mile Off"

The controversy over Prince Harry's memoir Spare continues to unfold, as accusations and recriminations fly about where, exactly, the British royal family's relationship with Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, went wrong, and where it needs to go if a reconciliation is possible before King Charles's coronation on May 6. Both Charles and Harry's older brother, Prince William, come in for heavy criticism in Spare, as do other senior royals and the UK press.

This week, royal writer Tom Bower claimed that King Charles is deeply worried about the effect the book could have on his reign and that Charles is a revenge target for Markle. Read on to find out more, including why Bower said Markle can "smell weakness a mile off," and what that means for the couples' current media strategy and future within the royal family.

Markle, officially the Duchess of Sussex, can "smell weakness a mile off," and King Charles "reeks" of it, Bower wrote this week in the Daily Mail, a conservative outlet that has consistently criticized the couple, particularly Markle. "[H]oming in on any human weakness seems to me to be Meghan's specialty," he wrote. "Just as she humiliated her own father and dumped her family and many friends, she appears vengeful against Harry's family for perceived slights." Markle is estranged from her father, Thomas, and half-siblings, who have been critical of her in the media.  

"As someone who has climbed the very greasy pole that leads to success in the dog-eat-dog world of American television, Meghan can smell weakness a mile off and Charles positively reeks of it," wrote Bower. (Markle was an actress in Los Angeles before marrying Harry.)  In Spare, Harry provided a peek behind the royal protocol, revealing details about his father's troubled marriage to Princess Diana, his extramarital affair with now-queen consort Camilla, and how his biracial wife was treated by the royal family and its handlers. Bower claims King Charles fears his reign could be "ruined" by the book. 

But a "peace summit" is possible, the UK Times recently reported. "It's going to take flexibility on all sides, but it can be done, it's fixable," a source told the news outlet. "It needs Harry over here, in the room with the King and Prince of Wales, a couple of other family members, some of 'his people' he trusts who always had his back, so he doesn't think he's being ambushed." "Both sides need to hold their hands up and admit we didn't get everything right, and we got a lot wrong, and we have to say to him 'we understand the pain you've been through,'" the source added. "The King can do it."

On both sides of the Atlantic, Harry has been asked during the promo tour for Spare if he would attend his father's coronation. He hinted it would be possible if certain conditions were met. "A lot can happen between now and then," he said. But UK media has reported that some members of the Royal Family don't want Harry and Meghan there, no matter what. "There have been discussions among the family, including Edward and Anne," one source said. "They do not want private conversations at the coronation making it into the paperback edition of Spare."

Bower has previously said in UK media that Markle's estrangement from one branch of her family gave she and Harry something in common and that Markle married Harry to become famous.  But the critic has been criticized by the UK press himself. In a review of his 2018 biography of Prince Charles, the Daily Mail called him "the undisputed Witchfinder General of contemporary biographers," and said, "somehow his prose is so hyper-charged and his tone so relentlessly accusatory that it is hard to see the wood for the trees."