The Duchess of Sussex is ushered out of the market in Fiji just eight minutes after arriving (Image: Daily Mirror)
Royal reporters had never seen anything like it. A royal tour almost always runs like clockwork and up until then everything had been going to plan.
Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, were proving to be a huge hit Down Under as they embarked on a 16-day trip that started in Australia, before moving on to Fiji and Tonga in October 2018.
Months after their lavish Windsor Castle wedding, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex had embarked on their first official royal tour as a couple.
Now a new royal book, The Four Wives of Windsor, written by one of Britain’s most trusted royal TV correspondents, Simon Vigar, reveals what really happened in a market place in Fiji which saw Meghan flee the scene minutes after her arrival to much fanfare.
Officially the Duchess of Sussex had to cut short a visit to a market in the capital, Suva, because of security concerns caused by large crowds. She left eight minutes into the scheduled visit to the site.
Vigar and his cameraman were the pool royal reporters for the solo visit Meghan was making. However, her security detail whisked the Duchess away after just eight minutes instead of the planned 15, citing uncomfortably busy crowds and crowd management issues.
However, Vigar had a ringside seat and remembers it very differently indeed. “The market was busy but it certainly wasn’t overcrowded or chaotic in any way and it is certainly not how Scotland Yard saw it either,” he recalls.
“Anyway advance security would have checked it out beforehand and if there had been any security issues at all she would not have been even allowed out of the car. She just wouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
Vigar speculates, as the press did at the time, that Meghan had spotted some of the women wearing UN T-shirts and that Meghan, who had previously worked for the organisation, had fallen out with them, something the Sussexes strenuously denied.
The Duchess of Sussex makes a swift Megxit (Image: AFP/Getty Images)
“Whatever the reason it was extremely odd” says Vigar. “I have never seen anything like that happen on a royal tour.
“Maybe she suddenly didn’t feel well as she had just announced her pregnancy but she looked absolutely fine to me.
“One of her aides was in tears and the poor woman stood next to me who had woven the names Harry and Meghan into two handmade fans never got to see her at all.”
During his 30 years on the royal beat, Vigar, who joined 5 News at its launch in 1997, has reported from the frontlines of royal history – covering births, marriages, jubilees and the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, to which he was one of few journalists invited.
He has interviewed key members of the Royal Family, including Queen Camilla, Prince Harry, Prince Philip and Princess Anne, and has travelled extensively on royal tours which is why he found Meghan’s sudden departure mid-visit so alarming and unsettling.
In his book he concludes that we may never get to the bottom of what really upset Meghan on that day writing: “Whatever the cause – and there are plenty of theories – the bottom line is the engagement ended very prematurely and the local female entrepreneurs, who were meant to be the focus, were upset.”
And he said one senior aide confided in him: “Meghan understood ‘the show’ bit but not the cultural side of the Royal Family.
“Smiling, waving and talking to people is a fundamental part of the royal job, it is not some tiresome, legal obligation in a Hollywood contract. Meghan struggled to get to grips with the whole notion that they were there as working royals – that first and foremost, they were representing the Queen overseas.”
*The Four Wives of Windsor by Simon Vigar is out 30th July (Century).