Royal Rift Exposed: The Disagreement That Reportedly Shattered Kate and Meghan’s Bond

It’s no secret that Prince William and Prince Harry no longer see eye to eye.

But there was a time before their well-documented feud when the brothers, alongside their wives, were lovingly dubbed the ‘Fab Four’ by the press.

However, strain in the relationship between Kate, Princess of Wales, and Meghan Markle began to emerge even before their first meeting in January 2017, according to royal biographer Tina Brown.

Brown wrote in Palace Papers: ‘Now that Meghan was a feminist hero, tensions with the more senior royal beauty, the [former] Duchess of Cambridge, offered an irresistible story to the tabloids, who always love to stoke a rivalry between women.’

Harry and Meghan had been together for just six months when the Duke introduced his girlfriend to Kate.

At the time, it was reported that the meeting had gone ‘really well’ and it was ‘important’ to Harry that the princess liked his new partner.

However, despite the reports, Meghan recounted in the couple’s Netflix series Harry & Meghan that the introduction had been awkward.

She said: ‘Even when Will and Kate came over and I was meeting her for the first time, I remember I was in ripped jeans, I was barefoot. Like I was a hugger, I have always been a hugger. I didn’t realise that is really jarring for a lot of Brits.’

‘I started to understand that the formality on the outside carried through on the inside, that there is a forward-facing way of being and then you close the door and think “Okay, we can relax now”.

‘But that formality carries over on both sides, and that was surprising to me.’

Brown wrote: ‘Meghan later said she found Kate to be cool of temperament, but that’s likely because Meghan is a “gusher”, who hugged even the guards outside Kensington Palace.

‘Kate is not a woman given to spontaneous rapport. She’d avoided recruiting new girlfriends to her inner circle/slumber party list since Marlborough and St Andrew’s.

‘Preoccupied with two young children and public duty, Kate had no serious reason to see the latest and most glamorous of Harry’s string of girlfriends as a potential threat.’

The royal author wrote: ‘Just as in the days when Princess Diana’s new updo upstaged the Queen at the opening of Parliament, the increasing media comparisons of Meghan and Kate – invariably casting Kate as dull and dutiful – began to inject tension.’

Brown added that Kate had ‘spent the best part of a decade wearing a tastefully inexpensive wardrobe, subsuming her personal views and signalling solidarity with working women’.

She wrote: ‘She put on the pantyhose both literally and figuratively, smiling gamely and uncomplainingly for the press.