Tina Brown knew Princess Diana.
She interviewed her, wrote about her, and through the years of researching her acclaimed biography “The Palace Papers,” accumulated a deep understanding of how Diana thought, what she valued, and who she would have trusted.
When asked directly whether Diana would have embraced Meghan Markle as a sister-in-law and ally, Brown’s answer was unambiguous: she would not.
And the reasons Brown gives are not the ones that most people would expect.
Brown’s assessment, delivered in 2022 and reported by the New York Post, the Mirror, and The Daily Beast, does not rest on the idea that Diana was a snob or a traditionalist who would have resented an American actress joining the family.
Diana herself was a rebel within that world.
What Brown argues is more specific: Diana had a finely calibrated radar for authenticity and manipulation, developed through years of surviving an institution that had tried to diminish her, and she would have trained that radar on Meghan and found something she did not like.
The New York Post’s account of Brown’s comments quotes her saying that Diana “would not have been a great fan of Meghan.” Brown, who is careful with her language and precise in her characterisations, chose those words deliberately.
Not a great fan.
Not hostile, not opposed in principle, but not a supporter in the way that the Sussex narrative has occasionally implied Diana would have been — the spiritual predecessor who would have cheered Meghan’s break from the institution and celebrated her defiance.
The Independent’s reporting on Brown’s remarks adds context about what specifically troubled Brown in her assessment.
Diana, she argued, was deeply sensitive to the dynamic of victimhood — she had used it herself, strategically, in the Morton tapes and the Panorama interview.
But she had used it in service of truths she believed were genuinely hers.
What Brown appears to suggest, without stating it quite so directly, is that she would have questioned whether Meghan’s victimhood narrative was as authentic as Meghan’s presentation of it claimed to be.
Diana’s own experience of the Royal Family was one of genuine suffering.
The marriage to Charles had been a disaster from early on.
The institution had, by her account and by the account of those who witnessed it, treated her with clinical indifference during her worst moments.
Her bulimia, her self-harm, her isolation — these were not invented or performed.
They were documented and attested to by people who were present.
Diana knew what real institutional damage looked like from the inside, and she had a survivor’s instinct for distinguishing it from its simulation.
The Daily Beast’s analysis of Brown’s position frames it in terms of Diana’s ultimate orientation: toward her sons.
Whatever Diana thought of the institution, she was ferociously protective of William and Harry and of their futures within it.
A narrative that positioned Harry as a victim of the family he had been born into — that required him to characterise his brother as complicit in his suffering — would not, Brown argues, have been something Diana could easily endorse.
She wanted her boys together.
She would have found the fracture between them devastating.
Brown also points to a less discussed aspect of Diana’s personality: her competitiveness.
Diana was not simply a saint in suffering.
She was ambitious in her own way, fiercely aware of her public image, and capable of sharp observation and sharper judgment about those around her.
Those who knew her well describe a woman who was funny, cutting, and not inclined to suffer fools or manipulators gladly.
Brown suggests Diana would have observed Meghan’s public evolution — from Suits actress to humanitarian to persecuted duchess to lifestyle brand — and formed views about it that she would not have kept entirely to herself.
The Daily Mail’s account of Brown’s remarks notes that this is not a straightforwardly hostile assessment of Meghan.
Brown is not saying Diana would have disliked Meghan as a person, or that Meghan is without genuine qualities.
She is saying something more nuanced: that the particular way Meghan has navigated her public life, and the particular story she has chosen to tell about her time in the Royal Family, would have rubbed against Diana’s instincts in ways that would have made easy friendship between the two women unlikely.
The Mirror’s coverage of the story points to the jewellery question as a specific and revealing detail.
Meghan wore several pieces that had belonged to Diana — notably a tennis bracelet and a ring made from diamonds from Diana’s collection.
Prince William, according to reporting, was troubled by this.
But the jewellery is also a window into how Meghan chose to position herself in relation to Diana: as a natural successor, an inheritor of Diana’s spirit and mission.
Tina Brown, whose understanding of Diana’s psychology is extensive, seems to suggest that Diana herself might have had something to say about that positioning.
Diana was, above all, an original.
She built her public identity through genuine suffering and genuine connection with people on the margins — with AIDS patients when they were untouchable, with landmine victims, with the ordinary people who wrote to her and received handwritten letters back.
Her emotional intelligence was real and it was tested.
The question Brown implicitly raises is whether the connection Meghan has built with her audience rests on the same foundation — and whether Diana, who could feel the difference between performed empathy and the real thing, would have been persuaded that it did.
Harry’s belief that his mother would have loved Meghan is documented in “Spare” and in multiple interviews.
It is a deeply human belief — the conviction that the most important person you lost would have approved of the person you found.
Brown does not attack that belief directly.
She simply offers a different reading, grounded in years of research and direct engagement with Diana, of who Diana actually was and what she was likely to have thought.
The two accounts cannot both be entirely right.
What Tina Brown’s assessment ultimately offers is a check on a narrative that has sometimes positioned Meghan as Diana’s natural heir — the brave woman who took on the institution and paid the price.
Brown’s counter-reading suggests that Diana was not simply a rebel who would have applauded all rebellion, but a specific woman with specific values, specific loyalties, and a specific capacity to see through the kind of performance that public life rewards.
Whether she would have found what she was looking for when she looked at Meghan Markle is, in Tina Brown’s judgment, far from certain.
