A close friend of the Princess of Wales has said that she is a “big hugger”, in stark contrast to Meghan’s description of her first encounter with Kate.
The Princess of Wales’s friend has spoken out in defence of the royal, insisting that Meghan Markle’s account of her first meeting with Kate is wrong. Speaking in the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s controversial six-episode Netflix docuseries, Meghan shared how she was surprised at how formal the royals were behind-the-scenes. In one of the episodes the Duchess discussed her first time meeting with Kate, Prince Harry’s sister-in-law and implied that she wasn’t overly friendly.
In the episode, Meghan said: “I was a hugger. I’ve always been a hugger, I didn’t realise that that is really jarring for a lot of Brits. “I guess I started to understand very quickly that the formality on the outside carried through on the inside.” She went on to say that she was “surprised” at how the “formality carries over on both sides”. Speaking to PEOPLE, Kate’s unnamed friend denied the Duchess of Sussex’s claims.
They said: “[Kate] is warm and friendly and greets everyone with a big hug and kiss.” They added that Kate is a “big hugger” and that it “comes naturally to her to be like that”. Omid Scobie spoke of the pair’s first meeting in his 2020 book about the Sussexes, Finding Freedom. He claimed that Kate was reportedly “extremely guarded,” but in the end, she let Meghan know “she was always welcome to contact her if she needed anything”.
In the series, which was released last December, Harry said that it was a “shock to the system” for Meghan to meet his grandmother, the late Queen. Harry said: “My grandmother was the first senior member of the family that Meghan met. “She had no idea what it all consisted of so it was a bit of a shock to the system for her.” Meghan added: “There wasn’t like some big moment of ‘Now you’re going to meet my grandmother’. I didn’t know I was going to meet her until moments before.”
