The mystery of that letter, sent by Thomas Markle Snr’s late first wife, Roslyn Loveless, to the Metropolitan Police in 2019, accusing him of serial child abuse, refuses to go away.
In these pages last week, I questioned why the police deemed its contents important enough to disclose to Meghan Markle, yet seemingly did nothing beyond that.
And why did they fail to pass on information to the relevant authorities abroad who might have investigated Markle Snr?
Understandably, there’s now an almighty row about what happened to the letter and who knew of its contents.
And the latest extraordinary development, which emerged this weekend, is that the Met still haven’t managed to identify the officer who sent the letter on to Meghan.
Let us remind ourselves that the ‘rambling’ letter contained very serious allegations – denied by Thomas Markle Snr – that he had sex with a child in the US and travelled to the Philippines and Thailand for sex with minors.
Meghan and her father Thomas Markle Sr have been estranged since 2018, the year she married Prince Harry
All those who know about the law concerning such matters have reacted to the Met’s failure to inform authorities abroad with complete astonishment. Because it is a failure that, if the allegations are proven true, could have allowed Markle Snr to continue to abuse children for seven whole years – right up until the recent allegations about his stashes of child-abuse material, first found in boxes in the Philippines and then in a cache discovered by the Daily Mail in a lock-up near his former home in Mexico.
As such, it is also a failure that impacts the reputation not just of the police, but also of the Royal Family.
Would the officer who sent the letter on to Meghan and has now astonishingly vanished really have told no one else? Would both Cressida Dick, the commissioner of the Met at the time, and Neil Basu, assistant commissioner in charge of royal protection, seriously not have been informed?
In 2019, when Meghan received the letter, the Sussexes still shared an office and many staff with Prince William and Princess Catherine (oh, happy days!).
A source said this weekend that Meghan and Harry are ‘very private and tended not to share stuff with others’. Nevertheless, it surely beggars belief that after Meghan was made aware of this serious accusation against her father in 2019, the couple did not talk about the contents in that office with William and Kate. Not to mention the matter at all would have been simply extraordinary.
And what about their staff? Can we really believe that absolutely no one at Kensington Palace or Buckingham Palace knew – not even any of their aides? That, too, seems absolutely astonishing.
And yet if those in royal circles did know and did nothing, it would amount to a cover-up… which would be a royal scandal to make the alleged sins of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor look like chicken feed.
