Meghan Markle’s dad has lifted the lid on the phone call in which she told him she was dating Prince Harry, saying he knew he was a “high number”.
Thomas Markle Snr spoke to his daughter and future son-in-law on the phone briefly before the couple told the world they were dating.
He claims that Meghan didn’t tell him who it was straight away, starting off by telling him her new love interest was British.
Speaking as part of Channel 5’s new documentary Thomas Markle: My Story, he said: “My daughter was like coming up to the A-List in terms of her company and her friends.
“She calls me on the phone, and she said I’ve got a new boyfriend and I said ‘Great’ and she says ‘He’s British’.
I said “OK”, she said ‘He’s a prince’, I said ‘Alright’ she said ‘He’s Prince Harry’. I said ‘Oh, OK’.
“I didn’t know what it meant.
“She could have been dating a Hollywood star and it would have been just as important to me, because you know either way they are both ‘high numbers’.
“She said do you want to talk to him.”
Meghan then passed the phone to Harry and the two men had a short conversation.
Thomas continues: “He said hello in a very British way and we talked a bit, that was nice.”
He says he was very happy at the start but soon started to feel the effects of his daughter being linked to such a high profile figure.
“She was just really thrilled to be with this guy. She was happy and that made me happy.
“But very shortly after the press started looking for me.
“I live a quite peaceful life down here and suddenly I’ve got these people hounding me and I’ve got people outside my door.
“Every time I would go anywhere I would be followed. My clothing was critiqued, the way I looked was critiqued, the things I bought were critiqued.
“They’d take close up photographs of me grabbing a can of beer out of a refrigerator. I suddenly became an alcoholic.”
Meghan and Thomas’s relationship was thrown into chaos when Thomas worked with a paparazzi photographer to set up pictures.
He claims he did it to repair his image rather than to make money, but also admits he’s still making money from the photos now.
Speaking on the programme, he says: “I had been going through this for months. Every paper seemed to want to make me look like a dumb, fat slob.
“I bought a new toilet, it became news around the world and I was made a joke – this was my throne.
“I got approached by a guy who spoke to me and said ‘I can change your image’. He said the problem you have is all these photos of you are terrible, he said I can make you look respectable.
“He said we’ll go out and take some photographs of you looking like you’re getting in shape for the wedding.
“The idea was that these would all be candid shots, discreet, no one would know they were posed or anything. It would be just me doing my routine daily.”
