Meghan Markle is a “cuckoo” in the royal nest and her “woke Californian hang-ups” are likely to destroy her marriage to Prince Harry, according to a senior Labour politician.

In an outspoken attack on the couple, former Labour minister and diarist Chris Mullin suggests the Duke of Sussex will “come limping home” when the marriage “ends in tears.”

He says Meghan is “clearly the main mover” in the couple’s relationship with “Harry very much second fiddle”.

The claims are contained in Mullin’s latest memoir, Didn’t You Use To Be Chris Mullin?, which is being serialised exclusively in The Independent.

The novelist, diarist and former MP, 75, played a key role in freeing the Birmingham Six, Irish men wrongly convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1974 pub bombings.

His new book, released this week, is full of his trademark wickedly indiscreet accounts of meetings and conversations with royals, politicians and celebrities.

Mullin dismisses the duchess’s now famous complaint that an unnamed royal speculated about the skin colour of her and Harry’s son, Archie.

He says people have often observed they can see Vietnamese blood in Sarah, his daughter by Vietnamese born wife Ngoc, and it is “not in the least offensive”.

It is not the first time he has sparked royal controversy.

In his 2020 memoir, he revealed the Queen sent a man to the gallows with the words “do you know, he even shot the dog?”. She turned down an appeal by a man convicted of murder in Bermuda, a story leaked to Mullin by a privy counsellor friend.

Mullin’s new diaries, which cover 2010–2022, claim the former Duke of Edinburgh once said “charm is a greatly overrated value”. He also describes Prince Philip as a “cantankerous old buffer” and says his reaction to media blanket coverage of the duke’s death was “thank f*** for Netflix”.

And he revealed that, as a foreign office minister in Tony Blair’s government, a senior diplomat told him a trade mission led by Prince Andrew was “like a rugby club outing”.

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