ALISON BOSHOFF: Is Meghan the minx REALLY Prince Harry's Miss Right? How Princess Eugenie helped fix up the Prince with his (very) socially ambitious TV star 

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Actress Meghan Markle (pictured in Toronto today) is rumoured to be Price Harry's new girlfriend

Meghan Markle’s wedding was a magical affair — she and her fiance Trevor Engelson made their vows at dusk on the most beautiful beach in Jamaica.

Afterwards, surrounded by friends and family holding sparklers, the couple embraced for their first dance on a manicured lawn overlooking the Caribbean sea, lit by dozens of white paper lanterns.

In the picture of that celebration published exclusively in the Mail today, the groom seems to have more than a passing resemblance to a younger Prince Harry.

Engelson was a promising young film producer, she an actress who had finally got her break in the TV legal drama Suits. But within 18 months the marriage was over — apparently killed off by the separation which ensued when Meghan filmed a second series of Suits in Toronto in 2012, while Trevor remained in Los Angeles.

She said in interviews that he visited ‘consistently’, but she was noted for cheerfully joining in with an active post-filming social scene: the cast often met for dinners and cocktails after work. She has spoken of them all playing board games and ‘drinking Scotch into the wee hours of the night’.

Attempts to revive her marriage during an exotic holiday in the Far East failed. Trevor Engelson won’t comment on what happened, but there seems to be some residual bitterness.

Miss Markle's  ex husband Trevor Engelson (pictured left) bears a resemblance a resemblance to the prince. Their marriage lasted just 18 months 

Mr Engelson and Miss Markle (right) are not be in touch anymore and neither has commented on her new relationship with Prince Harry (left)

I’m told they are not now in touch at all, and his well-heeled father David muttered the word ‘bull***t’ alongside the more usual ‘no comment’ when asked about his former daughter-in-law this week — which seems to hint at some serious dissatisfaction with whatever went on.

The argument cannot have been financial, because documents show she filed for divorce without asking her husband for any money.

If her relationship did break down because of a geographical separation, that might suggest an unhappy precedent which Prince Harry — who is based on the opposite side of the Atlantic from Meghan — may like to contemplate.

Now that news of the Prince’s latest girlfriend has emerged, with stories of them criss-crossing the ocean to be together, the question everyone’s asking is: Might minxy Meghan finally be Harry’s Miss Right?

The story of how they came into each other’s social orbits is fascinating. Her entree into the Prince’s world comes, I can reveal, via one of Meghan’s fashion world contacts: a designer named Misha Nonoo.

Although Nonoo is based in New York they have formed an alliance: they met up on Meghan’s European travels in Madrid this summer.

Misha Nonoo is married to Old Etonian Alexander Gilkes, and is close friends with Prince Harry’s regular matchmaker Princess Eugenie — who set up his last serious romance, with the actress Cressida Bonas.

Indeed, Gilkes is a friend of both Prince William and Prince Harry, and a co-founder of the online auction house Paddle8. The son of a leading London dermatologist, Gilkes counts the Middletons as family friends, and squired Pippa around New York on her visit to the city in 2012. 

Not only did he and Misha attend the wedding of William and Kate Middleton, but Princess Eugenie worked at Paddle8 for two years. Eugenie (and her sister Beatrice) went to the Gilkes-Nonoo wedding in Venice in 2012.

It seems that Misha Nonoo — possibly encouraged by Princess Eugenie — introduced the Prince to Meghan Markle in June. The pair met several times when she was in London at the end of that month.

Harry flew to Africa for the summer, but since his return Meghan has visited London twice, in September and October. Recently they are said to have had a double date with Princess Eugenie and her boyfriend Jack Brooksbank.

Meghan Markle (pictured on the set of Suits) and Mr Engelson were said to have has a magical wedding

And it’s reported that Meghan was among those at Balmoral celebrating his birthday in September, again with Eugenie and her boyfriend.

The relationship, it seems, is moving apace: it was even reported this week that she has met Prince Charles.

Even as she is accepted into the family fold, however, it is worth the Royals noting that this is a woman who likes to toot her own trumpet.

For Meghan’s formidable public profile goes far further than the usual Instagram boasting that has become a trait of so many modern celebrities. In blog posts on her website The Tig (named after Tignanello, her favourite upmarket Italian wine, and modelled after Gwyneth Paltrow’s insufferable lifestyle and fashion site Goop), she talks about how UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon ‘led a standing ovation’ after one of her speeches about gender equality. (Rather unfortunately, his name is misspelt Bahn-Ki Moon.)

She blogs prolifically about her charity work — she is a global ambassador for the children’s relief organisation World Vision, and a UN advocate — and describes herself as ‘opinionated, driven and with a deep desire to affect [sic] change’.

The impression is of extreme saintliness, coupled with an enthusiasm for some of the faddier reaches of popular culture. Indeed, on her website she refers to her own ‘hippie-dippie-California-girl sensibility of all things clean and green’.

One of the so-called social ‘influencers’ she has interviewed for her website is Amanda Chantal Bacon, the thoroughly absurd purveyor of Moon Dust to Gwyneth Paltrow (a blend of herbs, plant extracts and minerals which is claimed to ‘enhance your beauty, brain, body, sexual energy, sleep and spirit’). Bacon lists one thing she couldn’t live without as ‘Ashwagandha’, a root which ‘aids the thyroid’.

The Suits actress' marriage allegedly broke down because of a geographical separation. This might suggest an unhappy precedent which Prince Harry — who is based on the opposite side of the Atlantic from Meghan — may like to contemplate

Nothing in this right-on-rabbiting could be further from the utter discretion usually required in those who become part of the Royal Family. Indeed, Miss Markle makes Pippa Middleton look like a PR amateur.

As I have discovered, she is a world-class networker. She adds to her reputed £250,000-a-year earnings from Suits with plugs for all kinds of other ventures, including a recent social media campaign for Bobbi Brown make-up, and a small range of clothes she ‘designed’ for Canadian department store Reitman.

In a winning piece of timing (presumably no more than a happy coincidence), that collection was released this week to more than usually fevered interest.

She has 326,000 followers on Twitter and 1.1 million on Instagram.

Now based chiefly in Toronto, where Suits is filmed, she is at the head of a glossy posse of thirtysomethings with large social media profiles who make small fortunes out of Instagram endorsements.

Miss Markle's looks have been compared to Kate Middleton's sister Pippa (pictured right). But Miss Markle makes Pippa Middleton look like a PR amateur

Time and again she introduces interviewees such as tennis star Serena Williams on her website by saying she has met them at a conference or a fundraiser.

And the tireless search for contacts has paid off.

Her best friends include Jessica Mulroney, a fashion stylist who just happens to be the daughter-in-law of former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

This summer, Jessica travelled around Europe with Meghan, who talks on her Instagram account about spending weekends with the Mulroney family. Jessica Mulroney has been in the news because she works with Sophie Gregoire-Trudeau, the wife of the current Canadian Prime Minister Justin — a piquant coming together of the two power women which absolutely sets the local media alight.

Canada’s First Lady Sophie has been known to accompany Jessica and Meghan Markle on nights out in the pretty rooftop bar at the ultra-fashionable private members’ club, Soho House, in Toronto — the same location where Meghan is said to have socialised with 32-year-old Prince Harry in recent days.

That’s quite a power clique for Miss Markle, 35, who first went to Canada only five years ago: she can be said to have climbed to the very top of the city’s social tree. A long and recent romance with prominent city chef Cory Vitiello — who ran a burger joint famous for attracting many of the Hollywood A-listers who film in Toronto — probably won’t have hurt her social cachet one bit.

They appear to have met when she interviewed him for The Tig website in the summer of 2014. She had left her marriage, but he was already taken — he spoke about his ‘loving girlfriend’. Yet soon after, the other girl was ditched and he hooked up with Meghan.

They were an item for two stormy years, but now it seems, she has caught a rather bigger fish. The question now — since she was publicly linked to Harry — is how the actress will handle the intense global scrutiny.

A designer named Misha Nonoo, who attended Price William and Kate Middleton's wedding, introduced Miss Markle to Prince Harry

So far this week, she has teased observers by posting a picture of ‘spooning’ bananas lying side by side on her Instagram account (with stick bodies drawn on them), along with the caption ‘sleep tight xxx’.

She followed it up the next day by posting a picture of a quintessentially English cup of tea.

Hailed by some Left-wing newspapers as just what is needed to bring British royalty ‘into the 21st century’, Miss Markle — who is of mixed race heritage — certainly has a background which is more ordinary than the super-aspirational middle-class Middletons.

It has been noted that her parents have both filed for bankruptcy in the past and that her family is neither wealthy nor well-connected.

Her father Thomas Markle was a successful showbiz lighting engineer, her mother Doria worked for an airline and is now a yoga instructor and social worker. But even as her father’s bankruptcy over a $30,000 debt was being processed this summer, Meghan was travelling around Ibiza and Italy’s Amalfi coast on a month-long spree with her blue-chip girlfriends, looking more impossibly glossy and glamorous in every social media image she posted.

It’s a somewhat jarring contrast — you can see, perhaps, why her half-sister Sarah (who has the same father) called her a ‘narcissist’ earlier this week. (Although Sarah has evidently thought better of it and is now denying everything on Twitter.)

Raised in Los Angeles, Meghan is the treasured only daughter of Thomas and Doria. Her mother’s great-great-grandfather was a freed slave, named Wisdom, while Thomas’s family are Irish and from Pennsylvania.

They were married in December 1979 and Rachel Meghan was born in August 1981. In an interview she said her parents moved into a house in The Valley in LA and their neighbours assumed, because Meghan was so much more light-skinned, that her mother was the nanny.

One Christmas her father gave her a ‘family’ set of Barbie dolls, buying two sets — one white and one black — so it would reflect her biracial heritage.

By this time, though, their perfect family was falling apart. Thomas Markle moved out in March 1987, when Meghan was five, and an amicable divorce was agreed.

They agreed joint legal custody and shared physical custody. Thomas had visitation rights at weekends and summer holidays.

At this point he had been working for six years on long-running drama General Hospital in the lighting section. In 1986, when Meghan was four, he lit the Oscars broadcast.

He earned enough for Meghan to be sent to a private Catholic school in The Valley. At Northwestern University in Chicago she majored in theatre and international relations, before working briefly for the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires.

But it was always clear that she would end up acting. ‘I was such a ham as a child,’ she said. Yet it was years before she got her big break. She worked as a calligrapher and was one of the briefcase girls on the game show Deal Or No Deal.

Miss Markle — who is of mixed race heritage — is not from a wealthy or well-connected background. The actress has recently launched her own leather-inspired fashion range (pictured) 

Naturally, there were periods of disillusion. ‘Because of my background in politics and being educated, there were always other things I could be doing, so there were moments of “Why am I subjecting myself to this?” I did five TV pilots before Suits and none got picked up.’

Nobody surely, can fault her drive. Indeed, before she tasted success with Suits and with The Tig website, which only became a registered trademark a year ago, records show that she registered other websites for numerous putative business ventures, called things like Posh Beauty, Spoon Me Fork Me, Lalitots, and Foodiepup.

She’s clearly a woman who is determined to make it socially, financially and even on a global stage. The question is, where on earth will Prince Harry — who has always come across as a man of simple tastes — fit into her world?

Additional reporting by Daniel Bates.