Do Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle actively dislike each other?

If there’s one thing we’ve learned this year, just in case we didn’t already know, it’s that the world is desperate to find out as much as possible about what’s going on behind the scenes of the Royal Family. When the people get a hint that something is being hidden from them, they pounce.

When King Charles openly announced that he was suffering from cancer, the internet was surprisingly subdued. However, when Kate Middleton had abdominal surgery and then never returned to public duties everyone lost their minds and spread crazy conspiracy theories that ranged from adultery to alien abduction. Only when Princess Catherine was forced to make a filmed statement admitting to her own cancer diagnosis did the fever finally die down.

And yet there remains another Kate mystery that still has not been satisfactorily resolved, and it’s one that goes back years. We hear a lot of rumors, but are sister-in-laws Kate and Meghan Markle really arch-enemies?

Do Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle get along?

That’s the million-dollar (or pound) question, but it’s hard to come up with an irrefutably factual answer as the Royal Family doesn’t exactly make statements to the press about who’s getting along with who. Two insider sources, however, have shared their alleged intel on the relationship between the wives of Princes William and Harry, and while they slightly differ, they both paint the pair’s connection as complicated and frayed.

First of all, back in 2018, in the face of rumors that Kate had given Meghan the cold shoulder since she married into the Windsor family that May, self-styled “royal expert” Katie Nicholl claimed that the now-Princess of Wales had actually been nothing but welcoming. “I think they are certainly friendly and they are spending more time with each other,” Nicholl, author of Harry: Life, Loss, and Love, told InStyle. “You know they’re neighbors in Kensington Palace and I know that Meghan enjoys going over to see Kate and the children, and she does enjoy that. I’m told there’s always an open invitation for her to be with Kate whenever she wants.”

Having said all that, Nicholl had to add, in the most diplomatic way possible, that Kate and Meghan hadn’t exactly developed an instant sisterly connection and lived their own, very different, lives.

“I do hear plenty to suggest that they’re quite different people and that have quite different interests and that Meghan is quite independent and very confident and very keen to I think establish her own network of friends over here in London,” Nicholl admitted. “So that’s certainly not to say she’s snubbed Kate in any way. I think they do spend time together. But I think Meghan’s keen not to rely too much on Kate and to have her own friends as well.”

Is Kate really “uninterested” in having any kind of friendship with Meghan?

Fast forward to 2023, however, and Harry and Meghan’s relationship with the Royal Family as a whole has much changed, thanks in large part to the couple moving to the U.S. and their contentiously open relationship with the media. That might be why author Omid Scobie paints a very different picture of Kate and Meghan’s dynamic from Nicholl’s in his book, Endgame: Inside the Royal Family and the Monarchy’s Fight for Survival.

According to Scobie, and more in line with other earlier rumors, Meghan was actually keen to form a bond with Kate upon marrying Harry, but Kate was not so eager, to put it mildly.

“For Meghan, who found much of her time as a working royal a lonely and isolated experience, there was a hope that Kate would be someone she could at least turn to for an encouraging word during her lowest points, including her emotional difficulties during her pregnancy,” Scobie shares in his book. “They were once both outsiders, middle-class women brought into the house of Windsor for unimaginably different lives. Kate, however, was uninterested in forming this kind of bond with Meghan.”

Scobie cites an unnamed source in the Palace as informing him that Kate “wasn’t a fan” of Meghan and that she “can be cold if she doesn’t like someone.” A different source claims that Kate “spent more time talking about Meghan than talking to her.” What’s more, Scobie writes that Kate is known to have “jokingly shivered when Meghan’s name has come up around her.” Ultimately, Kate and Meghan supposedly have little interaction these days as “there has been almost zero direct communication, bar a few short pleasantries, between the pair since late 2019.”

Again, this is all unconfirmed, but Scobie’s claims do gel with those reports that Harry and Meghan were not informed about Kate’s illness prior to her announcement to the world. Nevertheless, the Sussexes wished Kate well in a response to the news given to the press. “We wish health and healing for Kate and the family,” shared the Duke and Duchess, “and hope they are able to do so privately and in peace.”