Meghan Markle ‘wants to be Princess Diana 2.0,’ old friend claims

MEGHAN Markle “was always fascinated by the royal family’’ — and hopes “to be Princess Diana 2.0,’’ a childhood friend has revealed.

Markle coyly claimed while announcing her engagement with Prince Harry on Monday that she “didn’t know much’’ about her blue-blood fiancé or his royal family before she met him, but old friend Ninaki Priddy said the pair travelled to London as teens — and the American actress was obsessed by the royals, the Daily Mail reports.

Ms Priddy told the Mail: “I’m not shocked at all’’ by Markle’s engagement to Harry. “It’s like she has been planning this all her life.”

“She gets exactly what she wants, and Harry has fallen for her play,” Ms Priddy said.

“She was always fascinated by the royal family. She wants to be Princess Diana 2.0. She will play her role ably. But my advice to him is to tread cautiously.”

On the then-15-year-old girls’ trip to London, they posed for one photo sitting on a metal railing and beaming in front of Buckingham Palace.

The remarkable image of the actress, from Los Angeles, was taken during a European summer trip back in 1996, 21 years before her engagement to Prince Harry:

Wednesday’s @DailyMailUK #MailFrontPages pic.twitter.com/pjGTlCzIo1

— Daily Mail U.K. (@DailyMailUK) November 28, 2017

A day earlier, Markle had said with Harry by her side: “Because I’m from the States, you don’t grow up with the same understanding of the royal family.

“And so, while I now understand very clearly there is a global interest there, I didn’t know much about him, and so the only thing that I had asked [a friend] when she said she wanted to set us up was, I have one question: ‘Well, is he nice?’

“Because if he wasn’t kind, it just didn’t seem like it would make sense.”

This story originally appeared in the New York Post and is republished here with permission.