Meghan Markle pushes King Charles to the edge
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have ended up playing a massive role in the health crises buffeting Buckingham Palace.
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Spare a thought for the bobbies who have been posted outside the London Clinic for a week now. Just a couple of hardworking cops who, I’m assuming, would normally walk a beat have now suddenly found themselves as background players in 1001 news reports for TV stations from Minsk to Minneapolis.
The reason for their unexpected cross platform close ups: That inside the private Clinic, where fees would probably make a suite at the Dorchester look like a bargain, happens to be
Kate the Princess of Wales who was hospitalised last week for abdominal surgery.
In the days since then, the media has rotated in and out of the pen set up across the street while various Met police officers in their best pressed uniforms have stood to attention and tried not to nod off.
The shock has now started to wear off, that the generally hale and hearty princess is laid up, meaning we are now in a gloriously dull holding pattern which leaves plenty of time for thinking. Thinking like, the royal family now finds itself in a serious bind which is largely one of their own creation. Thinking like, the chickens of Megxit have come home to roost.
Because of course, it’s not just Kate who has been sidelined but Prince William the Prince of Wales too, with the father-of-three having cleared his diary for the coming weeks to do doting husband duty and to take on solo responsibility for all lunch boxes.
Then there is King Charles who is set to go under the knife too. Within 90 minutes of Kate’s hospitalisation being announced, the Palace revealed that His Majesty will undergo a “corrective procedure” for an enlarged prostate, a diagnosis that I have no desire to learn anything more about. The King too will now be taking a couple of weeks off public duties too.
Come February, it looks like Queen Camilla will have no choice but to largely carry the royal can, despite the fact that she generally looks like someone who is more interested in spending quality time with the new Barbour catalogue than charming pensioners in Swindon.
With three of the four most senior members of Team: Crown out of the office and nowhere near a rope line for ages yet, the full extent of just how bad Megxit really was for the Palace has come into focus.
The loss of Harry and Meghan the Duke and Duchess of Sussex from the working ranks of the King & Co. has not been more keenly felt or more painfully obvious than right now, a situation that can be directly traced back to the Palace’s inaction in the final months of 2019 and the beginning of 2020.
Back then, the Sussexes were clearly at a low ebb, something that was confirmed in October 2019, when a doco about the couple’s official tour of Southern Africa aired. Meghan looked like she was one particularly moving ad away from tears while Harry looked like he was on the verge of clocking someone. Things were clearly not all right.
Something had to give.
That something was them punching in on the royal clock and thus they shocked the M&S pants off the world by quitting full-time royal life and off they went to the West Coast to make acai bowls and to see if anyone wanted to pay them millions to make a children’s show about a turtle with too many feelings.
In the years since then the focus has largely been on what the Sussexes have been doing with their free time in between gong healing sessions, such as making tediously overblown TV series about how the trials of learning to curtsy or writing a book detailing the shocking time that Princess Anne bluntly refused to do trust falls with Meghan.
Except I think this misses the point. Why the hell didn’t the Palace act in the months before Megxit to prevent the couple reaching breaking point?
Back in 2019, before pangolins became famous for all the wrong reasons and the world learnt of the existence of “wet markets”, Harry and Meghan’s unhappiness was on full display.
In September of that year during that African tour, Harry lashed out at a TV reporter and the couple revealed that he was suing the parent companies of the Mirror, the Sun and the Daily Mail over alleged phone hacking. (News Group Newspapers, the owner of the Sun, is owned by the same parent company as News Corp Australia, publisher of this masthead.)
A few weeks after that, the Palace announced that the couple would be taking what seemed like a much needed six-week sabbatical.
It is exactly this point that the bright minds and Oxbridge-educated mandarins of the Palace should have swung into methodical action. Things were clearly not working for the duke and duchess and yet the Crown Inc desperately needed to keep them sweet and to keep them on the books. The Sussexes’ natural ability to reach younger audiences and those in Commonwealth (you know the hundreds of millions of people who might be less than enamoured with the whitebread Waleses’) was a God-given bit of luck that seemed like it had arrived just in the nick of time.
So, did the late Queen’s staffers or the then Prince Charles’ office devote a few well spent days to coming up with some sort of plan to help the Sussexes cope? Did they devise some savvy blueprint to ensure they would go the distance?
Tell me – is it your turn to wryly laugh or mine?
We know thanks to Harry’s memoir Spare that their own attempts to come up with some sort of strategy never really got off the ground. While the idea was floated for the Sussexes to relocate to South Africa, which they were keen to do, that fell by the wayside after it ended up in the press and “caused a huge stink”.
That’s it? Are you truly telling me that this one single idea – send them to South Africa – was the sum total of what a venerable institution with hundreds of staff and an annual operating budget about equal to the GDP of a Pacific Island nation could come up with? That they couldn’t cook up some other scheme to ensure that Harry and Meghan could continue plumping for the Crown Inc?
In my view, the Palace failed the duke and duchess back then, and right now, with the triple whammy of Kate, William and Charles all benched, their chickens are coming home to roost. They failed to prevent Harry and Meghan from taking the nuclear option and failed to keep them on side, meaning that today the House of Windsor is looking about as structurally sound as a prefab, jerry rigged extension built on top of the San Andreas Fault.
The coming weeks and months will see the pressure mount on the remaining few working HRHs – Princess Anne and Prince Edward and Sophie the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh – and Camilla to hold the fort.
What these four won’t begin to be able to redress is the extended charisma and the glamour deficit about to befall the Firm.
Lacking the magic of Kate, and with William busy trying to work out where Princess Charlotte’s lacrosse kit has gotten to for the foreseeable future, the Palace is in for a massive dry spell publicity-wise.
No more enthusiastic front pages showcasing the Prince and Princess of Wales’ tree-planting scheme for suburban roundabouts or the installation of emotion wheels on the Tube. No more peppy Instagram videos showing the couple turning up in regional market towns and readily posing for selfies with punters. And no more red carpet moments with the princess done up in some combination of sequins and more diamonds than Elizabeth Taylor at a Cartier warehouse sale.
What has become apparent this week is that Harry and Meghan, in jumping ship, have incidentally pushed the royal family to breaking point by leaving them painfully short staffed – but the Palace deserves to shoulder plenty of the responsibility letting things fester and get so bad in 2019 for the Sussexes that they felt they had no other choice.
In another universe, where some savvy private secretary had intervened all those years ago, the duke and duchess would be right now poised to take on the full mantle and to fully step up. Instead the choices that the royal family and courtiers made back then on the eve of the pandemic have boomeranged.
The House of Windsor is about to face a serious test that no one saw coming and the shorthanded Palace would do well to look in a mirror if they want to understand why.
And someone, for the love of god, send those bobbies out at least a cup of tea and a biscuit. In these trying times, everyone could do with a Gingernut. Which coincidentally is exactly what it turns out that Charles needs too.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
Originally published as Meghan Markle pushes King Charles to the edge
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