Two words raise fresh Prince Harry and Meghan Markle marriage questions
As the Duke and Duchess of Sussex continue to appear individually, a friend’s claim has only made things more confusing.
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During the Cold War, a new profession emerged – Kremlinologists. They were the leather-elbow-patch chaps paid to interpret what was going on behind the Iron Curtain.
It was less of a precise science and more professional reading of tea leaves based on what the Igor and Vlads of the Politburo were chucking in their bins or brands of vodka they were buying.
In 2024, we have Sussexology and the last few weeks have seen a distinct wind change.
Something odd and new and confusing is afoot behind the high hedges and security perimeters of Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s California estate.
We are all now trying to divine, based on the contradictory, confusing signals coming out of their camp if they are just simply in the very logical midst of careers or if something more worrisome is afoot.
Now, two words from Sussexland have not cleared things up or set the record straight but raised fresh questions about what is going on.
The last month has seen Harry, passport and Nintendo Switch in hand, tootle off on an unhurried peregrination to New York, London and Lesotho to stand on stages talking about saving the world rather than that one time his brother got an extra sausage at teatime.
Meghan, for her part, has been back in California giving us alternatively full bore Jayne
Mansfield and Ralph Lauren girl guide.
Whatever happened to their perma-double act? Whatever happened, the chorus chimes in, to the couple formerly known as Mr and Mrs Salt and Pepper? (“We always move together,” as the duchess told The Cut in 2022.)
Are they simply dividing and conquering professionally, doing their own things and giving each other the breathing room to be their true selves? Or is there trouble in the throw-pillow-strewn paradise of their West Coast Shangri-La?
And so the Daily Mail’s Alison Boshoff enters the fray, with a well-placed source close to the duke and duchess telling her that the gossip about any separation is “highly exaggerated”.
Even with a very average minor in English and a PhD in royalology I have no idea what these two words mean.
As Boshoff points out, this is hardly a clear cut repudiation of the chatter about their marriage. Flames will not be dampened. Cold water has not left the bucket.
Why such an oddly ambiguous bit of word-shaped PRing? Why not take the opportunity to, once and for all, really quash the rumours and put to bed all the speculation?
Here, let me show you. They could and should have had a ‘source’ say something like, “Harry and Meghan are stronger than ever, thriving in their power and peace as they grow together as two branches of one mighty oak.” Extra points would have been given if the source had managed to get something in there about ‘intermingled roots’ and ‘leaves reaching for the sky’.
Hell, they don’t even really need to try that hard; just give us a healthy dollop of that old faithful, “thriving”.
Instead, we are left to guess and to stab about in the dark about what “highly exaggerated” might mean.
The problem that the duke and duchess face is that they have made their romance and their marriage an absolutely fundamental, load-bearing beam of their brand. We all know The Story: He was her knight in shining amour; she charged in on her stead and saved him from a lifetime of opening Huddersfield rec centres.
Their dynamism and love posed a threat to the rictus, aspic-ed world of the monarchy and faced with all of their fresh ideas were forced out of the Palace into the wilderness to make do with only a megabucks Netflix deal to keep them warm at night.
Hans Christian Anderson couldn’t have come up with a better modern fairytale.
The problem has become that now, for either practical or personal reasons, their perpetually entwined selves have moved into more independent guises. Questions were always going to be asked, loudly, if the Sussex product they are selling to the world changed so obviously.
Attempts by Harry and Meghan’s camp to tamp down speculation about their marriage, six years on from their big fat Windsor wedding, have so far failed to quash the chit and the chat.
Take the line that People has merrily been running with.
Recently the celebrity mag’s foreign correspondent Simon Perry, who accompanied them as the only accredited journalist on their trip to Nigeria, authored a piece about their new
“twin-track approach”, which sounds more like some DJing technique borne out of a disused East London garage than the portrait of a blissfully happy marriage.
“The Duke and Duchess have now hit their stride as individuals – not just as a couple,” a royal insider told Perry. “The Duke appears focused on his patronage work, and the Duchess focused on her entrepreneurial track”.
Said the friend: “What we are seeing is a functional and healthy relationship with two working partners, not the contrary.”
The piece goes on to say that “what’s unfolding reflects a clear shift in the couple’s public lives” and that “the couple’s collaborative work endures … these joint efforts will continue, even as their individual projects expand.”
“Collaboration”. “Joint efforts”. It all sounds like the language you’d use to describe an enforced team bonding afternoon at a macrame workshop.
Perry also reports that, per the friend, this “shift in focus” is “as much a reflection on parenting priorities, in that one of them stays behind with the children”.
Yet, does this really fly? They have travelled overseas without Prince Archie, five, and Princess Lilibet, three, on a number of occasions and at younger ages, leaving them in the safe hands of a nanny and/or her mother Doria Ragland to head to New York on a number of occasions, to Nigeria and Colombia this year and to the Caribbean for a holiday.
And so we are back to trying to read the Harry and Meghan tea leaves and to ponder what “highly exaggerated” means. Those lucky Kremlinologists. At least they had more to go on than People and “twin tracks”.
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 Two words raise fresh Prince Harry and Meghan Markle marriage questions
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