Prince Harry and Meghan Markle mark sad anniversary

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have just marked a major anniversary – and it has revealed a sobering truth about the couple.

The large crowd that gathered behind metal barricades on a grey winter’s day in London didn’t know they were about to become part of history.

Maybe they were gawpers, lookiloos, media, megafans.

But the large horde that thronged and waited outside Canada House on January 7, 2020 were all there for one reason – to catch a glimpse of two of the most photographed people on the planet – Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

What no one standing around in the grim weather knew that day as they cheered and waved at the departing Sussexes was that within hours, on January 8, they would stun the world – and the royal family – like two people in possession of military grade tasers.

Their IED (Instagram explosive device) would explode with thousands of devastating, monarchy-shaking volts – and Megxit was upon us.

Five years on from that day, and in a perfect example of you-can’t-make-this up, on the very anniversary of Megxit, Meghan officially joined the ranks of reality TV stardom, with Netflix filing her forthcoming cooking show in the same category as Selling Sunset.

The Instagram post that started it all. Picture: Sussex Royal/Instagram

Is this, you have to wonder, the life that the Sussexes envisaged for themselves when they tapped ‘post’ back in 2020?

Back then, their initial plan – a one foot in, one foot out model of royalling – was soon nixed by Her late Majesty, who seemed to feel you couldn’t be part-time representatives of the Crown in the same way you can’t have a part-time Pope or just be a wee bit pregnant.

So, ‘out’ and West Coast living it would be for Harry and Meghan. Still, their future seemed nothing but rosy and bright and accessorised with flashing dollar signs. They were box office gold, the glam, youthful and cool face of the royal family suddenly released from their regal shackles.

Unfettered, unbound by protocol and released from dreary expectations to christen lifeboat stations in rural Kent, they could now fully throw themselves into becoming the globetrotting dazzle-a-rama champions for good they seemed destined to be.

Truly, that’s what I believed would happen. That in 2020, Harry and Meghan were on the cusp of a bigger, brighter chapter that would leave the dowdy royal family in their metaphorical dust as they waltzed off to address the Bilderberg meeting having borrowed Beyoncé’s jet.

Well, I certainly got that one wrong, didn’t I?

Meghan has used her sudden arrival back on social media to plug her new cooking show and says it’s about ‘connecting with new friends’. Picture: Netflix

Sure, Harry and Meghan are travelling around the globe, but they are only doing so by staging nearly melancholic royal-lite tours for themselves.

And the duke did get to address the UN in 2022 – but that would prove the high water mark, with no similar starring moments having eventuated since. The duchess was awarded a Ms award for gender equality work, but championing girls is now only just part of her day job as she busily refashions herself into some sort of So-Cal tradwife.

Zoom out, and today the Sussexes would have to be two of the most polarising human beings out of the eight billion of us.

In 2020 they left the UK with an exquisite degree of fame, celebrity and as the focus of an obsession unlike anything else on the planet … and yet they have somehow only managed to parlay that into mediocre at best careers as content makers and with their names now bywords for nuclear level family dysfunction and feuding.

Do you think this was what Harry and Meghan had in mind when they boarded their irony-free “freedom flight” to Los Angeles?

They are not shoo-ins at high level gabfests like the World Economic Forum or the annual Sun Valley gathering, aka summer camp for billionaires. They do not pal around with political or corporate movers and shakers and their Archewell Founation does very good work, but on a relatively moderate scale. Maybe they just don’t want to.

But the question I keep coming back to is, do they matter?

So, do they really matter? Picture: Netflix

If Wall Street, Washington and Silicon Valley are not quite sold on the Sussexes, then nor is Hollywood. Their last remaining content deal, with Netflix, will reportedly expire this year.

The duke and duchess might have made an untold fortune in the last five years, but it’s now going to have to last them decades – and with a mortgage on their $20 million Montecito estate to pay off.

A few months before Megxit, in October 2019, in a one-hour TV special about their official tour of Southern Africa, Meghan famously said, “it’s not enough to just survive something, right? That’s not the point of life. You’ve got to thrive, you’ve got to feel happy”.

Are they thriving now? Are they happy?

Sure, Harry’s learning to surf, Meghan’s back on Instagram and they are raising their kids far away from royal reaches, but the wounds dealt by the Sussexes’ Oprah Winfrey interview, Harry & Meghan and Spare remain as deep and as raw as ever.

The duke has not seen King Charles in nearly a year, despite having visited the UK multiple times while His Majesty fights cancer.

Harry hasn’t seen his father for nearly a year. Picture: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images North America/Getty Images via AFP

King Charles has only met his youngest grandchild, Princess Lilibet, once.

Between Harry and Meghan, the only parent or close family member who would have been at their Christmas table last month was the duchess’ mother, Doria Ragland.

On January 1 the duchess returned to Instagram, launching a solo account with a video showing her doing some carefree skipping along a windswept-looking beach. Meghan had officially come full circle, from blogger and influencer to duchess and influencer.

Since then, the 43-year-old has posted the trailer for her new series, With Love, Meghan and a touching tribute to her rescue beagle Guy who passed away, which included a series of private photos and video of the Sussexes’ verdant Californian life. The picture that the video paints is fascinating – of a massive home, of slow hours in the kitchen, dog walks and enjoying the sunshine on a large lawn.

Happiness is a choice, or so the saying goes. Maybe they made the right, the perfect, choice after all.

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 Prince Harry and Meghan Markle mark sad anniversary