Reports reveal if Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are splitting
After months of speculation about their marriage, a new report details why Meghan needs to ditch her current narrative - and Harry.
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Back in 2019, the Sunday Times claimed that “a very senior member of the royal family” had given Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, a particularly snarky nickname – “the degree wife”.
The reason? “Because she’ll only last three years.”
And of late, it started to look a scotch like this snappish sobriquet could be borne out. After five years of marriage, equivalent to undergraduate degree plus a masters tacked on, chatter grew and grew that the marriage of the duchess and her other half, Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex’s was on the rocks.
Meghan had stopped wearing her engagement and eternity rings, the couple were no longer popping up à deux practising their slightly sickly constant hand-holding and she did not turn up by his side, either for King Charles’ coronation or when he emotionally gave evidence in his case against the Mirror.
Nor did she travel with him when he returned to the UK for the WellChild Awards last week nor was she with him for the kick-off of the Invictus Games in Germany this weekend, though it has been reported that she will fly in for a few days at the Games in the lead up to the closing ceremony.
And so, in the background, the ominous music quietly swelled …
Except now a deep dive from Alison Boshoff over in the Daily Mail has pulled back the curtain on le marriage Sussex to reveal if all is just fine and dandy and they are still using his and hers toilets or if love is officially dead and it’s time for Harry to pack up his toothbrush and Nintendo Switch and to find out if he can crash on Oprah’s couch.
The verdict – they are going their different ways, according to Bosoff, it’s splitsville … but only career-wise.
Brand Sussex – the sum that was for so long so much greater than their parts; the buy-one-get-one-free that was the duke and duchess; the permanent twofer; his yin to her yang – is looking like it’s no more.
They are pursuing this strategy because they, according to a friend of Meghan’s and brand and culture expert Nick Ede, to “undo the damage” of the last year.
“I’ve spoken to mutual friends and it’s not true they are divorcing,” Ede told Boshoff. “What is actually happening is they are trying now to undo the damage they did with the Harry & Meghan documentary and Spare, which made them into a toxic couple.
“The first way to do that is to allow Meghan to get away from the victim narrative and away from Harry so people can see who she is.”
As Boshoff writes, “It is more about brand separation as opposed to personal separation.”
Which makes it sound curiously like the duchess is essentially dumping her husband, professionally-speaking.
The obvious question here is, if we take Ede at face value, how might Harry feel about getting the career flick?
While the last year has seen the couple pick up the silver medal in terms of Netflix docos (beaten by The Tinder Swindler which is the most-watched of all time) and his book become the fastest-selling non-fiction title of all time, those successes have seen their popularity topple off a cliff and right into a bin fire.
Pause here to consider how drastically the ground has shifted if indeed the duchess needs “to get away from the victim narrative and away from Harry” to be a viable commercial prospect.
Moreover, what does it say about the Sussexes’ chosen path up until this point that they are now seen as a “toxic couple”? And that Meghan is supposedly now having to “undo the damage” they did on themselves via their big money-spinning projects? That the duchess now needs to “get away from the victim narrative and away from Harry so people can see who she is”?
The numbers paint a damning picture.
In the days before Harry & Meghan, the duke had an approval rating of plus 38 and the duchess was only plus 23, per research done by Redfield and Wilson for Newsweek.
When polling was done only a month and change later in January and after the release of Spare, their standing was in free fall, with Harry on minus seven, a 45 point plummet, and Meghan down to minus 13 points. (A negative net approval figure means the number of people with a negative view of them outstrips those with a positive view.)
This week Newsweek was back at it, and as of early September, Harry is now sitting on plus 12 and Meghan on minus two. Sure, it’s an improvement but they are far, far off where they were before they began doing mock curtsies on the tele and talking dog bowl biffo.
Interestingly while the Sussexes have been floundering, in polling from Gallup done last month, Prince William took out the top spot as the most popular public figure in America, beating out President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Consider too here that Harry’s long-awaited Netflix doco, Heart of Invictus, has, viewing figure-wise, essentially bombed, failing to make the top 10 most-watched shows on the streamer.
This is now the second series in a row from the couple’s Archewell Productions that has sunk like a stone after the ratings stinker that was Live to Lead. It probably didn’t help that one of Live’s stars, former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, took pains to distance herself from the Sussexes’ after the trailer came out.
So, you see the problem. Brand Sussex has taken on so much water it is struggling to stay afloat, a serious situation indeed given that the duke and duchess now pick up their own many, many bills.
For months now, it has been apparent that the couple, who Meghan famously and nauseatingly claimed, “We’re like salt and pepper. We always move together,” are now drifting off in divergent directions, image and work-wise.
In April, when Hollywood mega agency WME put out a tweet (or do we call it an X now?) tooting their signing of the former actress as a client, it was very telling that the duke was nowhere to be seen and that it was only the former Suits actress who had sought out big- gun representation.
While both Harry and Meghan have made Instagram returns of late (he via pal Nacho
Figureas’ account and her via hairdresser Kadi Lee’s account), it has been the duchess who has become much more of an enthusiastic public presence. In only a matter of weeks, she was photographed out to lunch, repeatedly papped enjoying California life, and hit the Beyoncé tour sans Aitch to rub shoulders with Jeff Bezos and Netflix head honcho Ted Sarandos.
Meghan, approximately 87 reports have claimed, is on the verge of unveiling some big, exciting new bit of digital entrepreneurialism that will be “genuine to who she is”, according to the Telegraph. (Make of that what you will but guaranteed the words “authentic self’ and ”speaking your truth” will somehow figure.)
Likewise, her @Meghan Instagram account has 127,000 followers even though it is yet to actually launch. It has been claimed that she could earn upwards of $1.5 million per paid post.
Harry’s prospects are much less shiny and exciting.
He has exactly zero new projects that have been confirmed or greenlit. He has never managed to get a podcast off the ground, there has been no second book announced and earlier this year sources at BetterUp, the billion-dollar start up where he is Chief Impact Officer, told the Daily Beast that day to day he did “zero things” and that, of his involvement with the troubled company, “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.”
Which perhaps makes Harry officially a bit of a lemon.
According to the Mail, the father-of-two is “in the early stages of discussing” a new doco with Netflix, that would focus on “oil drilling in the Okavango Delta in Botswana”.
For starters, this Africa project has been mooted for months now and yet is still “in the early stages”. More importantly, especially for anyone who might own Netflix stock, while clearly
a worthy topic, it’s hardly likely to really kill it rating and viewing figures-wise. (“Let’s stay in tonight, open a bottle of wine and spend five hours watching Harry squint into the sun, getting burnt, as he worries about some elephants,” said no one, ever.)
Then there is the thorny question of their seemingly divergent attitudes to life in the spotlight, with one half seemingly preening and ready for her close up while the half other once said that every camera flask took him “straight back” to his mother’s death.
Last month, a source “with knowledge from their time with Spotify” toldPage Six: “Harry has made it clear that he never wanted to be in the media…he would be very happy to go away. I think he’d like to go and live in Botswana – as long as he had money.
“Meghan actually likes being famous.”
To wit, when the duchess turned up to Beyoncé’s birthday concert, she posed with Kerry Washington and Kelly Rowland, but did not when she had gone only days earlier with Harry.
There is another argument in all this too.
While Ede might be adamant that all is well in the state of Montecito, others that Boshoff spoke to for that Mail piece had a much less rosy take on what might be really happening.
One source, who is in a “a senior media position in Hollywood,” told Boshoff of the Sussex union: “It’s 100 per cent over. That’s what I hear, and I’ve been hearing it for months.”
Boshoff also reports that “another [source] says Netflix aren’t likely to renew their deal in two years, for the simple reason they don’t expect them to be a couple by that point.”
Yowser.
It occurs to me there is a massive irony here. All this possible drama, these new projects, new paths and attempts to pull themselves out of the very serious career doldrums would make a cracking TV series. Definitely one worth opening a bottle of vino and setting in to binge on too.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience
working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
Originally published as Reports reveal if Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are splitting
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