Four days Meghan Markle and Prince Harry can’t explain
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been exposed and their choices after the Invictus Games raise a lot of questions.
COMMENT
Ah, Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex. You might be able to take the lad out of his homeland of room temperature beer and the perpetual veneration of the sausage roll and to plonk him down in a world of matcha lattes, but can you really take the Brit out of him?
After all, what is more quintessentially British than the nearly inalienable belief in one’s right of having several days every year of crisping oneself in the sun somewhere in southern Europe, ideally in a resort where the menu offers double egg and chips?
And so, it has come to pass with reports now claiming that Harry and his wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex managed to tack on a “mega-secret” trip to a luxury resort in Portugal after their recent stint at the Invictus Games in Dussedörf.
The optics here are nada bom, or not great for those who don’t speak fluent Portuguese.
Meghan, it would now seem, went to Europe and spent nearly as much time, or as much time, at the Invictus Games as she did on holiday. (It is unclear whether on what day the couple flew in.)
This Sussex news comes via Portugal’s Nova Gente magazine, which claimed that the couple had enjoyed a “lightning romantic escape” to a trendy beach town an hour and a half south of Lisbon, where Princess Eugenie and her husband Jack Brooksbank have a home. The duke and duchess are reported to have stayed at the CostaTerra Golf and Ocean Club where, funny this, Brooksbank works in the marketing and sales.
The Sussexes’ presence in the region has subsequently been confirmed by the local tourist board. (Disappointingly, at the time of writing, it had not been revealed whether the Sussexes did indeed get their egg and chips too.)
The most articulate thing I have to stay here is … huh?
The duchess arrived three days after the kick off of her husband’s monumentally successful sporting event for wounded serving and veteran military personnel but could make the time to enjoy several days of resort time?
When the duchess arrived in Germany, she at an Invictus bash only hours after landing and told the crowd, “’I’m sorry that I was a little late to the party … I just had to spend a little bit more time at home getting our little ones settled, getting milkshakes, doing school drop off.”
The point where I start to use my monthly question mark quota in only one day comes when we get to the fact that the 41-year-old couldn’t make it to the Games earlier because of their “little ones” – but could stay in Europe for several more days than absolutely necessary to bask in the ocean breeze and read the latest Colleen Hoover?
Huh? Que?
In some ways, taking this far-from-a-good-look getaway might be the most perfectly royal thing that the renegade duo have done in positively yonks.
For more than a decade now, William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales have regularly come under (rightful) fire for their propensity to take holidays at the drop of a Philip Treacy hat. Half-term? Holiday. Full-term? Holiday. It’s raining, it’s hot, Ryanair has a deal on all-inclusive stays in Mallorca? Holiday, holiday, holiday. (Creative licence might have been used here.)
But you get the picture. Going as far back as 2008, Her late Majesty was reportedly worried that William’s then girlfriend seemed to spend half her life in the check-in queue at Heathrow as she prepared to sun herself in Mustique or to enjoy a positively wizard time zipping down the slopes of Verbier.
Even now that the couple are King and Queen-in-waiting they still take every one of their children’s multitudinous school breaks off work to muck about in the boggy Norfolk countryside or to gambol about the idyllic Isles of Scilly to forcefully bond with their children. (It’s pronounced ‘silly’.)
The cake is definitely taken though by Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, the Lionel Messis of lying down by a pool. In the space of 15 months, starting in 2015, Beatrice managed to fit in 18 – yes, 18 – international sojourns while her little sister scraped by with only eight.
The moral here being, the royal family loves a holiday, nearly as much as they love shepherd’s pie, The Archers or indiscriminately shooting small furry or feathered things.
Harry and Meghan, in taking themselves off for a lovely getaway, are very much sticking to a family tradition.
However – that does not mean that this Portuguese breather was a good idea.
The Sussexes have now spent more days on their mini break (three) than the number of times they have appeared in public in the US to do some good works (two each).
Like everything, it’s about the look of the thing. The Sussexes have spent the last few years trying vainly to establish themselves as just as important public figures as when they were card-carrying representatives of the crown. Who can forget Harry’s UN speech, their DIY ‘royal’ tour of New York in 2021 or that doozy of a statement with the phrase “service is universal”?
Only last month in Tokyo, Harry told the crowd at a philanthropy summit, “My life is charity – always has been, always will be.”
The thing is though, they keep nailing their colours to the mast and then trundling off out of public view to then only pop up again to accept some award somewhere.
Their visibility on the do-good front this year has been particularly low.
In 2023, Harry has undertaken two-in person charity outings in the US (taking part in the Diana Award’s person Conversations for Change event with award alumni in LA and visiting a Santa Barbara youth group for Mental Health Awareness Month with his wife) and one in the UK (attending the WellChild Awards). Meghan has logged two – an outing on International Women’s Day to Harvest Home, an LA charity supporting pregnant women at risk of homelessness, and the above youth group visit.
The couple also appeared in a video to announce the first recipients of funding from the Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund in August.
In September, Harry appeared at a philanthropy conference in Tokyo and then played in a fundraising polo game in Singapore in support of his Sentebale charity.
Elsewhere, Meghan donated a recipe to a charity cookbook; Harry did a video in their garden about WellChild.
While there have also been a few other bits and pieces in the forms of statements put out by their Archewell Foundation and having doled out funding, overall, they have done nothing to really write home about.
According to Giving USA, $163 billion was given away by private foundations in the United States in 2022. The Sussexes’ Archewell Foundation has donated $4.6 million, out of the $20 million it has raised, in 2021-2022.
My point – the duke and duchess are making a difference and a much greater one than you and I – but their good works do not live up to the rhetoric and hype that surrounds them.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex seem to want to be taken seriously as global humanitarians but have thus far failed to back that up with substantial work or having a significant impact.
The Bill and Melinda Gates and the Greta Thunbergs of the world really don’t have to worry about the Sussexes coming for their crowns or exalted positions any time soon.
Sure, everyone deserves a holiday but spending nearly as much time poolside as at the Games (in Meghan’s case) is hardly going to bolster their cred at the UN.
I suppose the biggest question here, the thing I really want to know is, did Harry send any postcards back to his family in Britain? It’s hard to imagine that there is a flimsy bit of cardboard currently in the Waleses’ letterbox with ‘Wish you were here’ scribbled in biro.
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.
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