‘Hopeless’: Prince Harry’s week from hell

The Duke of Sussex has had one of the worst weeks in recent history and there are no signs of improvement.

Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, leaves from the Royal Courts of Justice, Britain's High Court, in central London on June 6, 2023. Picture: Daniel LEAL / AFP

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Lord Byron’s most famous poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, is about a wealthy aristocratic bloke who is deeply unhappy and a bit lost so he ditches the UK to try his luck overseas.

Remind you of anyone?

Two centuries on since the poet’s death, a second Harold is having a right old time of it and no amount of dissipated continental wandering is going to fix things.

Prince Harry the Duke of Sussex has, this week, taken a battering on multiple fronts such that it might be worth investigating if he has been hexed.

The duke now faces bills of at least $1.9 million but which could stretch to $19 million; he has had to apologise to a London court for breaching confidentiality rules; he lost his “hopeless” bid over the Home Office’s removal of his official bodyguards; one of his hill-he-will-die-on phone hacking court cases suffered a major blow and, brace yourself, he’s had to go to work. (Day jobs come for all of us in the end.)

It’s been something of a bad-news buffet for the self-exiled, fledgling civilian.

Debretts might heartily disapprove of loose-lipped money talk but let’s be a bit vulgar and start there. The Duke of Sussex’s coffers have just taken quite the hit.

The duke now faces bills of at least $1.9 million but which could stretch to $19 million and he has had to apologise to a London court. Picture: Daniel Leal / AFP

A couple of years ago Harry went to court to seek a judicial review of the Home Office’s decision that he and wife Meghan the Duchess of Sussex no longer qualified for publicly-funded security after they skipped out on full-time royalling in 2020.

Earlier this year, the Duke of Sussex lost that case and now a judge has ruled that he will have to pay 90 per cent of the government’s costs. That bill, combined with his own legal fees, is estimated to come in at more than $1.9 million.

It’s not only dosh on the line in this Home Office case this week; the duke will have egg liberally applied to his face as he apologises for breaking the confidentiality rules. It turns out that in November 2023, the duke emailed Johnny Mercer, the Veterans’ Affairs Minister, confidential information about proceedings.

(If you are feeling a spot of deja vu, that’s because in 2021, during her privacy lawsuit against the Daily Mail, Meghan also had to apologise to the court after having forgotten she had authorised an aide to brief the authors of Finding Freedom.)

The duke will have egg liberally applied to his face as he apologises for breaking the confidentiality rules. Picture: Jason Koerner/Getty Images for Sentebale

However, that $1.9 million worth of legal fees could end up looking like spare change.

On Thursday came a significant blow in Harry’s phone hacking case against News Group Newspapers (NGN) when fellow claimant Hugh Grant revealed he had accepted a payout and was backing out of proceedings. (NGN is owned by the same parent company as News Corp Australia, publisher of this masthead. They deny the duke’s allegations.)

Taking to X, formerly Twitter, Grant explained that even if he was successful winning against NGN, if the court ultimately awarded him “even a penny less than the settlement offer, I would have to pay the legal costs of both sides” leaving him potentially on the hook for £10 million ($AU19 million).

On Thursday came a significant blow in Harry’s phone hacking case against News Group Newspapers. Picture: Daniel Leal / AFP

Bright legal minds tell me if I’m wrong here, but surely that means that Harry too could possibly end up facing similarly astronomical legal bills?

That $19 million sum, as a point of reference, is not far off the $23 million that the Sussexes have reportedly banked in total from their Netflix contract, according to the Daily Mail.

Coincidentally, while the duke’s NGN case continues to trundle on and his lawyers continue to bill him by the hour, he has been in Florida, hard at his day job, making tele.

Last weekend he and Meghan flew to Palm Beach for him to play in a charity polo tournament, bringing with them the dozen-strong production crew who are making his recently announced Netflix series about the horsey sport. Giddy up.

Dana Barnes, Prince Harry, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, Adolfo Cambiaso and Malcolm Borwick at the Polo Club in Florida. Picture: Jason Koerner/Getty Images for Sentebale

While the as-yet-unnamed series (Riding High? Long to Rein Over Us? Turf’s Up? Bridle-zillas?) is a huge win for anyone who still owns a battered copy of Jilly Cooper’s seminal 90s novel Polo, the literally multimillion-dollar question is, will this show actually work? Will viewers clamour to enjoy a front-row seat inside the glamorous world of chukkas or will a world suffering through a cost of living crisis fail to get all hot and bothered about watching what sounds like a four-legged Drive to Survive?

Harry and Meghan’s professional hopes now rest on this series and her forthcoming lifestyle show which will “celebrate the joys of cooking and gardening, entertaining and friendship”.

But just to point out the obvious, their only commercial ventures that have demonstrably paid off and been unmitigated successes are the ones that have seen them zealously litigating and re-litigating the tired case of Sussex versus Crown Inc.

Their only successful commercial ventures have seen them litigating the tired case of Sussex versus Crown Inc. Picture: @msayles/The Kinsey Collection/Instagram

Currently, the duke and duchess reportedly only have a year and a bit until their contract with the streaming giant ends. What they have yet to prove is that they can make content the unwashed masses actually want to watch and that does not involve them starring in a high-def postmodern King Lear remake filmed entirely on greige linen sofas.

A bigger issue for them is that fundamentally, Harry and Meghan have become influencers.

When they initially signed their Netflix deal they announced they were going to make “content that informs but also gives hope,” and yet here we are with Harry producing a show about horses and Meghan having a red-hot go at remaking herself into an ersatz Martha Stewart.

Fun, entertaining, highly bingeable TV? Hopefully. But I’m not sure what precisely is meant to be ‘informative’ or ‘hopeful’ about swarthy Argentine polo players cantering about the screen or watching the duchess make marmalade.

In 2020 when the Sussexes cleared out of Buckingham Palace it looked like they were about to knock the mouldy House of Windsor onto their pancake-like bottoms. The duke and duchess, I would have bet back then, were going to whip around the world, helping cure diseases and all but getting their own seat on the US Security Council as they helped make the world a better place.

When they signed their Netflix deal they promised to make “content that informs but also gives hope”. Picture: @msayles/The Kinsey Collection/Instagram

But their upcoming shows are about Argentine polo players and marmalade making. Picture: Handout/Sport Gives Back Awards via Getty Images

Instead the Sussexes have ended up looking more and more like celebrities who get up to some very nice bits of charity too.

Boil it all down and what defines the duke and duchess are who his father is and how shoddily his relatives may or may not have treated them back in the 20 months they opened bridges for a living.

Then again, maybe the Duke and Duchess of Sussex will surprise us all because is there anything more quintessentially Californian than stunning career about-faces? A two-bit Western actor became President; an Oscar-winning actress built a company worth hundreds of millions of dollars selling vagina eggs.

All I can confidently say: I am going to need a lot more horse puns before this is over.

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.