Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s three-day marriage test
It’s been 116 days since Prince Harry and Meghan Markle made any sort of official appearance together. Now, all eyes will be on them for three pivotal days.
COMMENT
There is one highly under-reported thing that we need to talk about when it comes to Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex: Their excess baggage.
Which I mean, quite literally. Last year when they flew back to the UK via private jet, natch, for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations, photos showed they travelled with so much stuff it included their own high chair. In last year’s Netflix outing and nerve-shredding endurance test of TV, Harry & Meghan, there are repeated shots of them stuffing large suitcases and, at one point, we see the duke giving his then baby son Archie a ride on a particularly big case.
The duke and duchess might be many things but based on the available evidence, light packers? I think not.
Thus, pray for the baggage handlers of Dusseldörf, given the Sussexes’ imminent arrival in Germany for the Invictus Games this week, the same event at which in 2022 the duchess wore approximately $74,000 worth of new clothing in only three days, according to the Daily Mail. (How many huge wheeled numbers would that have required to cart all around hmmm?)
This week is going to be a corker, in every conceivable way, from suitcase situation upwards with a hell of a lot of the Sussexes’ future riding on a matter of only a few days.
Will this week see them pull off the image reset they so desperately need? Will they be able to quash marriage strife rumours? Get to bask in the warm glow of unfettered positive PR?
Or will things all go, technically speaking here, tits up?
In nearly four years of turning points, here we are again, at a crucial juncture, waiting to see if things will break Harry and Meghan’s way.
Already this year’s Games stands out in contrast to the 2022 event for the fact that the couple will not be arriving together. While Harry will return to the UK this week for the WellChild Awards, his lady wife and content-making partner will only meet up with him in Germany. (Let’s all just raise an eyebrow here.)
Assuming we will see them together at the outset, that will mark 116 days since the couple made any sort of official appearance together. (They were, of course, photographed celebrating the duchess’s birthday in early August at a Montecito restaurant but as the Kremlinologists of X – formerly known as Twitter – can tell you, they were, highly unusually, not holding hands.)
The German press reported this week that there was “confusion about [Meghan’s] appearance.” According to the news site T-Online (and Google Translate) the duchess had been “initially scheduled” to, along with moderator Hadnet Tesfai, appear as part of the closing ceremony and would “personally moderate” the stories of the war-disabled competitors and their families, according to the Invictus Games website.”
However, that information, per the report, “can no longer be found.”
(Given that my German extends as far as being able to order a glass of wine and knowing the chorus to ‘Zum geburtstag viel glück’ I am hoping nothing has been lost in translation.)
So too there is the question over how long the duchess will be in Germany for. Last year saw her spend several days at the Games and attend multiple events, daily. Will the 42-year-old stay for three days again this time around and be just as much of a presence by Aitch’s side?
The last few months have seen burbling speculation about whether something might be maritally rotten in the state of Montecito. In May, the Telegraph reported that “Such is their independence from each other” that according to “the owner of a leading hotel chain in Montecito … they have a room set aside for Harry where he occasionally stays on his own.”
This might constitute a spot of tilting at windmills but it’s worth noting that the couple did not pop up to refute this claim.
Then in July, the US gossip website Radar Onlinewent so far as to report that they were “taking time apart,” which a Sussex source then promptly told Page Six was “not true. It’s literally made up.”
In August Harry and Meghan appeared in a charity video together, calling the recipients of the inaugural round of financial support from the Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund. It would have only been slightly less subtle if they had cropped up wearing matching T-shirts emblazoned with “Still so in love!”
Somehow, just seeing them sitting side-by-side on a bench and doing their usual enthusing on camera was hardly the silver bullet for the marriage woe rumours.
The disappearance – pouufff! – of Meghan’s engagement ring from her left hand also did not go unnoticed, though she has still been wearing her wedding ring made from Welsh gold.
Which is to say, going into the Games this week, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are facing down even higher than usual levels of public and media scrutiny.
Even if there is not a jot of truth to these reports, even if the couple are happier than they have ever been, if they should so much as not beam at one another for a second, then I’m guessing that some segments of the British press will interpret that as them having already called in the divorce laws.
Piling onto the couple even more pressure here is how bloody badly these two need an image reset. The name ‘Sussex’ is now synonymous with truculence and pouting; with anger, with recriminations and with private family details being dissected in public for a paying audience.
The Sussexes might have made very reasonable criticisms of the royal family and the Crown Inc. along the way but the duke and duchess’s repeated carping has ultimately only been to their long-term detriment.
The connotations of the duke and duchess’s brand have long since tipped into the negative and they have single-handedly made themselves a highly loaded prospect from a marketing perspective. Their ongoing, attempted vivisection of The Firm might be personally cathartic and it might have kept Netflix and Penguin Random House sweet, but they are now the world’s most famous figure symbols of family dysfunction.
By all outward measures, corporate America has not exactly greeted them with flung-open arms. In June, the Sussexes parted ways with Spotify after having only made one series for the company in two and a half years. An official statement at the time said that “Meghan is continuing to develop more content for the Archetypes audience on another platform.” No other podcasting app or company has eagerly snapped the duchess up as of yet.
Or consider their speaking gig situation. In 2020 it was announced that they had signed on with the Harry Walker Agency in New York, with reports that they could pick up as much as $1.5 million a speech. Obviously the pandemic soon interceded but even so, there has not been one report of them giving any highly lucrative speeches since then.
By contrast, human Womble and man never winning ‘Father of the Year’ Boris Johnson pocketed nearly $4.9 million in advance speaking engagement fees from the very same agency in the less than six months since he left office.
Compounding the problem of Harry and Meghan and the words that keep coming out of their mouths are their actions – or lack thereof.
The Sussexes have not done or built or achieved anything of any real note since leaving the UK aside from making themselves some money and buying a house they could use to film the next season of the Bachelor in. Think about it: The duke and duchess have talked about themselves, he’s written about himself, she’s talked about herself and they have proven happy to appear at charity events where they will pick up awards lauding their work. That’s not much of a CV.
In summary: They need a win. Badly. And a big one. They need a nice healthy stretch of non-stop glowing press coverage, reminding the world just what an appealing prospect they used to be. They need a tonal shift and to make ‘Sussex’ stand for something exciting, positive and energetic.
Ultimately, they need the Games to mark a turning point, to transform them back into readily marketable, hot commodities. Something that will get the yoghurt companies and the SUV makers of America calling.
Despite what John Lennon wrote, in life you need a lot more than just love.
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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