Reason Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are suddenly everywhere
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are in desperate need of a reset and they appear to have found the perfect way to do it.
COMMENT
You’ve probably seen the evidence for yourself already – the sad truth, the bleak reality.
Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex can’t dance.
He cannot cut up a rug, shake his groove thing or get down without looking like a middle-aged plumbing supplies middle-manager on his third Bacardi and coke, a fact we now know all too well after he joined his wife Meghan the Duchess of Sussex and her mother Doria Ragland for the Los Angeles’ leg of Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour. (Clearly he decided to leave re-alphabetising his supplement shelf and re-reading Oh The Places You’ll Go for another day.)
Harry’s shimmy-a-thon is something that we could potentially put down to husbandly love or it being a possible birthday treat for Ragland, the only close family member that either he or Meghan are not estranged from.
We could have seen it as a one-off, except that, come Sunday in Los Angeles, would you know, Harry was out and about again, merrily in full court view of the cameras when he turned up for the game between Inter Miami took on Los Angeles FC.
Huh.
How come, after months if not years of the duke only making brief forays out into the wide public, such he and his cousin Princess Eugenie turning out for the Super Bowl in 2022 and he and Megan going to a basketball game in April, have we now gotten two very high profile ducal outings in the space of less than 48 hours?
And how come we have, while not a single photo emerged of Meghan attending Taylor Swift’s Eras tour last month this Beyoncé outing was filmed and photographed by the public more energetically and from more angles than a Presidential meet and greet?
Right now, it would seem like the Sussexes are cheerily and readily serving up a decidedly peppy and upbeat face to the world.
The only two explanations I can come up with: Maybe they are just high on life and have finally found a good babysitter.
Or maybe this sudden return to the spotlight has something to do with the coming events of this week which will see the Team Sussex ratchet things up, jiggle all the knobs to 11 and go into overdrive as they find their careers and brand at a serious crossroads.
Prepare yourself for a lot more of the duke because the former working HRH is about to return to the fore with gusto.
First, Harry and Harry alone will fly to the UK for the WellChild Awards on Thursday (UK time), giving a speech only hours before the first anniversary of his Gan-Gan’s death, presenting him with the perfect opportunity to pip the royal family to the post of marking the occasion.
Then, on Saturday, the duke will be in Dusseldörf for this year’s Invictus Games, the massively successful sporting competition for wounded, injured and sick service people, which he founded nearly a decade ago using the royal family’s stationery cupboard pens, contacts and unmatchable convening power.
For Harry, who will celebrate his 39th birthday later during the Games, this week is it – his big shiny chance to hit reset after a year that has seen him enjoy both incredible commercial success (Spare is the fastest selling nonfiction book of all time) while simultaneously seeing much of the world sour on him and his patent brand of vituperatively targeting his family.
In the space of only a month, from early December last year until early January this year when Spare was released, Harry’s approval rating in the US plummeted 45 points while Megan’s fell 36 points, per polling from Redfield & Wilson and Newsweek.
While the couple’s numbers have improved since then, such a calamitous toppling off the approval cliff really says a hell of a lot about how fast and furiously attitudes shifted towards them.
If things are not looking rosy Stateside then in Blighty they are positively grim. New research out this week from YouGov found that nearly two thirds of Brits (63 per cent) now have a negative view of Harry. (And Meghan? 68 per cent of respondents have an unfavourable opinion of her.)
It would be easy to dismiss the public’s feelings towards the duke and duchess as being beneath their concern except for the fact that their entire financial future rests on the masses being invested and interested enough in them to subscribe, stream and buy what they have to sell.
Last week saw the release of Aitch’s first solo project, Heart of Invictus, a tear-jerking five-parter that, while incredibly moving, is also only slightly longer than the Anna Karenina.
While the critical reception, at least according to those select outlets which bothered to review it anyway, have been largely positive, the public has hardly rallied around the project. Again, those naughty numbers tell a bleak story. In the two days after Spare’s release, the tell-all garnered 970,000 mentions on X – formerly known as Twitter.
However, in the same period of time last week, Heart had only hit just over 50,000 mentions, according to audience intelligence platform Pulsar and Newsweek.
Or to put it another way, Heart has created a bit more five per cent of the social media hubbub of Spare.
According to Flix Patrol (official Netflix numbers are not out yet), Heart has failed to register in the top 100 most-watched TV shows on the platform right now.
What this means is that of the three projects that Archewell has had a hand in – Harry & Meghan, Lead to Live and now Heart of Invictus – two have failed to land, audience-wise.
Meanwhile, based on what is publicly known, the big Sussex story cupboard of exciting new projects hardly looks full-to-bursting.
For months there have been reports suggesting that Harry might go back to his beloved Africa and make some sort of documentary for Netflix. Yet over the weekend the Telegraph reported of this project, “proposals are in their early stages.”
“Early stages”? What the dickens are they doing all day?
The urge to yell “pull your finger out” strikes me here.
Then there is Meet Me At The Lake, the best-selling novel that the streaming giant reportedly spent $4.6 million buying the rights for the Sussexes so that they could have a go at wearing their scripted content producer hats. However, with Hollywood as currently having ground to a standstill due to strike action, this all seems a very long way off.
So on the career front, they have failed to prove themselves out-and-out successes and instead look dangerously like bits of fizzers as Hollywood power players, so far anyway.
Their reputations are hardly doing much better.
The events of the last 12 months, thanks to Harry & Meghan, Spare and the proliferation of Sussex interviews we have weathered, have only cemented the image of them as two people who seem content to forever paddle about in the shallows of self-pity, interspersed with stints slagging off his family and the occasional twinge of his and hers matching Messiah complexes.
Post-Megxit, the duke and duchess have not emerged as powerful, positive and energising leaders but as complainers par excellence, totally blinkered to the fact that two wealthy and healthy people being paid to lob hand grenades at the monarchy hardly makes them deeply sympathetic or inspiring figures.
The Invictus Games this week could change all that; could change the channel and reset the temperature here.
Watching Heart you are reminded of how great Harry can be when he forgets he was given a smaller Balmoral bedroom than big brother Prince William. The Harry you see in his doco is a man driven to help and who cares as hard as a person can.
This is the Harry that the duke and duchess need to remind the world exists, to supplant plonker Harry and his puckery filial whingeing with the image of Harry as a compassionate, devoted and selfless doer.
Ditto Meghan, whose podcast didn’t get a second season and whose big shiny entrepreneurial website seems to remain forever in the offing. The 42-year-old might wear the hell out of a pair of white jeans and have style up the wahzoo but for some reason her various causes du jour – paid parental leave, the dismantling of Roe vs Wade – seem to have fallen off the radar.
Invictus could, especially for Harry, change all of this. It could constitute a fresh start after a few years of attempted fresh starts.
It’s crunch time for the Sussexes and based on what we are seeing, it looks like the duke and duchess are gearing up to give it their all. It’s fightback time, one sorry ducal hip-shaking go at dancing to Run the World (Girls) at a time.
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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