Uncomfortable truth in new Meghan Markle and Prince Harry videos
The brutal reality of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s life has come to light after videos of the pair were splashed across social media.
COMMENT
A party boy covered in the sticky remnants of slopped Jägerbombs. Dedicated, proud soldier. Therapy proselytiser and Invictus Games founder. Ebullient newlywed. HRH stuck in a perma-funk. Self-emancipated California kvetcher.
The evolution of Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex has, for two decades now, been an always surprising and often bumpy road, and today, prepare yourself for the latest iteration of the 38-year-old – unwitting TikTok star.
On Friday night he, wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex and her mother Doria Ragland joined 70,000 fans in worshipping at the altar of Beyoncé, attending the Los Angeles leg of the superstar’s Renaissance tour.
And this is a fact we know thanks to the nearly immediate outpouring of TikTok videos filmed by fellow attendees, which flowed forth and took over royal Twitter (sorry, royal X) over the weekend.
We got Harry looking sour! Meghan dancing, wiggling away in silver sequins! The couple enjoying a few unusual-of-late touchy-feely moments! Meghan dancing from another angle! Them canoodling to a slow number! The duke and duchess seemingly video calling someone!
And again and again and so forth and shot from so many minutely different angles I feel a bit dizzy.
Based on the available evidence on social media, the concert goers around the Sussexes’ private box spent much of the event with their iPhones not devotedly trained the stage but on the duke and duchess.
What is so fascinating here is not what these videos show but the sheer number of them.
And therein lies the moral of this story – in the US, for Harry and Meghan, it’s not just the trailing, buzzing paparazzi they have to worry about breaching their privacy or recording them but every single one of the 310 million people with smartphones too.
For a spot of the oil’ compare and contrast, cast your mind back to June June when another one of King Charles’ sons decided to bust a groove. Off Aitch’s brother, Prince William, the Prince of Wales and a bunch of his old Etonian chums went, venturing as far afield as Camden for a night out at KOKO nightclub.
The fact that the heir to the throne decided to let his hair (singular) down with a spot of hip-wriggling and cocktail-drinking is only known because the Daily Mail managed to get their hands on four nearly identical shots of the 41-year-old standing and holding a drink. El scandalo!
Likewise the recent outing of Willy’s partner in 40-something party mode Kate, the Princess of Wales when she attended her first music festival, the suitably upper crust 24-hour music festival at Houghton Hall in August. Despite the princess having to make her way through a crowd of 10,000 posh sorts with glowsticks, only a single solitary person took a photo of her and then banged it up on social media.
one of the boys snapped kate middleton @ houghton 🤣 pic.twitter.com/JRQjNywXdf
— Jazz (@JazzWild_) August 15, 2023
What the deluge of Sussexes-at-Beyonce TikToks and social media videos demonstrate is the fundamental difference in the public’s thinking and attitudes in the US versus the UK. What boundaries, what hesitations, what natural inclinations to let them be which might exist across the Pond are unlikely to be found Stateside.
The Sussexes, in the US of A, are viewed as celebrities and will be treated thus while back in warm-beer-Britain there exists a much higher degree of respect for members of the royal family and something of an unspoken understanding they deserve to be able to live their off-duty lives unmolested.
In the two years plus that Harry and Meghan lived together in Britain, from late 2017 until early 2020 when they slipped their palace moorings, I am unable to recall one photo or video shot by a bystander of the couple cropping up.
Likewise, the Waleses. In my last nearly five years of spending an indecent amount of time staying abreast of every single development and twitch emanating from Buckingham Palace and any crumb of new information about the royal family, I have only ever seen a handful of iPhone photos or videos surface of William and Kate and their kids.
There is a photo that would appear to be taken out of a bus window at traffic lights showing the princess and her two elder who are eating ice creams; a couple of shots of William on a soccer pitch with George and a kids’ team; a picture Kate walking through what looks like Chelsea; and one doozy of a video of William yelling at a stranger who tries to record him riding his mountain bike in Norfolk that is quite old now.
That’s it. What is remarkable is how few images have ever gone into circulation of la famille Wales off-duty and taken by the smartphone-wielding masses.
The answer to this, why we are not daily treated to photos of William dragging Charlotte’s hockey kit out of the back of their Audi station wagon at the school gates or Kate dashing through the self-service check-outs with a loaf of Mother’s Pride, is the attitude of Brits to the royal family – a willingness to give them breathing room and personal space; some sort of national attitudinal resistance to bothering them or being pesky; and an underlying, fundamental belief that they deserve to be left alone.
And in the US? Huh! I’d wager we are more likely to see the introduction of compulsory voting before this ever becomes a thing.
Harry and Meghan exist in the US as just two more entrants in the pantheon of big names and A-listers, no different from an Angelina Jolie or her ilk. And, therefore, they are treated as such with delighted, dazzled or agog members of the public having seemingly no concerns or hesitations about whipping out their phones to record the Sussexes in the wild, so to speak.
It’s not just the duke and duchess whom the public has no problem snapping but their kids too, with photos of the duo and son Prince Archie a Fourth of July parade in Wyoming ending up on social media and more recently shots of them with daughter Princess Lilibet at a Fourth of July parade in Montecito.
My point is, in trading the grey skies of the Windsor Home Park for dappled West Coast sunshine, the Sussexes have not just plonked themselves in the very epicentre of the paparazzi universe but in an environment where every time they step out in public, they face having strangers’ phones trained on them.
It might be cold comfort but even if Harry and Meghan have only found middling success as TV makers and recently jettisoned podcasters, they are doing colossally well over on social media, with just one video of the duchess dancing alone having been viewed nearly 16 million times when I last looked. Maybe if all those content-making attempts don’t pan out, we might yet see another version of the duke emerge – arise Hashtag Harry, king of the manfluencers, the Joe Rogan of the jojoba set.
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.
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