‘What happened?’: The single decision behind Prince Harry’s spectacular five-year downfall
The Duke of Sussex is preparing to turn 40 – but there was one fork in the road where everything could have gone differently.
On September 15, the bells of Westminster Abbey won’t ring out. The Clarence House Ballroom will remain shuttered. The Apsrey gift wrapping department won’t be inundated with last-minute cufflink jobs. And a world, a life, an ocean and continent away, Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex will turn 40 and wonder what the hell tapioca flour is as he stares down at his birthday cake.
Yes, it’s happening. The former boy prince, the cheeky lad, the impossibly small figure who walked behind his mother’s casket through the eerily silent streets of London, is about to hit this milestone birthday and if there is ever a moment for quiet, considered contemplation it is this.
What the actual f**k happened?
Harry celebrated his 30th birthday with a black tie knees up, with his father warmly having given over Clarence House for the bash, even sending along cases of champagne and claret to help get the party going. Next, the duke rang in his 35th, finally having become a husband and a father as he had always longingly talked about, and about to embark on what would be a highly successful overseas royal tour.
And yet only five short years later, King Charles sounds like he frantically shakes his head every time his footman tells him his younger son is on the phone. His brother Prince William reportedly “absolutely f**king hates him”. Nearly two-thirds of Brits don’t like him, according to polling done last week. And Harry has to give the Home Office 28 days notice if he wants an armed security detail to pick him up from the Heathrow duty free counter when he jets back to his homeland.
So I’ll repeat – how, in less time than it takes to use up a family-sized jar of Vegemite, has Harry plunged from the highest of heights of adoration and renown and being the most popular member of the House of Windsor (after the corgis) to a point where he has become a highly polarising figure who can’t keep a podcast deal afloat and reportedly attracted some boos when attending a London church?
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly the one thing that got the Duke of Sussex to where he is today.
Depending on whose narrative you buy, his life is now either heavy on the moping and the disconsolately waiting for his UK friends and Netflix to call – or it’s one where he is filled to the brim with burbling joy at all his broad horizons and exciting professional options like learning how to make rom-coms and jar jams.
But in all of the inevitable forensic accounting and hindsight mulling of the Duke of Sussex’s life this week, if we want to understand the how and the why of how we got here, we have options. Oh, do we have options.
Options like Harry’s shocking naivety that an institution that has borne up under direct bombing from the Nazis, fought more than 100 wars (not including those pesky colonial rebellions) and that one time Princess Margaret really got into reggae, would willingly and pliantly bend and adapt to his wants.
Or his misguided belief that he could set down terms, via the stunningly vulgar medium of social media, and that the late Queen would merrily acquiesce.
Or that telling the world about dog bowls and icy todgers and having to bravely make do with the smaller bedroom inside a historic castle would unleash a wave of global sympathy and prompt the King and William to turn up in Montecito to personally apologise.
When Harry turned 35 in 2019, he seemed to have everything he had always wanted – a stunner of a wife in Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. His very own family in the recently arrived, squidgy bundle of Prince Archie. A five-bedroom renovated-to-the-hilt freebie home in Windsor Home Park with a Carrara marble splashback. (Well, I’m guessing about the last one).
Still though, there were plenty of signs that things for Harry and Meghan were careening towards some sort of cliff edge.
After an initial absolute love-in with the British public and a lot of the media (aside from the racist reporting and think pieces that were low on actual thinking and high on bigotry), things had taken a turn for the messy.
The most consequential, teary bridesmaid dress fitting in royal history. The baby shower that Marie Antoinette might have considered a bit OTT. The fiction that they had bought a $9000 copper bath. The squirrely approach to the birth of Prince Archie. The duchess going to Wimbledon and watching in a sea of empty seats. The duke launching a green travel initiative after having taken four private jet flights in 11 days, thus giving cause for journos to start Googling synonyms for “hypocrite”. Both of them doing TV interviews hinting at their personal struggles against the backdrop of sub-Saharan Africa, where nearly half a billion people live on $2.80 a day.
The bit in all of this that no one knew at the time was the severity of the Sussexes’ private anguish and that Meghan’s mental health was in a terrifyingly bad way. As she later told Oprah Winfrey, “I just didn’t want to be alive any more”.
We can all agree that something had to give, however, when faced with a stonewalling and slow-moving royal edifice, the Sussexes took matters into their own hands on January 8, 2020 and announced they had had enough. They would have a couple of those nice part-time royal roles please, with a side order of juicy paying jobs.
The date where Megxit maybe could have been headed off was January 13 when Harry, William, Charles and Her late Majesty gathered at Sandringham for what sounds like one hell of a tough summit.
It was obviously not to be. The Sussexes had the option of two doors, one that led back through the Palace gift shop into the coal-powered engine room of Crown Inc and the other out into the cold light of freedom. (Though one man’s hard-won liberty can sometimes look a hell of a lot like exile).
Five years on, from the vantage point of 2024, I think the issue lies not so much in what Harry wanted – a new and a different way of being royal – but the ham-fisted, bull-in-a-china-shop way he went about trying to achieve that.
If, in 2019 or early 2020, he and Meghan had simply said to the world, “We’re struggling, we need a break. We are going to move to the Yorkshire dales and live mostly quiet, private lives save for re-emerging from the odd event like Trooping the Colour, International Women’s Day and the Invictus Games”, you know what? I reckon the UK and the world would have not only wholly supported them, but cheered them for putting their mental health above a dusty crown that Harry was never going to get to wear.
Instead, well, everything happened. A book. TV. Oprah. Funerals. More TV. A coronation.
Eight and nine-figure deals were done and lost. A paparazzi chase and court cases and more court cases and breakfast TV interviews. Old friends who no longer speak to him and a family who don’t seem to want a bar of him.
His refusal to adhere to Elizabeth I’s motto, “video et taceo” (“I see and remain silent”) has come at a very high price, but maybe it has been worth it. Who needs bell ringing and Highgrove champagne if no one expects you to spend a Tuesday afternoon opening a new dermatitis ward or the Warwickshire show?
And who needs a birthday cake made with actual dairy and gluten either?
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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