Is there any way back for Harry and Meghan?
The Queen has taken direct charge of trying to bring the Sussexes back into the family fold. But the signs are not good.
What on Earth do they do from here?
The crisis at Buckingham Palace is the biggest, well, since the last one, and the public has still not forgotten the swagger of Prince Andrew defending his friendship with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein in a television interview in November 2019.
Andrew, the Queen’s favourite child, is by any measure the least favourite royal, but Meghan, following her outbursts while Prince Philip remains seriously ill in hospital this week, now joins him as the only other royal with a negative public rating, according to the most recent polls.
This week’s self-absorbed two-hour interview of woe on CBS with Oprah Winfrey was always designed to simultaneously elevate their profile in the United States — with seemingly little care about collateral damage and shattering Harry’s family.
Bombshell revelations included Meghan’s mental health torment, that Charles stopped talking to his son during the height of the “Megxit” drama and ingrained racism after a royal family member spoke to Harry about the skin tone of any children he may have with Meghan
Forget unsurvivable, Harry’s tenuous holds to both his father, Charles, and brother William may have been irreparably broken. The impact on the monarchy’s ties throughout the Commonwealth, where many nations’ citizens are overwhelming of black race, are still being assessed.
The Queen — the only royal to have been showered with warmth by the couple in the three hours of taped chat — has taken direct charge of trying to bring them back into the family embrace following the many bombshell revelations in the interview.
However, her short, 61-word Buckingham Palace statement that “recollections vary’’ and that the matter will be “dealt with privately’’ has been challenged almost immediately.
Meghan’s close friend, Janina Gavankar, was sitting with Meghan at their Montecito home watching the broadcast on Sunday.
By Wednesday, just hours after the Buckingham Palace statement of reconciliation, Gavankar went on British television declaring “the family and the staff” at the palace were aware of Meghan’s mental health crisis. She warned, darkly, that there are texts and emails as evidence. In concert, other friends of Meghan bombarded social media in a anti-British, pro-Meghan campaign.
Prince William, meanwhile, hasn’t rushed to speak to Harry. He said on Thursday, four days after the broadcast and after having attended a school visit in East London: “I haven’t spoken to him yet but I will, we are very much not a racist family.’’
Over the coming months it will become clear if Harry’s celebrity-driven American wife, with her very different cultural references, wants to continue with victimhood and score-settling, risking their Duchy of Sussex and HRH titles, and any bonds with their British family.
Yet the palace only has to look to Meghan’s increasingly hostile connections with her father, Thomas, and the celebrity-fuelled wedding list of the 2018 extravaganza with just Meghan’s mother, Doria, in attendance as family for hints as to the future.
One of Meghan’s ex-best friends, Ninaka Priddy, warned four years ago, at the time of the couple’s engagement, that Meghan gets exactly what she wants and Harry has fallen for her play. Said Priddy: “She was always fascinated by the royal family. She wants to be Princess Diana 2.0. She will play her role ably, but my advice to him is to tread cautiously.”
The Queen’s patience will be stretched only so far: she won’t risk severe damage to the monarchy even if that comes at the expense of “much-loved’’ family members.
We learned from the Winfrey interview that Meghan’s truth was eerily Diana-esque. Even sitting down with Winfrey mirrored the Princess of Wales’s explosive Martin Bashir interview back in 1995, and Meghan too, unloaded about a lack of support to the point of neglect from the Royal family and being treated cruelly.
But Diana was the mother of an heir to the throne: Meghan is the wife of the one-time spare, now sixth in line; and it appears that centuries-old traditions of knowing one’s place rankled with Meghan.
Hers was the Little Mermaid fairytale of finding her voice only after breaking free from the imprisonment of an evil institution (and being unfairly compared to Kate Middleton), with her princely saviour husband — who, it must be said, also uncomfortably dolloped pique and bitterness against his own father and brother.
But then, was that the point? Burn enough bridges never to go back? Throw in some vague accusations about racial discrimination from one family member so that the monarchy — which does some very good work in African and Pacific nations — is forever tasked as being some sort of white bigoted organisation?
Unleash a bizarre narrative about Archie being denied his “right’’ to be a prince, and allude this was prejudice because of the colour of his skin?
Whinge about being cut off and having to be self-supporting with an inheritance of tens of millions of dollars from his mother and then gloat about an “authentic life’’ with rescue hens and barefoot black-and-white commemorative photos?
There was all that, and more. Claims of being imprisoned with her passport and keys confiscated, what of Meghan’s 13 foreign trips abroad, including that unforgettable baby shower in New York? Being silenced when she gave heartfelt personally written speeches about women’s rights and orchestrated a cookbook to help Grenfell Tower survivors?
Winfrey artfully shoehorned in two questions about the Sussexes’ foundation, Archewell, but Meghan was too worked up about her gripes of British life that she bottled the chance to look forward rather than back.
It could be that Meghan also overloaded to mainstream America. Some of her claims are misleading or misinterpreted, which then unfairly tarnish the very serious matters, like her inability to get support when feeling suicidal.
Meghan’s father, Thomas, queried why she couldn’t turn to Harry, a salient point given Harry’s long connections to mental health charities. Just two months before the height of this mental health crisis, when five months’ pregnant, Meghan even helped launch a mental health initiative, Every Mind Matters. But the issue runs deeper than a mere practical one of finding a specialist. Harry alluded to an institutional problem with embarrassment about revealing his wife’s condition to other family members.
It’s easily verified that Archie isn’t eligible just yet to be a prince, just like other great-grandchildren of the Queen. So why did Meghan feel slighted that her child should be instantly treated differently being the first mixed-race child, with extra special privileges?
If titles matter — and neither Harry nor Meghan have dared suggest they hand back the Duchy of Sussex, nor their HRH nomenclature — why did they then belittle the centuries-old institution and the royal duties of acknowledging honouring civil work that comes with such privilege?
Having the Sussexes continue to trade on being anointed a duke and duchess feels very odd to many Britons, especially when both ridiculed the genuineness of their presence at royal events. What would have hurt the Queen deeply was their suggestion their smiles were only a facade.
Polls in the UK show the public wants the Sussexes to renounce their titles. The Megxit — the departure of Harry and Meghan from royal duties to a life without royal duties in California — is often compared to an event 85 years ago, also involving an American divorcee, but so grave it changed the course of history. And, like King Edward VIII’s abdication of the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, the focus on royal scandal once again provides a light relief from the tensions of the time: a third gruelling national stay-at-home lockdown, children are only preparing to abandon home schooling for the classroom after four long months of increasingly frazzled parental guidance; and the poor economic outlook of twinning Brexit with a pandemic.
In 1936, author Evelyn Waugh penned in his diary that the royal scandal provided light relief from the tensions of an impending war: “The Simpson crisis has been a great delight to everyone. At Maidie’s nursing home they report a pronounced turn for the better in all adult patients. There can seldom have been an event that has caused so much general delight and so little pain. Reading the papers and even listening to announcements that there was no news on the wireless took up most of the week.”
Across Britain, the latest Harry-and-Meghan tattle has distracted from the coronavirus doom. Yet as absorbed in the cross-Atlantic slanging match as they are, no matter what she said, Kate said, they said, aides said; the polls have shown the public has not materially shifted its opinion about Meghan and Harry since they walked away from royal duties more than 12 months ago.
In a YouGov poll, more than a third of people, many of them Conservative voters who supported the campaign to leave the European Union, and aged over 50 living outside London, sympathised with the Queen and the royal household. That was down only two points compared to last March. Just over one in five, many aged under 24 who identify as Remainers and Labour voters, have sympathy for Harry and Meghan. This is up four points.
Most Britons believe the treatment of Meghan, who was lauded as a breath of fresh air and richly welcomed to the country just four years ago, has not been a race issue, but rather a cultural one.
But in the US, Meghan’s problems have been interpreted very differently. Six in 10 Americans, and a higher ratio of black Americans, believe Meghan’s bi-racial heritage affected how she was treated by the British press.
And that’s the support Meghan wants, as she tries to re-position her and Harry’s future onto a different platform of “storytelling’’.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s resentment and hostility towards the very British institution that gives them their American celebrity legitimacy has raised fresh doubts.