How to stage a non-royal tour — Harry and Meghan’s complete guide
The Sussexes have just completed a trip to Nigeria with all the elements of a royal tour – except it wasn’t. Just wait for the Netflix edit.
The way to understand the latest episode of the H&M show is to cast your mind back to 2018. This was when everything in the garden was rosy and royal. The newly wed Sussexes were on tour in Australia and cheering crowds turned out to greet them. So far, so good, and Harry dutifully worked them. Meghan, however, had a different take on the situation. According to Valentine Low, in his book Courtiers, she said, “I can’t believe I’m not getting paid for this.” It’s taken six years, an awful lot of missteps and a batch of strawberry jam. But in Nigeria over the weekend, might they finally have done it? Have they become fully fledged money-making rent-a-royals?
Nigeria is not, on the face of it, an auspicious place to stage a non-royal royal tour. Eighty-seven million Nigerians live below the poverty line and it’s so dangerous that both the Foreign Office and the US State Department advise against all travel to parts of the country. It’s a punchy destination for a couple who have complained to the High Court that they don’t feel safe in England, but needs must. They were invited by the chief of defence staff, and now that Meghan’s jam is making its own way in the world, off they went.
The trip was ostensibly about the Invictus Games, which Nigeria hopes one day to host. Meghan also found out a few years ago, through a genealogy test, that she is 43 per cent Nigerian. But there’s a reason why the tight schedule included a polo match and it’s not because wounded veterans are queuing up to play it. It’s because, as ever, it’s less about the cause and more about H&M. Their latest project with Netflix is a documentary about the world of polo and the people who play it. Cue a chukka or two on the Invictus tour, to the deafening soundtrack of two birds being killed with one stone.
True, it would take a heart of stone not to look at some of the coverage and laugh. The golden chairs marked “duke” and “duchess”, the dinner where images of the couple were projected onto the walls. But just you wait until the tour has been slickly edited at Netflix HQ to look like the real royal deal. Polo? Who cares about polo? You really think Netflix has commissioned a long documentary about a sport few people play and nobody cares about? It’ll bear as much resemblance to the world of polo as a Polo mint. It will effectively be the follow-up to the fly-on-the-wall documentary Harry & Meghan, but with more horses. And check out the photos of Meghan getting a woman to move away from Harry at a photo opp of them at a polo match in Florida last month. What the hapless woman was trying to do we may never know. Her job, perhaps. Whoever she was, she was surplus to requirements and ruining their close-up.
If the antics in Nigeria prove anything, it’s that if it walks like a royal tour and talks like a royal tour most people will think it’s a royal tour. The British high commissioner can say all he likes that the couple were visiting in “a private capacity”. For most of the world, that’s semantics. Drill down into the usual checklist for royal tours and a royal tour is exactly what they’ve ordered: do something cultural, wear local clothing, join in with an activity (preferably non-sweaty), glam up for a state dinner, act as if you’re having a lovely time and hug small children. They’ve cut out all the boring bits, starting with duty. Church services, precedence, troop inspections, opening new hospital wings in the rain, anything where you have no control over the lighting or might not be in the front row, or where someone else might ruin your close-up. The strategy for their team may as well be to ask what the Princess Royal would do, then do the opposite.
They affect not to care what anyone in the UK thinks but don’t entirely succeed because they recently hired a London-based PR man, Charlie Gipson. He’s evidently hit the ground running and was seen loitering in the background over the weekend as H&M swept into an engagement where presumably the lighting was just right. Their trusted photographer Misan Harriman was also part of the roadshow as, keen as the couple are on a free press, it doesn’t extend to coverage of them. They’ve limited the possibility of photographs they don’t want by removing all photographers not on their payroll and only visiting places where that can be rigidly enforced.
It’s all barmy because this sort of royal tour is exactly what they didn’t want to do. Alas, jam and execrable podcasts evidently don’t pay the bills. Harry could be forgiven for yearning for the days when there were no bills to pay and if there were, Daddy paid them. At a solo engagement for a children’s charity in London last week, he said that the more opportunity he had to do those kinds of events, the more people would know about the charity’s “incredible” work. Does he understand the irony? Does he realise that’s as good a summary as any of the work done by the royal family, from which he fled?
Royalty during the last reign was far more about what you did and less about what you looked like. The rise of celebrity culture and the internet changed that, and H&M are milking it. There’s no point feeling aggrieved on behalf of Queen Elizabeth, to whom they caused so much distress in her final years. There’s no point feeling affronted by their relentless attempts to monetise the few moments they actually spent as working royals, all of which they later said they hated. Rejoice instead that if they can make this rent-a-royal thing work, we might be spared the endless moaning, and the real royals might be left in peace to get on with shaking hands and wearing tiaras.
If everyone in Nigeria thinks H&M are great, all I can say is, well, so did we once. Monetising royalty is, as Elizabeth pointed out, incompatible with a life of service. Service Montecito-style involves holding out the card reader for payment. I doubt the gratuity is included.
The Times