If Harry and Meghan keep bashing the institution, the public will tune out
On the eve of the couple’s arrival in the UK, royal insiders reveal their exasperation at yet more bombshell claims from the duchess.
When Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex sealed the deal with Queen Elizabeth for liberation from royal life in January 2020, their statement pledged that “everything they do will continue to uphold the values of Her Majesty”.
How distant that promise seems now, as the Balmoral breakfast table heaves with headlines featuring slings and arrows so frequently fired by the Sussexes at the monarch’s family and the institution she leads. But the Queen, 96, has been keeping calm and carrying on during her annual Scottish break. “She has had a busy summer with lots of visitors and has been out picnicking,” says a Palace source.
While the Queen continues to emphasise that the Sussexes remain “much-loved” family members, they are not expected to see her when they return to the UK this week. They will attend a youth summit in Manchester tomorrow and the WellChild awards in London on Thursday, with a visit to Germany on Tuesday for an Invictus Games event.
Under the terms of the “Sandringham summit”, when the Queen, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry negotiated the departure, they agreed to step back from royal duties, Harry relinquished his military appointments and the couple’s public funding stopped, giving them financial freedom to strike multimillion-pound deals on the other side of the Atlantic. Prince Charles continued privately to support the couple financially while they found their feet in the US, but they have lived independently for more than two years.
The Queen signed off the 2020 deal - less than two years after the couple married in Windsor - with what now sounds like wishful thinking: “It is my whole family’s hope that today’s agreement allows them to start building a happy and peaceful new life.”
Whether the Sussexes are happy and at peace is hard to tell, but ever since there has been precious little calm for the monarch. In the 2 and a half years since they left for America, the couple have accused the royal family of racism, disregard for their mental health, miserliness and bad parenting, with the Queen and Charles passing down “genetic pain and suffering”, according to Harry.
New jibes landed last week in Meghan’s interview with the American magazine The Cut, when she suggested she and her husband were forced into exile because “by existing, we were upsetting the dynamic of the hierarchy”. She added that Harry had “lost” his father in the process. Sources close to Meghan later claimed her comments were misunderstood, and she was referring to her estrangement from her own father.
None of which is what the royal family had in mind when the Sussexes vowed to uphold the Queen’s values. A royal source says: “It is hard to see how what they’re doing would equate to the values of the Queen, who has never encouraged people to discuss deeply personal family relationships in public.”
The monarch soldiers on, but as a source who knows her well says: “She doesn’t want to be on tenterhooks all the time, waiting to see what the next nuclear bomb will be - that will take its toll.”
Charles’s friends say the jibes continue to be “painful” for him, particularly after spending time with Harry, Meghan and his grandchildren, Archie and Lilibet, during the Platinum Jubilee in June, which Charles saw as a “minor act of reparation”, according to one friend, after the Sussexes’ explosive interview with Oprah Winfrey last year. The friend says: “For two years, there has been a steady stream of really challenging things said about a man who cannot [publicly] defend himself to a couple he obviously loves and misses. That is incredibly difficult on a personal level. He is completely bewildered by why his son, whom he loves deeply, feels this is the way to go about managing family relationships.”
Meghan also revealed she and Harry are working on a “historical documentary” to “share” their “love story” as part of their huge deal with Netflix, which could give the streaming giant unfettered access to the privacy-obsessed couple. “I can say anything,” the duchess reaffirmed to Allison Davis, who interviewed her for The Cut, adding: “I’ve never had to sign anything that restricts me from talking.” This is a different take from her interview with Winfrey last year, when Meghan said she was “silenced” by the royal family. She also let slip last week that she rediscovered her “journal” in Frogmore Cottage in June. Meghan is not known to be writing a book, but her royal diaries could yet see the light of day.
A royal source, who was involved in the negotiations around the couple’s departure, said: “Everyone hoped they would go off to be financially independent, pursue their philanthropic endeavours and be happy - and that in going their own way, they might no longer feel the need to rail against the system as much as they still do. But then the star power of them requires an association with the royal family, and the fuel on those flames is the family discord.”
There is no appetite from the Queen to remove the titles conferred on the couple when they married. She has already forbidden them from using their HRH styling and the word “royal” in commercial ventures. As a well-placed source says of the family’s thinking: “You can never un-royal a royal. You can take the HRH away, you could take the ‘duke’ away, but Harry is still the son of the future king.”
Instead, the Palace’s strategy is not to comment on every outburst, but to hammer home the distinction between official working members of the royal family, who represent the Queen, and the Sussexes as “private citizens”. In turn, the Sussexes continue to remind the world of their royal status. In her recent interview, Meghan mused: “It’s important to be thoughtful about it because even with the Oprah interview, I was conscious of the fact that there are little girls that I meet and they’re just like, ‘Oh my God, it’s a real-life princess.” As a source who knows the Sussexes says, they “need to remind everyone they’re royal” because it carries a “higher status”.
Some royal insiders were surprised that the Netflix program is in the pipeline. “I don’t think anybody thought they’d do an access show because of how strongly they spoke about media intrusion in their lives - it seemed contrary to their desires,” says one.
There are some signs the global star power of the Sussexes is fading. A front page of the New York Post last week carried an image of a pouting Meghan on a mock-up of a child’s beauty pageant outfit, with the headline: “Toddler and Tiara.” Alyssa Rosenberg, the Washington Post columnist, wrote: “The only way for the Sussexes to build a truly new life, and have a wider impact on the causes they care about, is to stop making themselves the centre of the story.”
That seems unlikely, given that Meghan’s new podcast, in which she reflects on her struggles alongside celebrity guests, still has ten episodes to run. Harry’s “intimate and heartfelt” memoir, whose mystery publication date is hanging over the royal family like a rain cloud, is expected soon.
Shortly after their wedding in 2018, the Sussexes were rapturously received in Australia, with Meghan announcing her first pregnancy there. But in the aftermath of her interview last week, Natalie Barr, an Australian television presenter, described Meghan as a “total tosser” on air. The plummeting of royal stock down under will ring alarm bells for the monarchy. There are fears the Sussexes’ antics will fuel the growing republican movement in Australia, which is expected to reappraise its status as a realm when Charles becomes King.
Meghan also said that a South African cast member of The Lion King told her at the 2019 London premiere: “When you married into this family, we rejoiced in the streets the same we did when Mandela was freed from prison.” The anecdote “surprised” Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Zwelivelile Mandela, who said of his grandfather’s 27 years in jail campaigning against apartheid: “It can never be compared to the celebration of someone’s wedding [to a] white prince.”
It “baffled” the actor John Kani, who said: “I have never met Meghan Markle. This seems like something of a faux pas by her. I am the only South African member of the cast and I did not attend the premiere in London. It just may be a misremembering on her side.” The South African composer Lebo M, who briefly spoke to the couple at the premiere, said he did not recall mentioning Mandela.
Meghan’s comments sent eyebrows skywards in royal circles. “The whole thing is just staggering,” said a royal source. “Nelson Mandela? Who’s next, Gandhi? There are simply no words for the delusion and tragedy of it all.”
The Duke of Cambridge is now acclimatised to the Sussexes’ gripes, which no longer raise his hackles as much as they once did. “He’s not really spending much time thinking about it,” says a source close to Prince William, though friends concede he does not relish the prospect of Harry’s book. The Cambridges are now happily ensconced in Adelaide Cottage, their new Windsor home, a stone’s throw from Harry and Meghan, who will stay at Frogmore Cottage this week. The couples are not expected to meet.
Courtiers are bemused by the Sussexes’ determination to rage against the past. As Davis observed of Meghan in her article: “She has taken a hardship and turned it into content.” A source who knows the Sussexes questions why Meghan “is constantly looking back at how awful it was to briefly be a royal. What does success look like, is it a number in the bank? Is it that they’ve killed off the monarchy?” Another Palace source says: “Ultimately they are bashing the institution that has put them in the position they’re in, the longevity of that strategy is not sustainable.”
But the royal households expect the strategy to continue. “There is a weariness in the institution where this is priced in,” says a well-placed source. “It knows it has to move forwards and there will be voices off stage left continuing to chastise the institution and the individuals in it. But the Queen has always been good at taking the long view, she will have taken the view that it will take a few more years of this before things settle. Set against a 1,000-year-old history of an institution that has seen its fair share of family discord, this a familiar pattern. The more they attack the institution, the more people deduce they’re attacking the Queen and the public are turned off by that.”
The Times
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