In a March 24 Substack post titled "Are the Windsors Underestimating the Sussex Problem?," Tina Brown suggested that the way to solve the Sussex Problem is to bring them back into the fold of the royal family:
Just how desperate does the House
of Windsor want Harry and Meghan to get? The royals and their advisers don’t
seem to see the iceberg looming from sunny Montecito. Distracted by the Andrew
Mountbatten-Windsor catastrophe, the palace remains in a perplexed haze about
one of the Andrew scandal’s less-discussed lessons: the perils to the monarchy
when peripheral royals hang out with the uber-rich and start to consider
themselves, by comparison, broke.
Not that there is anything about
Harry and Meghan’s cacophony of blown opportunities that resembles the
disgraced Andrew’s cascade of dissolute transgressions or Sarah Ferguson’s
heinous groveling to their pedo pal Jeffrey Epstein. But look in the crystal
ball, people. Bad enough that Spotify bailed on the Sussexes and Netflix failed
to renew their 2020 $100-million deal. Now, the streamer has put a fork in
Meghan’s basted turkey, With Love, Meghan, and cut loose her
domestic-goddess home products spin-off after a mortifying eleven months
(leaving a $10-million pile-up of tea, baking mix, and strawberry jam), the
Sussexes’ revenue streams are starting to dry up. They will soon be heading for
that hinterland of freebie hell that draws them further and further into cheesy
commercial gigs, or worse, toward dubious, transactional acquaintances willing
to underwrite their faux-royal lifestyle and their astronomical security costs.
Their upcoming trip to Australia where Meghan will appear as the up-close star
attraction at a paid “girls weekend,” hosted by the podcast Her Best
Life in the ballroom of the InterContinental Hotel at Sydney’s Coogee
Beach, has the whiff of Fergie’s post-divorce money-making schemes. (Remember
the rogue redhead’s early aughts contract with Wedgwood to flog fancy table
settings under the fluorescent lights of mid-market American shopping malls?)
Potential reputational hazards to
the Sussexes lurk in the dreaded moral pitfall of wanting to fly private. On
their 2024 DIY royal tour of Nigeria to promote Harry’s Invictus Games,
Meghan’s refusal to fly by military transport meant the couple availed themselves
of a small plane supplied by the Nigerian big shot Allen Onyema. Without palace
advisers to brief them, Harry and Meghan seemed unaware that Onyema was wanted
in the U.S. on charges of money laundering. Sounds like just the kind of dodgy
dude Prince Andrew would have invited to a “straightforward shooting weekend.”
This piquant revelation comes from
the British investigative journalist Tom Bower’s latest biographical
hit-job, Betrayal: Power, Deceit and the Fight for the Future of the
Royal Family, a 400-page forced march through the Sussexes’
post-Megxit fuckups. It’s what you would expect from Bower, a dour
scandal detective, whose more than 25 previous tomes are a bomb site of
reputations, from Robert Maxwell’s to David Beckham’s. He’s always been good at
turning up unforgettably damning details, like the one from Rebel
Prince, his 2018 biography of Prince Charles, which dropped that
amongst a convoy of personal effects the prince brought to his friends’ country
houses was his bespoke lavatory seat, a tidbit that may fall in the category of
“too good to check.” (I am told that, as recently as two years ago, in a
private discussion about press malfeasance, the king was still exasperated by
“that damned lavatory seat nonsense.”)
A new Bower news bomb is always
something of a publishing event in the UK. The best nuggets in Betrayal are
Meghan’s doomed ongoing efforts to project authenticity. In one Instagram
promotion of the “love language” of her jam, the duchess posted an image of her
daughter Lilibet’s hand “nearing a bubbling pot in her own kitchen that
supposedly contained her homemade spread. ‘Beautiful,’ says her daughter,
although As Ever jam was apparently manufactured 2,000 miles
away in Illinois.” For Meghan’s much-covered 2021 visit to a Harlem school to
read the students her platitudinous picture book The Bench, her
press aide arranged to have the classroom walls painted and the lighting
improved to make it look “more appealing.” Meghan is portrayed as a deluded
diva with an infallible belief in her own star-powered, misunderstood
specialness.
Bower’s Harry is a dazed,
distraught figure who stumbles around in a state of explosive chagrin. He is
outraged when Sophie Chandauka, the assertive chair of Sentebale, the Lesotho
charity started by a teenage Harry, presents him with a “brand audit” in 2024,
informing him that fifty organizations and donors believe he is now toxic to
Sentebale’s fundraising efforts. “People don’t want to be associated with your
Netflix shows, and especially not with Meghan,” she told him with a brutal
candor that must have been a first for the grandson of the queen. Harry was
stunned. Johnny Depp, he replied wonderingly, still attracts a lot of money,
despite the courtroom battles with his ex Amber Heard. Harry could not accept
that his own distraction, and the blowback of his scorched-earth memoir Spare played
a role in the implosion of Sentebale, despite his personal injection of $1.5
million. Ms. Chandauka is usually depicted in the tabs as a shrill saboteur who
weaponized her race and gender to drive Harry out. Here, she comes across as a
pragmatic businesswoman, vexed by the charity’s financial hemorrhaging and
determined to reposition Sentebale for potential donors “who don’t want your
victimhood. It can’t be Africans with a begging bowl.”
Juicy stuff, if true. The Sussexes
have blasted the book as “deranged conspiracy.” Missing from Bower’s litany of
failures is any empathy for the larger quandary of Harry and Meghan’s
predicament, which haunts, in varying degrees, all the “minor” royals, expected
to dutifully encircle the crown. The Windsor B-list is accustomed to a luxury
and a deference that everyone resents, but without the wherewithal or expertise
to pursue successful lives beyond the palace. If they try to do so, they are
accused of exploiting their royal status. But what else do they have to sell?
As one veteran courtier put it to me when I was writing The Palace
Papers, Harry “is a deeply caring person who wants to make a positive
difference. What he doesn’t understand is that the reason he’s getting to do
that is because he’s a royal prince.” If Meghan fantasizes that she’s a global
lifestyle guru with the following of a millennial Martha Stewart, it’s at least
in part because of the sheer size of the Netflix and Spotify checks that, once
upon a time, confirmed it.
I am told that the heir to the
throne, Prince William, is preoccupied with the built-in risk of
primogeniture’s cruelty. He is determined that his second- and third-born
children, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, are well-prepared and
well-financed for independent lives and will not fall into the same cycle of
thwarted freedom. But what about his traitorous brother? The rupture with Harry
is bigger than a sibling feud. Before the Sussexes crash and burn, the House of
Windsor needs to put aside schadenfreude and grip the problem. Give Harry and
Meghan a limited international role. Cough up a turnkey pied-à-terre for them
in Buckingham Palace, where none of the rest of the family wants to live
anyway. Pay their damn UK security bill. (It won’t be a good look if Harry, a
veteran of two tours of Afghanistan, is taken out by a nutjob). In return, the
Sussexes must put a sock in it.
As for the press’s obsession with
brotherly reconciliation and forgiveness, forget it. For 70 years, Queen
Elizabeth II spent her reign smiling tightly at people she couldn’t stand.
