More about Harry and Meghan in Australia

According to Wikipedia: "Tessa Dunlop is a Scottish historian and broadcaster. She has written several history books based on oral histosry, and presented history programmes for the BBC, Channel 4, Discovery Channel, UKTV History and the History Channel."  

This is her take on Harry and Meghan's place in the world, published in The Independant on Friday, before Meghan's appearance at the Her Best Life retreat in Sydney.  

Meghan says she was ‘most trolled person’ in the world

It was all going so well. A curated couple in matching beige wowing a carefully selected crowd in Australia with a heady mix of celebrity and charity. “Just call me Meg,” insisted the duchess on the first day. Apparently, the penny had dropped, Meghan finally understood that on a not “royal” tour she can’t stand on ceremony. Sick children smiled, and dear Haz gladhanded at a veteran’s museum with abundant charisma. Hurrah, the House of Montecito are here! Day one of their Australian tour was a surprising slam-dunk for brand Sussex.

So where did it all go wrong?

Yesterday the headlines curdled, the temperature rose, and by all accounts, it is not just Brits who are furious. How dare the Sussexes inflict a “faux royal tour” on Australians already unable to decide which side of the monarchy line they sit. For Harry and Meghan to re-enter such a fragile ecosystem was always going to be risky. Having enjoyed a full-fat royal visit to Australia in 2018 to universal acclaim, the stakes were high.

If these days the couple are no longer part of the monarchy, then what are they exactly? Cosplaying royals? Profiteering celebrities? Do they bat for Team America? Or just Team Sussex? How to square the circle of a touring prince who is not a working prince but who is still a prince? It is a challenging question, and one Harry proved unable to answer.

Cue the Duke at a lectern intoning to a room of Australian business leaders: “After my mum died just before my 13th birthday – I was like ‘I don’t want this job. I don’t want this role – wherever this is headed, I don’t like it.” Here, you are forgiven for asking, “if you didn’t like the job Harry, why have you replicated that same job on a repeat tour in a constitutional monarchy?”

Miles from home, in a challenging landscape, blinded by his own privilege, and never a great thinker, the giant contradiction at the heart of the Duke’s angry thesis roared to the surface once more, breaking the hearts of monarchists and serving red meat to republicans. If only Harry and Meghan could acknowledge that their lives are gilded in exorbitant privilege thanks to their intersection with monarchy, a hangover which they wear daily: their titles, their inherited jewels, their well-documented royal back story. Instead, they lament their former difficulties while replicating much of their former lives. Argh! Cue more of the very same trolls that Meghan claims she ran away from when she left the House of Windsor. Make it make sense!

For those of us who long to move the script forward, this is more than cognitive dissonance; it is a reminder of why the Sussexes have ultimately set back the cause of much-needed reform in the institution of monarchy. Their truth-to-power departure in 2020 was a potential moment of reckoning for the House of Windsor. A chance to open up the doors and let in the light, to root out cronyism, encourage financial transparency and lean into a new democratic age.

Harry is an uncomfortable reminder of why our working royals are tightly scripted, who say it best when they say virtually nothing at all

But six years on, the self-involved, repetitive woes of Harry have failed to move the dial towards progress. There is no fresh new narrative, or alternative model. Harry continues to operate in the royal mould; he is still platformed thanks to his extraordinary start in life, as he sashays around the world, resting on his blue-blooded laurels. The only difference is that nowadays the Duke is paid with private money, not through the public purse. He has to sing for his supper, with tickets to hear Harry talk about his dislike of royal life selling for a cool AU$997.

“So what?” you may well think. Better to be remunerated openly and honestly for a speaking gig than to acquire money through extraneous, illicit means. The problem is that Harry, operating off piste with nothing new to say bar a few more parenting observations, tells us that when let out of their royal cage, princes are just a self-involved version of ordinary.

His series of banal utterances merely serves to further diminish the once transcendent glamour of monarchy. In short, Harry is an uncomfortable reminder of why our working royals are tightly scripted, who say it best when they say virtually nothing at all. The King’s much-anticipated speech to Congress in a couple of weeks is a case in point – brains in the Foreign Office are no doubt already fine-tuning their platitudes. In contrast, the Duke, with an unscripted surround-sound of his own making, doesn’t stand a chance.

The upshot isn’t only a downgrade for the Sussexes, it tarnishes the entire royal edifice. Once upon a time in 2018, the couple were a smash hit in Australia – a unifying national glue that spread the love from one continent to another – we basked in the reflective glory of our monarchy and Australia’s monarchy too! How times have changed.

These days, Harry and Meghan are working for themselves, Britain is out of the picture, and Australia in a sulk. The cost of security has proved divisive (a petition against that burden numbers tens of thousands of signatures). The country struggles to acknowledge the fantastic free advert the pair have bestowed upon their great nation – sunlit Australia is all over the international news. No matter, nowadays, split in two, the royal family no longer encourages international unity, but rather feeds echo chambers and angry silos looking for something to rage against.

If Harry and Meghan stand for a nepo-baby new age opulence, our old school working royals have been pushed further into a once green and pleasant land now occupied by flag-waving, rigid little Englanders who won’t tolerate change or criticism of any kind. Next stop America for a state visit with a warlord leader of the once free world – the optics that come with a president who professes to love the King, but loathes the Pope will prove uncomfortable to say the least.

Gone are the days when the monarchy offered an alternative to a brace of strongmen operating with impunity. Instead, the option is a them-or-us version of royalty. And the posturing of the Sussexes this week has further diminished a unique national feature that once helped us feel good about ourselves. The problem is personified by Meghan, who looked every bit the Duchess at a lunch for the homeless in Melbourne, her slender wrist adorned with Diana’s Cartier watch, and her neat frame showcasing a dress by Karen Gee, an Australian designer. But without the bulwark of the British state and the protection of the palace walls to conveniently buffet away awkward questions, who and what is it all for? An Instagram moment? A paycheque? Or a calling?

And if we ask those questions of Meghan and Harry, then it is only fair we ask them of William and Kate, of the King and Queen. By pulling at the royal tapestry one stitch at a time, the danger is the whole facade starts to fray. Arguably, it already has. These days, Meghan and Harry are just a sideshow, a harbinger of what could come as less deferential generations push forward and demand value for money and transparency from an institution rocked by a curious cocktail of Epstein-induced scandals and family feuds.

Perhaps the monarchists among us are hoping for too much when we pray for a reconciliation that will take the sting out of the Sussexes’ showboating and help redeem the embattled working royals. While it may be the stuff of nightmares for Kate and William, if silver linings are what you are looking for, the optimists believe the couple’s joint tour of Australia is a dummy run for a return to Britain this summer. If that’s the case, as a conciliatory gesture, perhaps the King could lend Harry his speech writer?

"My Trauma, My Truth, My Merch"

It's Sunday morning and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been back in the U.S. for about 24 hours. Their quasi-royal tour of Australia is still big news, however, and most of what I've seen is not positive for Harry and Meghan. The Sunday Times of London has some thoughts, in an article titled "Harry and Meghan's Australia tour--my trauma, my truth, my merch," and subtitled "The Duke and Duchess of Sussex's quasi-royal trip is about profit, not philanthropy," ouch.  This is the article in its entirety:

The late Queen Elizbeth's judgment looks sounder by the day. Early in 2020, her grandson proposed that he and his new wife switch to a "half in, half out" role. They would remain part-time working royals, Harry suggested, while also being free to pursue money-making opportunities. This "hokey-cokey" arrangement, also known as having your cake and eating it, was emphatically, correctly and inevitably (given her finely tuned appreciation of how the institution she headed should behave) rejected by the Queen. 

Supremely miffed, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex promptly decamped to California. Yet, as has become apparent, most recently on their quasi-royal progress around Australia, the couple have not abandoned their favoured portfolio option. No royal approval? No matter! Harry and Meghan seem happy to proceed with royal disapproval, or more specifically royal dismay, from the King and royal disgust from the Prince of Wales. 

Never mind "call me Meg". Harry and his wife freely use their titles in their business ventures and insist on titles for their children. Their schedule Down Under has been characterised by a blend of emotive endorsements of good causes, leisure and leveraging their fame to make money. Meghan was interviewed on stage at an event in Sydney for which guests were charged £1693 a ticket. She has been plugging her lifestyle brand and podcast. Details of the clothes she has worn to philanthropic events have been posted on a style platform in which she has invested, with links for fans to buy the outfits. She has also filmed an episode as a guest judge on MasterChef Australia, rebooting her celebrity career. 

This trip looks like the shape of things to come, a combination of "my trauma", "my truth" and "my merch". While this pitch may prove profitable, it will never be classy. Elizabeth made the right call.  

"... the Sussexes must put a sock in it."

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.