Most of the time, the Wall Street Journal ignores the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, and why not? That all changed this morning, when the WSJ published 3900 words examining Harry and Meghan's current place in the world and their relationship with Prince William and the rest of the royal family. Written based on "interviews with more than a dozen personal and professional associates," the article is fascinating; if H & M subscribe to any sort of clipping service, or if they periodically Google their own names, they probably won't be happy about all this, but for the rest of us it's deliciously juicy with just the slightest hint of snark. And wait until you get to the last sentence.
ON A SUNDAY in late January, Prince Harry—Duke of
Sussex, California resident and U.K. expat—found himself in an unlikely place:
the mountains of Utah, surrounded by a group of Girl Scouts.
Harry was there with his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex,
for the premiere of Cookie Queens, a documentary about the Girl
Scout cookies program that the couple officially joined as its 17th and 18th
executive producers one month earlier. Their addition lent the documentary a
Sussex sheen, as paparazzi captured the couple walking the Park City streets
and posing with scouts who boasted individual records of selling more than
10,000 boxes of cookies a cycle.
In a London courtroom days earlier, Harry had marked the
finale to another project: a legal broadside against British tabloid press
tactics that he says contributed to his 2020 decision to flee the U.K. He gave
evidence for over two hours against the publisher of the Daily Mail,
laying out how the outlet’s intrusion had caused him to become paranoid and
distrustful, and ultimately resulted in him stepping back from the life he’d
known as a working British royal.
While the so-called “spare” appeared to fight back tears
during his final statement to the judge, his brother, the heir, was just two
hours’ drive away on the Windsor Estate. Prince William spent his week gamely
performing for the very same cameras Harry sought so hard to evade.
The king-in-waiting traveled to Scotland to engage in the
kind of public performances that modern royals are expected to undertake in
front of clicking photographers. William watched as his wife, Catherine, known
as Kate, tried her hand at helping weave a two-mile-long tartan scarf at a
mental health charity. The prince was later filmed sliding down the ice on one
knee to release a curling stone at Scotland’s National Curling Academy.
Despite being in the same country, the brothers didn’t meet
and made no plans to do so.
Six long years after Harry roiled the royals with “Megxit,” a new chapter has emerged in the family
dynamic, one that spells out possible futures for the monarchy itself. The
brothers’ strained relationship is both an ordinary story of siblings growing
apart and a referendum on the world’s most famous hereditary institution.
This account of the brothers’ diverging paths is based on
interviews with more than a dozen personal and professional associates.
William has spent most of the past six years becoming a
king-in-waiting, and the most popular face of the family since the boys’ grandmother Queen Elizabeth II died in 2022 after 70
years on the throne. In William and Kate, the House of Windsor sees a chance
for restoration and a renewed interest in a young king with a young family.
While William’s future appears more predictable than ever,
Harry, a man who grew up in Kensington Palace and remains fifth in line to the
British throne, today lives far from Britain, literally and figuratively.
Recent business ventures have struggled, the Hollywood production deals that initially subsidized
his exit are drying up, and his nonprofit arm laid off much of its staff
shortly before Christmas.
Those who know Harry describe him as happily settled into
family life in Montecito, continuing to advocate for the causes he cares about,
and often starting his day as his older brother does: with school drop-off. But
some who have spent time with him in recent months have also found him adrift
and isolated, with Meghan chasing new pursuits as he passes the time in his
sleepy new hometown.
The fact that Harry and Meghan fled the U.K.
symbolizes to their supporters that the crown has calcified into what they see
as an anachronistic and racist institution. Their entrepreneurial efforts in
the U.S. seem to others evidence of the crass opportunism hidden beneath the
patina.
King Charles entertains calls from Harry, and vice
versa, but William has cut ties with his brother as he sketches out plans for a
reign free of the kind of familial blowups—from Uncle Andrew on down—that have tainted the
Windsor brand over the past four decades.
William, 43 years old, and Harry, 41, haven’t spoken in
years, and it’s unlikely they will ever fully make up, according to colleagues,
friends and associates of both men. “The prospects of reconciliation are pretty
remote,” says Sally Bedell Smith, who has written several royal biographies.
“There are just so many wounding and damaging revelations.”
In at least one area, though, it appears as though a detente
may come soon. Harry, who spent the past few years throwing dirt at the royal
family after decamping to California, has been trying to mend fences with his
father, King Charles, who is in treatment for cancer.
The Duke of Sussex’s aides are optimistic that the U.K.
government will grant Harry’s family taxpayer-funded police protection when
visiting Britain, opening the path for Meghan and the couple’s two children to
make the trip over from the West Coast this year. The culmination of the
prince’s various legal battles with the press could also smooth the way for
father and son to be publicly reconciled at an Invictus Games event for wounded
servicemen in 2027, aides say. (A public reunion while the prince’s legal
battles continue against the U.K.’s biggest tabloids could be fraught for the
palace, observers say.)
Still, the more Harry struggles to forge a new existence,
the more he appears to be refocusing on what he knows best: riffing on his own
persona of the amiable, accessible royal, undertaking pseudo-royal visits to
draw attention to good deeds across the globe. When William comes to the
throne, Harry will always be in the background, a foil, a potential distraction
and a constant reminder of a regal brotherly duo that could have been.
In a royal life already marked by tragedy, this latest act
could cast Harry in an appropriately Shakespearean role, a Banquo’s ghost at
Prince William’s table.
THE BROTHERS GREW UP as sandy-haired schoolboys always
under the camera’s eye, their fraternal relationship forged by loss and
memorialized by the image of them walking side by side behind their mother
Diana’s casket on a September morning in 1997.
As teenagers, they wrestled with a constant spotlight on
their dating lives and school activities as two of the world’s most eligible
bachelors. Everything from their birthday parties to their hairlines was
scrutinized. But to the public, the brothers always had a camaraderie rooted in
sadness; they had only each other to fully understand what they had been
through.
The two brothers were close, flanking their grandmother on
the royal balcony or smiling on the sidelines of a polo match. In Harry’s
lawsuits against various British tabloids, he cites how he and his brother
would regularly discuss their private lives with each other, including leaving
detailed voicemails on each other’s phones.
When William married Kate, Harry would write of seeing his
brother off to a life where he would no longer be the future king’s closest
companion.
“Who shall separate us?” he wrote in his memoir. “Life,
that’s who.”
Harry’s life took a dramatic turn after he married Meghan in
2018. At the time it was billed as a public relations masterstroke for the
monarchy, which was now modernizing by welcoming a mixed-race American
celebrity into its ranks. The fairy tale quickly went sour as the couple chafed
at the confines of regal life, complaining they were hounded by what they
described as an at times racist tabloid press. The tensions reached a boiling
point, and in early 2020 they announced their exit.
For a time, it looked as though Megxit had gone according to
plan. The couple settled in Montecito, a coastal haven 90 miles northwest of
Los Angeles near Santa Barbara. They had a production deal at Netflix and
another one at Spotify, and Harry secured millions of dollars to write
his memoir, Spare, about a life in waiting.
While working on the autobiography with a ghostwriter, Harry
saw the book as a chance to set the record straight, though he did wonder out
loud to associates whether he was making a mistake in writing it. A Netflix
documentary that detailed the Sussexes’ escape from the clutches of a
suffocating royal family and a tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey on CBS had
already put relations with the palace on life support.
In September 2022, William made an impromptu call to Harry
to suggest they walk out of Windsor Castle together to greet crowds who had
gathered to mourn the death of Queen Elizabeth. The crowds were expecting
William and Kate to show up; and the addition of Harry and Meghan was so last
minute that it caught even the couple off guard.
The episode, far from rekindling a sibling bond, turned out
to be a bookend in the two brothers’ relationship. The couples haven’t been
seen together since.
Spare, published four months later, may have
described the life of the second-born son, but its title did not describe the
author’s approach. The propriety of the Windsor clan was shucked for juicy
details on Harry losing his virginity behind a pub (“she spanked my ass”) and
the tense conversations with family members about his impending exit. He even
dared to criticize the monarchy itself and the finances required to sustain it.
“Of course, some members of my family will never forgive me
for writing a book,” Harry later told the BBC. “Of course, they will never
forgive me for lots of things.”
FOR WILLIAM, Spare was a gut punch, people
who know him say. Not only did it damage the family brand in his view, it
severed a bond of trust between the brothers.
Spare painted William as the hotheaded older
brother who pushed his sibling to the ground during an argument. It shattered
the Windsor mantra of “never complain, never explain,” stripping back the
mystique of monarchy, revealing a somewhat dysfunctional family trapped inside
an institution it struggles to manage.
“William takes his privacy very seriously,” says Robert
Hardman, author of The Making of a King: King Charles III and the
Modern Monarchy. “The fact that Harry’s book said out loud all those things
said in private, that really hurt.” Hardman says William never read the book in
full and was instead briefed by aides on its contents.
William publicly commented only once on the Sussexes’
allegations, to deny insinuations they had made to Winfrey that the family was
racist. Soon that saga was eclipsed by a darker, much more serious familial
crisis. In early 2024, Kate underwent a procedure on her abdomen during which
doctors discovered cancer. Soon after, King Charles got his diagnosis. William dialed back his public engagements, and
for a long stretch, Kate largely disappeared from public view until they saw
fit to tell their children about the diagnosis. Last year, Kate confirmed she
is in remission from cancer. Buckingham Palace says Charles is responding well to treatments.
Next to the happy-go-lucky Harry, William always came off as
the earnest, somewhat colder older brother who seemed to march solemnly toward
the inevitable fate of being burdened by the crown. William’s persona has
softened with age—and, it appears, to an extent, by design.
On a recent crisp November Tuesday in northern Wales, some
50 people crowded near a beach cafe in Colwyn Bay to catch a glimpse of the
Prince of Wales. It was a mixture of old and young. A lady brought two
best-in-show dogs to meet him. A mother rocked a stroller. A group of young
marine conservationists stood nervously in line waiting to greet the royal.
Security officials dressed in Barbour jackets and earpieces discreetly
corralled the crowd.
A polite cheer erupted when Prince William’s motorcade
pulled up. William, dressed in a dark blue knee-length coat and cashmere
sweater, stepped out and worked the crowd.
“How’s the weather been?” he asked one onlooker. “You must
be a local!” he joshed with a man wearing shorts in the cold. An old woman
hugged him and started to cry.
This is the de rigueur work of what William’s officials call
an “away day”—when the prince heads every other week into the provinces to
sprinkle some royal stardust. It’s the kind of bread-and-butter regal
engagement that helped cement The Firm’s place in the hearts of the British
public, the royals mixing with real Brits in all corners of the realm. William,
as the Prince of Wales, has a particular duty to get out and be seen in Wales
proper. His mantra, says one palace official, is to be Prince for Wales.
HARRY AND MEGHAN’S lasting absence has created a
manpower problem. William and Kate are the only full-time working British
royals under the age of 60. The younger Windsors are eschewing the grinding
rounds of endless ribbon-cutting their forebears engaged in to try to make
fewer, more high-impact interventions heralded to the nation via social media.
William is also looking to lay the groundwork to become a
different kind of monarch than King Charles, aiming for a less formal, less
stuffy style. Unlike his father, who has carved a niche as a somewhat quirky
renaissance-man-turned-grandfather to the nation, William cuts a more norm-core
jib: His primary hobby appears to be soccer, in particular his favorite team,
Aston Villa. He champions environmental causes, influenced by his father, and
mental health awareness, a campaign his wife steered him toward.
While he is destined to become the supreme governor of the
Church of England, he isn’t an assiduous churchgoer. His family will likely
never live in the drafty Buckingham Palace, having recently signed a 20-year
lease on a less grandiose mansion on the Windsor Estate with no live-in staff.
The prince fires off WhatsApp messages to aides running the Duchy of Cornwall,
a large tract of land traditionally handed to the heir of the British throne,
and often dives into the weeds of running the estate. He is also softening the
stiff upper lip that once personified his family’s approach; William was filmed
recently tearing up after talking to a woman whose husband had died by
suicide.
So far, his low-key earnestness has struck a chord with the
British public, with nearly 71% approving of him. He is Britain’s most popular
royal.
And herein lies one of the central ironies of the Windsor
story today: Those who have worked with Harry in the U.S. say he would have
also made a great working royal.
Since leaving his royal duties, Harry has embarked on tours
of foreign countries that, from a distance, resemble those of the Windsor
travels around the Commonwealth. He is a natural with kids and strangers, and
colleagues have been touched when he talks of inheriting a role of service from
his mother. He remains the driving force of the Invictus Games, which started
with veterans, including some injured on the same tour as the prince.
Last year, he traveled around Britain meeting with charity
leaders and army veterans and engaging in balloon fights with children, with
the kind of warm approach that had once made him so popular in the country.
Shortly after, he visited Ukraine to meet with injured veterans. He raised
eyebrows in Buckingham Palace when he then traveled to Canada to meet military
veterans in the lead-up to Remembrance Day, traditionally a centerpiece event
for the British royal family, where fallen soldiers are honored.
Over the Remembrance Day weekend, however, the contrast
returned. In the U.K., William and Kate spent the weekend in black, attending
solemn ceremonies and wreath-layings for fallen soldiers. Harry and Meghan were
in black too—for a 70th birthday party for Kris Jenner with a James Bond theme,
thrown by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The Sussexes were photographed heading
into the black-tie party, also attended by Beyoncé, Adele, Bill Gates and six
Kardashians.
Jenner and her daughter Kim Kardashian posted photos of
Harry and Meghan at the party, but then quickly deleted them—which only
generated mystery that drew more attention to their attendance.
“We were told that it was totally cool to post. And then
after it was posted, I think they realized it was Remembrance Day, and they
didn’t want to be seen at a party,” Kardashian said in late January on a
podcast hosted by her sister Khloé.
The foreign tours are rolling on in 2026, with the couple
recently visiting Jordan where they met with wounded children from Gaza. A trip
to Australia is in the works for next month.
The couple’s glitzy life in California has left them with
bills to pay, and so far the Sussex entrepreneurial efforts have been a mixed
bag. After Megxit, Harry and Meghan tried in vain to get a best-of-both-worlds
setup, pitching to continue to represent the monarchy while also chasing
commercial interests. Harry’s grandmother would not let them.
Their Netflix deal, which Harry saw as an opportunity to
produce David Attenborough–style documentaries, has not been renewed. Though an
initial documentary on the couple scored high ratings with further details
on Megxit, viewership for Meghan’s more recent how-to show, With Love, Meghan, fell this last season.
Instead, the streaming service has opted for a first-look deal with the
production division of the couple’s Archewell firm, meaning it has the first
right to pick up any project it produces but doesn’t otherwise fund the company.
In 2025, Meghan pivoted to consumer products, launching As
Ever, an online marketplace of jams, dried flowers and other home goods that
she started with help from Netflix employees. At Netflix’s headquarters,
employees were encouraged to take home some leftover perishable inventory. Last
week, As Ever and Netflix announced the companies were ending their
partnership, leaving Meghan’s firm to operate independently. (Meghan,
meanwhile, has expressed an interest in returning to acting—and filmed a cameo
in an upcoming Amazon MGM production in which she plays herself.)
In recent times, the couple would emerge from separate
offices at their Montecito home to work jointly on the Archewell Foundation,
which they launched to raise awareness of issues ranging from vaccination to
social-media abuse. But in December, the foundation staff were blindsided when
they were told it was shutting down, according to people who worked with it.
The couple plan to narrow their philanthropic efforts to grant-giving and
similar dispersals, rather than running a nonprofit themselves—a move that will
reduce overhead costs, former employees say.
Following Meghan’s entrepreneurial bent, Harry began putting
plans together last year to launch his own venture, but that is a longer-term
goal. The couple have had major turnover in staff. When their head of
communications left last year, she was the 11th person to exit the role since
they left the U.K.
The dissolving of the foundation has left the couple with
little to work on together, say former employees. Meghan continues to try to
expand As Ever. Harry is known to play polo at a nearby club, and the couple
socialize with entertainment executives with homes in the area, such as
Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos, who gave them their first major production deal.
The prince undertakes paid speaking work, including in
December traveling to Toronto to address the Ontario Real Estate Association.
But for much of the time, Harry is at home. The town around the Sussexes looks
like a sun-kissed version of a Windsor Estate, with green acres and wide
expanses.
IT’S NOT THE FIRST TIME that the Windsor franchise has
dealt with an estranged sibling living across the water. In 1936, William and
Harry’s great-grandfather George VI came to the throne after what threatened to
be an existential crisis for the British crown. George’s older brother Edward
VIII abdicated to marry a divorced American, Wallis Simpson.
Telling his own story decades later, Harry would recount how
royal custom dictated he ask his grandmother for permission to marry Meghan.
Meghan had divorced a talent manager in 2014, a taint on her résumé from The
Firm’s perspective. When Harry confided to friends his plans to propose to an
American divorcée, the Duke of Windsor was invoked. (His grandmother’s ultimate
reply, as recounted in Harry’s memoir: “Well, then, I suppose I have to say
yes.”)
In Edward’s time, a pliant British press didn’t call into
question the future of the monarchy. But Edward created a long tail of
ignominy. A year later, in 1937, he had tea with Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany
and was later sent into semi-exile in the Bahamas amid fears his views on
appeasement could prove an embarrassment to the British establishment.
Edward, who settled in France, later threw up the kinds of
headaches that will feel familiar to King Charles. While no longer a de facto
working royal, Edward lobbied relentlessly for Simpson to be granted the title
Her Royal Highness.
Once outside the royal fold, the then–Duke of Windsor needed
to raise cash to pay for his lifestyle. In 1951, he published the first royal
tell-all memoir, A King’s Story, which flew off the shelves and
painted him as a victim of an establishment stitch up. He also took part in a
CBS interview with Edward R. Murrow to promote his wife’s memoir, which
followed shortly after. He died near Paris in 1972.
Ultimately, however, the royal family survived, and actually
thrived, largely by appearing to ignore the Duke of Windsor in public.
The same strategy is being applied to the Duke of Sussex,
but some royal watchers fret that the relationship could get worse before it
gets better. The Duchess of Sussex could write her own memoirs or more freely
air her views on American politics, though associates say she has been loath to
weigh in on any topic that might invite the slightest controversy. Harry has in
the past hinted he has enough leftover material from Spare to
write a new book.
Others see the only way forward as reconciliation and
bringing Harry back into some sort of royal orbit. The stumbling block, says
the author Bedell Smith, is that Harry doesn’t seem inclined to apologize. “It
would be nice to have that reconciliation part now,” Harry said last year. “If
they don’t want that, that’s entirely up to them.”
Both brothers’ decisions are driven in part by an identical
desire: to avoid inflicting on their own families a repeat of their own
childhood trauma of seeing their mother chased to her death by paparazzi.
William has doubled down on royal life, ensconcing his children in the privacy
of the Windsor Estate with the aim of giving them as normal a life as possible.
Harry has cut himself off to also try to build something better for his
children on the other side of the world. He and Meghan are vigilant about personal
security and keeping their children away from unsanctioned cameras, whether
wielded by professionals or their own neighbors.
The result: The trauma that bound the brothers together as
young men ultimately drove them apart in parenthood.
For now, the hidebound traditions of royalty loom over their
relationship. Harry remains family and fifth in line to the British throne. But
when William becomes king, he will be able to wield power over the Sussexes,
including the ability to strip them and their children of their titles if they
step out of line or, in an extreme circumstance, removing his brother entirely
from the line of succession.
And if Harry were ever to remarry, he would have to ask the
king to consent first.
Wait, what? "And if Harry were ever to remarry..." Is the WSJ hinting that all is not well romantically in Montecito? Yowza. The article talks about H & M's professional separation, but there's nothing to suggest their personal relationship is in peril... except for that last sentence. Harry can't get remarried unless and until he gets unmarried from Meghan. After talking to more than a dozen personal and professional associates, do reporters Colchester and Schwartzel think Harry might be single in the foreseeable future? My guess? Yes.
Update: In the first sentence of this post I said that the WSJ mostly ignores Harry and Meghan, but not always. I had forgotten about a previous article, dated June 24, 2023, that stated that H & M's "Hollywood foray is looking like a flop." Read it
here.
