Duty first for lovestruck Harry as he jets off to Caribbean
the Queen no longer undertakes longhaul travel, she asked Prince Harry to go in her place. The diplomatic importance of his mission will be drilled into him daily by the austere figure of Sir David Manning, his adviser on foreign affairs and former ambassador to the US. He will never be more than a few paces from the Prince during the trip. Despite their political independence, Barbados and Antigua and Barbuda remain Commonwealth realms, with the Queen as their head of state, as do Grenada, St Lucia, St Kitts and Nevis, and St Vincent and the Grenadines, all of which the Prince will be visiting. Barbados, in particular, is restless for republicanism; in March last year Freundel Stuart, its prime minister, announced that the island would drop the monarchy and elect a president in November, but since then the plan has been quietly postponed, to the annoyance of many citizens. The Not My Prince movement has even quoted the words of the Prince’s girlfriend. Miss Markle, who has a black mother and a white father, proudly talks about her ancestors who were slaves, and said in one interview: “You create the identity you want for yourself, just as my ancestors did when they were given their freedom.” There will be, however, plenty of fans ready to give him a warm welcome. Antigua and Barbuda has created a special cocktail in his honour, called, appropriately, The Prince’s Ginger. With his staff of 10, the Prince will be ferried between islands and will sleep aboard the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Wave Knight, a tanker used for refuelling Royal Navy vessels. The tour will include a 20-hour voyage between St Vincent and the Grenadines and Grenada next weekend. On a tour in 2012, the Prince was greeted warmly, dancing with locals in Jamaica. Today, Meghan Markle, left, is likely to be on his mind theatre. His breakthrough performances came when he played the code breaker Alan Turing in the 2014 film
and stamped his mark on Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective in the BBC’s
Cumberbatch paid tribute to his actor parents Timothy Carlton and Wanda Ventham in inspiring him to pursue his ambition as an actor.
“I started out in this profession with two parents to look up to who’d had successful careers, who’d had the respect of their peers and who had a good time doing a job which can be tough on the family, because of timing, being peripatetic and the odd hours we work as well as all over the place,” he said.
Aware of the pitfalls of the acting profession, Cumberbatch initially tried to pursue a career in law.
But he said: “Then I discovered, the further down that route I went, it was as precarious [as acting]. You’re only as good as your last case; it’s a form of performance, of course, and it’s so oversubscribed as a profession as well.
“Why not pursue the first dream and roll with the punches? So I did.”