So now what for Harry and Meghan?
Royal rogues. An asp in the bosom for the poor Queen. An American divorcee who wields succubus sway with her prince of a husband — history repeating. Wallis redux. Diana reincarnated.
Or blatant racism by the British establishment, aided and abetted by a ravenous tabloid press that has made life intolerable for a biracial outsider. A Windsor-Mountbatten spawn still traumatized by the death of his mother — chased to her demise by paparazzi. A couple yearning to be free.
The upshot: Canada may have just inherited the Duke and Duchess of Sussex — Harry and Meghan.
They’d get to jump the immigrant queue, refugees from mind numbing royal protocol and smothering traditional practices.
According to multiple media reports, Meghan returned to these shores on Thursday, reunited with baby Archie, who’d apparently been left in the care of BFF Jessica Mulroney. A few days previously, Meghan and Harry had dropped by Canada’s High Commission in London, purportedly to thank them for an enjoyable Christmas holiday spent in Victoria, B.C., pointedly dodging the Royal Family’s Noel retreat at Sandringham. A command performance for the extended clan in perpetually rainy Norfolk.
With purportedly no intention of going back, Meghan bided out the media and domestic storm that broke following the couple’s bombshell announcement on Wednesday that they were distancing themselves from the family firm, and caught everybody with their knickers down. Though not the very inner circle, since both the Queen and Prince Charles were aware of the desired desertion, if pleading for time to figure out a manageable detaching.
Can’t imagine why Californiaborn and raised Meghan would want to leave the Old Sod. The woman whose arrival on the scene as Harry’s inamorata — they’d met on a 2016 blind date — was greeted with this headline in one of the red tops: “Harry’s girl is (almost) straight outta Compton.”
“Megxit,” the bolting was promptly dubbed. There’s always a woman to blame.
Meghan’s socialite predecessor, Wallis Simpson, scaled a mountain to bag the Prince of Wales, but both of them were sent to Coventry, Edward VII relinquishing the throne for “the woman I love” and triggering a constitutional crisis. Diana, Princess of Wales, never made it out alive.
One can only hope a better outcome awaits Harry and
Meghan once the furor dies down. An aftermath to audacity that won’t see them stripped of titles, income — only five per cent of the couple’s funding comes from the Sovereign Grant dole for senior royals; the rest of their expenses are paid from Charles’ “private income” — their Frogmore Cottage home and public affection.
Which has been in short supply, affection from the Queen’s subjects, since the giddy days of the couple’s betrothal and marriage, and (fleetingly) the birth of their first child. There was a hint of going their own way on that occasion too, the new parents refusing to pose for the obligatory photo op on the hospital steps. All the public got, in due time, was a picture of Archie’s finger.
Harry and Meghan are hardly homeless-bound. He came into some $12 million from his mother’s estate and more than $5 million from the Queen Mother. She was worth — as per media reports — an estimated $5 million from her earnings as a successful actress. In any event, they’ve stated they intend to become financially independent while maintaining some of their royal obligations, particularly continuing their charitable associations.
What’s not to admire about a couple wanting to strike out on their own, slip out from within the bell jar of a ridiculously constrained existence? Harry served his country as a soldier in Afghanistan. Meghan did the brood cow thing that is expected of royal women, after forfeiting a lifestyle she’d clearly enjoyed, particularly while living for five years in Toronto, where her cable-TV show, “Suits,” was shot.
While nowhere near as naïve as the doomed Diana, Meghan didn’t have a clue what she was getting into, as she’s since admitted. She could not have anticipated the venom directed at her, just for being Meghan, every gesture and comment dissected by media scrutiny. What’s supposed to be a symbiotic relationship — the royals are there to be seen, the media is there to chronicle — had descended anew to mutual loathing, amid a resurrection of the Malice at the Palace days of the ’80s.
Harry remains haunted by his mother’s death, for which he holds the media hounds responsible. “My deepest fear is history repeating itself,” he wrote in a statement in October after Meghan filed a lawsuit against the Mail on Sunday over publication of a private letter she’d sent to her estranged father. “I lost my mother and now I watch my wife falling victim to the same powerful forces.”
Yet neither has been able to catch a break, despite all the good deeds, with endless leaks from behind palisaded walls of a power-mad duchess, cheesy Americanization of a British institution, inappropriate and hypocritical social activism, and escalating friction between the Sussexes and the Cambridges, William and Kate.
The future king and his prim, fastidious stick insect wife seem better suited to their roles, which at least are clearly defined. But Harry has to forge an identity beyond his royal bona fides. Even if that means Brits losing their favourite royal grandson. A net gain for Canada, it appears, whether or not Harry is named governor general, as many are speculating. Just another ceremonial job, really, and he’s better than that.
The long-running power struggle between royals and news outlets, of which Harry and Meghan no longer want any part unless they’re calling the shots, would seem a battle Harry and Meghan can’t win. It’s less bloody on this side of the pond, however. While Harry may have been more inclined to setting up his household in an African country — deep ties there — Canada is a nice saw-off, given Meghan’s comfort zone in Toronto, the professional opportunities available and the Commonwealth connection. Also, frankly, our essential niceness. We don’t do British sneer.
What Meghan does bring to their ever-after offshore is a crucial social media savvy, and that’s where the wrangle is playing out thus far. Before the “grey men” at The Firm — what Diana labelled the fussy courtiers who bent them to palace will — forced her to knock it off, Meghan ran a popular lifestyle Goop-ish blog, the Tig. On Wednesday, the couple launched their new website, sussexroyal.com, which attracted so much interest that, at one point, the platform would not load.
It was there that Harry and Meghan fired their bolt from the blue, announcing an unprecedented “step back” from official duties, though adamant they would continue to support the work of the Queen, on their own terms, in their own style. The website was created by the Tig’s Toronto-based designers.
One feels for the Queen, for whom family and duty are everything. She didn’t need yet another roiling chapter of family discord. But it’s not as if Harry and Meghan have, you know, been consorting with under-age sex slaves or brought the monarchy into disrepute with sleazy royal access deals for sheiks or been hack-recorded wanting to, poof, turn into a tampon.
This is a timely modern-day Reformation.
Canadian diversity has room for royals too, should they transplant.
Welcome, Harry. Welcome back, Meghan.