FINDING FURY
Devastating book lays bare bitterness of royals over Harry and Meghan
IT HAS become normal in the Queen’s Christmas broadcast for the sovereign to deliver her annual message of goodwill from behind a desk on which recent photos of her family have been placed looking outwards so that they can be studied by her audience.
Who does and who does not feature on the royal Christmas desk has always been like the changing panorama of faces on the historic balcony of Moscow’s Kremlin. It showed who was in favour and who was not.
In 2018, Harry and Meghan had featured smiling in a silver frame. But there would be no sign of them in 2019, nor any mention of the name Sussex.
There are those who maintain that the pictures on the Queen’s Christmas desk are really the choice of that year’s TV producer. If so, he or she would surely have requested an image of the most talked about set of British royal personalities of the moment — Harry, Meghan and their new baby Archie, who were a matter of avid fascination to TV audiences around the world.
It was unheard of for the royal Christmas desk not to feature a cosy image of the latest royal grandchild or great-grandchild. But in 2019 there was no sight of Harry and Meghan’s six-month-old son, Archie.
A brief video clip flashed on screen during the broadcast showing the Queen and Meghan’s mother Doria cluck-clucking over the little boy, but there was no name-check.
The Queen simply acknowledged the arrival of her great-grandchild in passing, without mentioning his name or his parents: ‘Prince Philip and I have been delighted to welcome our eighth great-grandchild into our family.’
This was the Queen’s only reference to the new arrival and his parents in her 2019 address to the world — an anonymous ‘eighth great-grandchild’.
The Sussex family had been ‘non-personed’ as effectively as the Soviets non-personed Trotsky and Khrushchev — another charming custom, of course, that had been developed by the Kremlin.
THe reasons for this very public signal of Her Majesty’s displeasure were, by December 2019, manifold.
There was the row over the fitting for the tiara Meghan wanted to wear at the wedding — leading to Harry’s famously petulant outburst: ‘What Meghan wants, Meghan gets.’
There was the deception over the announcement of Archie’s birth, which unlike every other royal birth of modern times took place in total secrecy: Buckingham Palace announced at 2pm on May 6, 2019, that Meghan had gone into labour that morning — when in fact, she had safely given birth to baby Archie eight hours earlier, at 5.26am.
That was followed by a refusal to make public the names of the godparents. It is still expected by monarch, palace and just about anyone with a stake in the game that the world should be told who the new royal baby’s ‘ sponsors’ are. How can you j udge the suitability of a sponsor who remains unknown? Yet the names of Archie’s godparents are still a secret today.
There was the issue of Vogue that Meghan guest edited. Unlike Kate and Diana before her, she declined to feature on the cover. Her concept was instead to display with the headline Forces for Change, a gallery of the women activists she admired, from Jane Fonda to Greta Thunberg, with 13 other Left- wing, multiracial campaigning women — a move which l eft many with serious constitutional concerns about the monarchy weighing into politics.
And when Harry and Meghan decided to trademark Sussex Royal products without asking the Queen’s permission, the extent of royal fury at Sussex impertinence rose to even higher levels.
‘Hopping’ was a mild description of how mad the family was.
There was nothing intrinsically taboo about royals selling something in order to generate funds: for decades there had been a highly successful souvenir shop at Buckingham Palace and Prince Charles’ Duchy Originals line of products were generating some £3 million or so a year from a whole range of items, headed by its beloved Duchy Originals oaten digestive biscuits. But listed under Sussex Royal’s surprise June 2019 trademark applications were, for example, ‘social care services, namely organising and conducting e motional s upport groups; counselling services; emotional support services; provision of personal support services to help, care for and support persons in need . . . mentoring and personal care services.’
Duchy Digestives were one t hi ng — but Sussex Royal personal therapy sessions? It was beyond parody.
THe starting of any commercial activities by a member of the royal f amily r equires l i aison with Buckingham Palace and depends, ultimately, on the approval of the Queen herself.
So one might have expected
Harry at the very least to have consulted his father when it came to going into business himself.
But as 2019 wore on, family consultation was ceasing to be
Harry’s style. During his and Meghan’s tour of South Africa in the early autumn of that year, the couple i ssued between them three l awsuits against News
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International, the Mirror group and Associated Newspapers.
In other words, the couple had lined themselves up against three of Britain’s bi ggest media companies — without talking to the Queen or Prince Charles first.
Once again Harry had totally failed to consult the Queen about a major initiative affecting his royal work and image — and the image of the crown as a whole. The family finally hit back. Elizabeth II had always had a soft spot for Harry, and she had been delighted by the arrival of Meghan, whose personal energies seemed to complement her grandson’s so well.
As Head of the Commonwealth and reigning over an ever more multicultural society in Britain, t he Queen had especially welcomed the exciting new dimension that a mixed-race recruit brought to the Windsor identity — and as we shall see later in this series, she herself had spotted when things were going wrong, and had helped devise a strategy she firmly hoped would make things easier for the couple.
But there were some matters on which Elizabeth I I would not compromise — and chief among them was the authority of the crown. By not disclosing their plans to market merchandise under their own royal trademark, Harry and Meghan had trespassed dangerously on that authority. To commercialise the crown required the crown’s consent — and the Sussexes had not sought that.
Now t heir f ail ure t o seek permission for their lawsuits took their rebellion one step too far.
The absence of a single Sussex f rom the 2019 assemblage of significant royal faces in the Queen’s Christmas broadcast appeared to reflect a deliberate decision on her part. She would be providing no brand endorsement opportunities this year for Sussex Royal.
THE new royal picture that the Queen did release on January 3 to mark the new decade showed Queen Elizabeth II herself, the future King Charles III, the future King William V — and, going even further, King George VII in the shape of little Prince George, just coming up to seven years old.
What a fascinating and historic image to remind us of the essence of the royal system! The current monarch with t hree f uture monarchs. All the living heirs — and not a suggestion of a ‘spare’.
According to insiders, this formal photograph, taken in t he Buckingham Palace Throne Room a week before Christmas 2019, was the idea of Prince Charles, anxious to promote his cause of the ‘slimmed-down monarchy’.
Palace sources have also let it be known that the plan of depicting the direct line of royal succession
was enthusiastically supported by Prince William, which might be seen as sending his younger brother a message.
The message was received and it was taken to heart.
The Sussexes had taken refuge with Archie for an extended Christmas break on a wooded, f our- acre Vancouver Island estate off the west coast of Canada.
It was a sort of sabbatical. Before leaving London Harry had spoken to his father and grandmother with a few of his ideas about how things might change for himself and his wife within the royal structure.
It was a pity that William was now so angry that he was not speaking to him any more. It was as if Harry had become un-brothered.
The harsh reality was that the gospel according to Meghan — as evidenced in the special issue of Vogue she had edited — was simply not royal, nor was it in harmony with mainstream, ‘un-woke’ British opinion. William and all the senior members of the royal family — not least Prince Charles and the Queen — had come to feel the same.
This growing disapproval at the top had started seeping downwards. The honeymoon was over. On the talk shows, Meghan and Harry had become topics of national controversy instead of celebration.
There was an urgent need for the image of the Harry-Meghan brand to be turned around — and the couple saw the ten-day tour of Southern Africa for which they were preparing at the end of September as the perfect opportunity.
When she got engaged to Harry in 2017, Meghan had announced a definitive end to her showbiz career. But she had retained her Hollywood ‘three As’ — her agent, attorney and accountant — to field c al l s relating to the professional side of her life.
And she remained particularly close to Kelei g h Thomas Morgan, a representative of the crisis management and PR firm Sunshine Sachs, with whom she had worked while she was acting in the legal drama Suits.
Thomas Morgan had become a friend and in due course a fellow new mother — she had occupied a prime seat at the royal wedding — and as Meghan’s relationship with Buckingham Palace went awry, Keleigh moved into the vacuum to give Meghan the benefit of her professional advice.
It was decided that for the South Africa trip, there were to be a minimum of s mart cl othes or fashionable costumes and poses that suggested Vogue.
There must be no private jets — commercial flights only. And above all, let us see as much as possible of Archie. There was to be no more of this ‘secret baby’ nonsense.
On day one, Meghan and Harry visited a charity in Nyanga supported by the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust that they now jointly headed, and they mingled informally with children who were l earning about their rights and taking part i n selfdefence classes.
There were also some f emale empowerment lessons going on and it was impossible for Meghan not to give expression to what she felt in her heart. She stood on a tree stump to speak to these young women with whom she i dentified, and for the first time since her marriage she referred to herself in public as a ‘woman of colour’.
As Harry watched her saying these words, the love and admiration shone out of his eyes.
A few days later, Harry went to Angola, where he was photographed walking through the very same minefield at Huambo that his mother had famously visited in 1997.
‘It has been quite emotional,’ he said on Friday, September 27, ‘ retracing my mother’s steps . . . to see the transformation that has taken place, from an unsafe and desolate place into a vibrant community.’
Harry said he knew what his mother would have done if she had still been alive. ‘She would have seen it through . . . Let’s finish what was started. Let us consign these weapons to the history books.’
Talking of f i nishing what was started, Harry had prepared a very private memorial to his mother for that last Friday in September. The Prince had long been indignant that Rupert Murdoch’s News International had not paid t he f ull price f or phone- hacking activities by the News of the World (since closed down) against himself, William and Kate ten years earlier.
For some time since his marriage, and with Meghan’s encouragement, Harry had been consulting David Sherborne, a l eading media and privacy barrister who had been winning cases for dozens of phonehacking victims — and for Mirror Group victims as well.
The newspapers had settled with all of Sherborne’s victorious clients for large sums of money. But Harry did not seem inclined to settle. He did not appear in the mood for compromise.
Harry’s two lawsuits for the misuse of confidential information, filed in the High Court by Sherborne on September 27, 2019, would be his revenge for his mother — launched as they were on the day that he walked in Diana’s footsteps through the mines of Huambo.
The climax of the trip, which would prove historic, were Harry and Meghan’s i ntervi e ws wit h Tom Bradby, whose cameras had been following them for his ITV documentary Harry & Meghan: An African Journey.
But Meghan had gone into negative ‘victim’ mode.
‘ How are you feeling, Meghan?’ wondered Bradby.
‘ Thank you f or asking,’ she replied with a steely and defiant edge. ‘ Because not many people have asked if I’m OK.’
She went on to say she was worried about the effect of keeping a stiff upper lip on her mental health, adding: ‘I think that what that does internally is probably really damaging ... I’ve said for a long time to H (that’s what I call [Harry]), it’s not enough to just survive something, right? Like that’s not the point of life. You’ve got to thrive, you’ve got to feel happy.’
Her words tailed away as she tried to hold back the tears. It ended the Sussexes’ oh- so-promising tour of Southern Africa on a sad note. Selfpity and tears — which Sunshine Sachs playbook had they come from?
On October 1 — the day before they flew back to Britain — a press release announced Meghan’s own lawsuit against DMG Media, alleging breach of privacy against t he Mail on Sunday for publishing excerpts from a letter she had sent to her father, Thomas Markle.
In conjunction with Harry’s two cases launched in the previous days against the Mirror and Murdoch groups, the young royal couple were now lined up directly against Britain’s three l argest media groups — a formidable prospect as they headed back to London at the beginning of October 2019.
Windsors do not do campaigns of social upheaval. They do not do headline-grabbing lawsuits in pursuit of personal crusades. And, most of all, they do not air their grievances like any other Johnny Depp. To be royal, sometimes, i s to ride the punches, to take it on the chin — and to just shut up.