ROYAL RUMBLE

Unpopular Harry and Meghan Chase New Roles Back in Britain

The couple want to build bridges with charities and media, but who is prepared to help them, and who will pay to keep them safe?

Anyone who imagined that Harry and Meghan were going to slip unobtrusively into private life now that they are back in the United Kingdom will be swiftly disabused of the notion by a report in the London Sunday Times.

According to royal correspondent Roya Nikkhah, Meghan intends to rekindle her relationships with British charities, to be photographed and publicized working with them, and the couple is going to grant gracious access to the royal rota, the very same pool of reporters they once denounced as corrupt tools of the establishment!

The Sussexes, we are told, are “excited” about being back in Britain. This strikes The Royalist as strange because six years ago, before the Oprah interview, before Spare, before the Netflix series, before all the other denunciations, the Sussexes were a great deal less unpopular than they are now.

Today, they are actively disliked by many members of the British public and by most of the British press, which they have spent a lot of money suing. Yet in 2020, leaving the country was, they said, a matter of survival. Now, with their standing considerably worse, it is apparently an irresistible delight.

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The Sunday Times reports that Harry is in “a different headspace” than he was then. That is a marked contrast with Charlotte Griffiths’ account in The Mail on Sunday last weekend, which had him in more or less exactly the same headspace as before: resentful, aggrieved, and angry. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether you believe Sunday’s quotes, which have the unmistakable ring of the usual approved sources, or Griffiths’ unsanctioned take.

Harry will be back in business very soon. He is doing a charity skydive later this month, an exercise curiously reminiscent of Prince Andrew abseiling down the Shard when his own popularity was in the toilet. Doing something dangerous is always a reliable way to look heroic. Then come the WellChild Awards, which matter enormously to Harry.

For Meghan, The Sunday Times says Smart Works is in her sights, with a source saying she will “look to rekindle that relationship, where she can get back involved in a more meaningful way now that she’s back here.”

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Smart Works, which provides interview clothes and coaching to unemployed women, is the only royal patronage she kept when the couple left. It is a worthy charity but not a high-profile one. Whether other charities will want to align themselves with a figure as divisive as Meghan will be fascinating to watch.

Meanwhile, the flow of briefings out of the Sussex camp continues, with The Telegraph (which seems increasingly cozy with the Sussex operation) reporting that the school run poses particular dangers for the family. The paper has a catalog of alleged plots, including an incident in May 2023 in which the Sussexes’ Montecito security team is said to have confronted a man carrying a hammer and duct tape who intended to break into their house. That is a serious matter. What it has to do with their security in Gloucestershire is less obvious.

The Telegraph also carried, earlier in the week, a quote attributed to a source close to King Charles saying, essentially, that he wanted the couple to get their security back, that he was worried about his grandchildren going unprotected, and that he found himself in a very difficult position.

What makes the whole security saga so frustrating is a very obvious solution sitting in plain sight. As Robert Jobson told The Royalist podcast this week, the king could simply hire highly experienced former police officers on a private basis and pay for them himself. The objection that private officers cannot carry firearms is absurd. The last thing Harry and Meghan need, given their current standing, is for a bodyguard to shoot somebody. Gunning down a suspicious loiterer on a Cotswolds street corner won’t do much for the numbers.

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Alas, the king’s aversion to paying family expenses out of his own pocket is well documented, most recently by Gabriel Pogrund’s Sunday Times story last weekend on the money flowing to Queen Camilla’s sister Annabel Elliot via the King’s Foundation. (Pogrund, the man behind the Fortnum & Mason carrier bags stuffed with €500 notes and the cash-for-honors scandal, joins me on Monday, Sept. 7 to talk about that story and about the broader theme of irregular money in royal life. Do not miss this podcast.)

But if this really is an argument about a couple of million pounds a year, it is an extraordinary one. The king’s annual private income from the Duchy of Lancaster runs to around £25 million ($34 million). He pays, as far as anyone can tell, for Andrew’s security. He supports Beatrice and Eugenie with rent subsidies. Why not Harry and Meghan?

As I reported exclusively last week, the king encouraged them to come home. They would not be here if he had told them they were not welcome, or had shown any backbone at all in standing up to them. This is a rehabilitation effort being carried out by the king, in the teeth of public opinion, William’s wishes, and the advice of his own courtiers. It is ridiculous to pretend otherwise. I think it is fair enough that the king should be the one who pays for a hot mess of his own creation.

Only 2 percent of the British public support taxpayer-funded protection for the Sussexes, and it is not hard to see why. Many people believe Harry put himself in danger with his own foolish choices, above all the decision to write in Spare that he had killed 25 members of the Taliban, an unbelievably stupid thing for someone supposedly preoccupied with his family’s safety to do.

The week ahead will be extraordinary. On Tuesday Sept. 8, Prince George starts at Eton. The same week, Archie and Lilibet are expected to start at their new schools. Three cousins, three first days, and one very uneasy family.

Want more royal gossip, scoops and scandal? Follow all Tom Sykes’ reporting at The Royalist on Substack or listen to The Royalist podcast on YouTube.

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Tom SykesEuropean Editor at Large

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