Are the Windsors Underestimating the Sussex Problem?

Just how desperate does the House of Windsor want Harry and Meghan to get? The royals and their advisers don’t seem to see the iceberg looming from sunny Montecito. Distracted by the Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor catastrophe, the palace remains in a perplexed haze about one of the Andrew scandal’s less-discussed lessons: the perils to the monarchy when peripheral royals hang out with the uber-rich and start to consider themselves, by comparison, broke.

Serving it up: Meghan Markle in her unrenewed domestic goddess Netflix series

Not that there is anything about Harry and Meghan’s cacophony of blown opportunities that resembles the disgraced Andrew’s cascade of dissolute transgressions or Sarah Ferguson’s heinous groveling to their pedo pal Jeffrey Epstein. But look in the crystal ball, people. Bad enough that Spotify bailed on the Sussexes and Netflix failed to renew their 2020 $100-million deal. Now, the streamer has put a fork in Meghan’s basted turkey, With Love, Meghan, and cut loose her domestic-goddess home products spin-off after a mortifying eleven months (leaving a $10-million pile-up of tea, baking mix, and strawberry jam), the Sussexes’ revenue streams are starting to dry up. They will soon be heading for that hinterland of freebie hell that draws them further and further into cheesy commercial gigs, or worse, toward dubious, transactional acquaintances willing to underwrite their faux-royal lifestyle and their astronomical security costs. Their upcoming trip to Australia where Meghan will appear as the up-close star attraction at a paid “girls weekend,” hosted by the podcast Her Best Life in the ballroom of the InterContinental Hotel at Sydney’s Coogee Beach, has the whiff of Fergie’s post-divorce money-making schemes. (Remember the rogue redhead’s early aughts contract with Wedgwood to flog fancy table settings under the fluorescent lights of mid-market American shopping malls?)

Harry and Meghan’s 2024 DIY royal tour to Nigeria

Potential reputational hazards to the Sussexes lurk in the dreaded moral pitfall of wanting to fly private. On their 2024 DIY royal tour of Nigeria to promote Harry’s Invictus Games, Meghan’s refusal to fly by military transport meant the couple availed themselves of a small plane supplied by the Nigerian big shot Allen Onyema. Without palace advisers to brief them, Harry and Meghan seemed unaware that Onyema was wanted in the U.S. on charges of money laundering. Sounds like just the kind of dodgy dude Prince Andrew would have invited to a “straightforward shooting weekend.”

This piquant revelation comes from the British investigative journalist Tom Bower’s latest biographical hit-job, Betrayal: Power, Deceit and the Fight for the Future of the Royal Family, a 400-page forced march through the Sussexes’ post-Megxit fuckups. It’s what you would expect from Bower, a dour scandal detective, whose more than 25 previous tomes are a bomb site of reputations, from Robert Maxwell’s to David Beckham’s. He’s always been good at turning up unforgettably damning details, like the one from Rebel Prince, his 2018 biography of Prince Charles, which dropped that amongst a convoy of personal effects the prince brought to his friends’ country houses was his bespoke lavatory seat, a tidbit that may fall in the category of “too good to check.” (I am told that, as recently as two years ago, in a private discussion about press malfeasance, the king was still exasperated by “that damned lavatory seat nonsense.”)

A new Bower news bomb is always something of a publishing event in the UK. The best nuggets in Betrayal are Meghan’s doomed ongoing efforts to project authenticity. In one Instagram promotion of the “love language” of her jam, the duchess posted an image of her daughter Lilibet’s hand “nearing a bubbling pot in her own kitchen that supposedly contained her homemade spread. ‘Beautiful,’ says her daughter, although As Ever jam was apparently manufactured 2,000 miles away in Illinois.” For Meghan’s much-covered 2021 visit to a Harlem school to read the students her platitudinous picture book The Bench, her press aide arranged to have the classroom walls painted and the lighting improved to make it look “more appealing.” Meghan is portrayed as a deluded diva with an infallible belief in her own star-powered, misunderstood specialness.

Bower’s Harry is a dazed, distraught figure who stumbles around in a state of explosive chagrin. He is outraged when Sophie Chandauka, the assertive chair of Sentebale, the Lesotho charity started by a teenage Harry, presents him with a “brand audit” in 2024, informing him that fifty organizations and donors believe he is now toxic to Sentebale’s fundraising efforts. “People don’t want to be associated with your Netflix shows, and especially not with Meghan,” she told him with a brutal candor that must have been a first for the grandson of the queen. Harry was stunned. Johnny Depp, he replied wonderingly, still attracts a lot of money, despite the courtroom battles with his ex Amber Heard. Harry could not accept that his own distraction, and the blowback of his scorched-earth memoir Spare played a role in the implosion of Sentebale, despite his personal injection of $1.5 million. Ms. Chandauka is usually depicted in the tabs as a shrill saboteur who weaponized her race and gender to drive Harry out. Here, she comes across as a pragmatic businesswoman, vexed by the charity’s financial hemorrhaging and determined to reposition Sentebale for potential donors “who don’t want your victimhood. It can’t be Africans with a begging bowl.”

Juicy stuff, if true. The Sussexes have blasted the book as “deranged conspiracy.” Missing from Bower’s litany of failures is any empathy for the larger quandary of Harry and Meghan’s predicament, which haunts, in varying degrees, all the “minor” royals, expected to dutifully encircle the crown. The Windsor B-list is accustomed to a luxury and a deference that everyone resents, but without the wherewithal or expertise to pursue successful lives beyond the palace. If they try to do so, they are accused of exploiting their royal status. But what else do they have to sell? As one veteran courtier put it to me when I was writing The Palace Papers, Harry “is a deeply caring person who wants to make a positive difference. What he doesn’t understand is that the reason he’s getting to do that is because he’s a royal prince.” If Meghan fantasizes that she’s a global lifestyle guru with the following of a millennial Martha Stewart, it’s at least in part because of the sheer size of the Netflix and Spotify checks that, once upon a time, confirmed it.

Intimate distance: William and Harry at the queen’s funeral in 2022

I am told that the heir to the throne, Prince William, is preoccupied with the built-in risk of primogeniture’s cruelty. He is determined that his second- and third-born children, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, are well-prepared and well-financed for independent lives and will not fall into the same cycle of thwarted freedom. But what about his traitorous brother? The rupture with Harry is bigger than a sibling feud. Before the Sussexes crash and burn, the House of Windsor needs to put aside schadenfreude and grip the problem. Give Harry and Meghan a limited international role. Cough up a turnkey pied-à-terre for them in Buckingham Palace, where none of the rest of the family wants to live anyway. Pay their damn UK security bill. (It won’t be a good look if Harry, a veteran of two tours of Afghanistan, is taken out by a nutjob). In return, the Sussexes must put a sock in it.

As for the press’s obsession with brotherly reconciliation and forgiveness, forget it. For 70 years, Queen Elizabeth II spent her reign smiling tightly at people she couldn’t stand.