Wouldn’t it be amusing to see an actual fly-on-the-wall job about Netflix’s new Harry & Meghan documentary? Imagine the scenes behind-the-scenes. The duchess rehearses her crying face in consultation with her make-up specialist. The duke glares at himself in a mirror. “I had to protect my family,” he repeats over and over as he fingers his apricot beard. The lighting team try to coax along the impossibly capricious royals only to suffer their own nervous breakdowns after Meghan accuses them of disregarding her mental health.
Or maybe that’s not the entertainment people want. Television these days is all about “structured reality” — or rubbish glossed up as revelation. It’s up to you, the viewer, to decide how much you can be bothered to disbelieve. “No one knows the full truth,” says Harry, in the second teaser Netflix released this week. “We know the full truth.”
How does that work, exactly, H? Well, the “full truth” apparently involves presenting “accredited pool” royal photographs — i.e. images over which Harry and Meghan had control — as evidence of media intrusiveness. It means splicing together shots of Harry and Meghan with images of a crowd outside a Harry Potter film premiere that took place five years before the duke and duchess ever met — as well as a clip of a crowd waiting for the glamour model Katie Price outside court and a gang of paparazzi surrounding the car of former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. Is this some sort of edgy statement about the way the media manipulates our perceptions? Or just a load of flashy cobblers? Harry & Meghan could end up being an inversion of Netflix’s other royal drama, The Crown — the characters are real but it’s far less believable.
Harry, for his part, seems almost sweetly obsessed with his own personal truth-bombing campaign. This includes his mind-blowing news that, as he puts it, “there’s a hierarchy of the family.” He’s talking there about the royal family there. In another dazzling disclosure, Harry says that when it comes to royal stories and the press: “There’s leaking, but there’s also planting of stories.” Gee.
Arguably Harry’s most astute moment comes when he says, with a hint of malice, that royal publicity is “a dirty game.” So it is. He, his wife and their media handlers appear hellbent on their mission to cause as much trouble as possible for the royal family they’ve left behind — in particular for brother William and sister-in-law Kate. Why else would the Sussexes have released the first attention-hogging trailer for their show last week on Twitter as the Prince and Princess of Wales visited America? “That really pissed William and Kate off,” says someone who went on the US trip. “They felt ambushed.”
Harry and Meghan, for all their talk about combatting cyberbullying, appear to have mastered the art of “trolling” — that’s online slang for deliberately winding people up. On Tuesday the pair accepted the Ripple of Hope award from Kerry Kennedy, the niece of John F. Kennedy, for their “heroic stand” against “structural racism” in the monarchy. Meghan and Harry spoke at the event and she talked of “sweeping down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
Netflix has kept tight-lipped about the precise allegations leveled in Harry & Meghan, yet palace officials have long been bracing themselves for another attempt to smear the British monarchy as vile and racist. There’s also mounting concern in court circles about Harry’s memoir, Spare, which is coming out on January 10.
Windsor males, not unlike medieval knights or tribal warlords, are at their most quarrelsome when it comes to their womenfolk. A bit of mano a mano is OK in the context of a public intra-royal spat, but the ladies are off-limits. The King is fretting that the book will include some horrid lines about Camilla. Harry says he wants to draw attention to the “pain and suffering of women who marry into the institution” and is clearly desperate to avenge the many slights he perceives against his wife. William is concerned that Harry will use the documentary to go after Kate — portraying her as an ice-cold outsider turned insider, who could have helped Meghan but didn’t. “William wants to be seen to rise above it,” says one insider. “But if he feels he has to protect his wife from something that is factually untrue or particular unfair, he will.”
William and Kate are not innocent when it comes to the dark arts of PR, mind. Back in 2019, when Harry and Meghan were being rebuked for taking private jets while lecturing the world, the then Cambridges helpfully got snapped boarding a budget Ryanair flight. And in March last year, just a week after Harry and Meghan’s notorious Oprah Winfrey interview, Kate happened to be caught on camera, dressed down in Barbour and jeans, paying humble tribute to the murdered Sarah Everard at a vigil near the Clapham Common bandstand. It’s a dirty game, remember.
Harry’s people, or at least his publishers, are understood to be lining up a volley of British media hits to promote his book and further annoy his family. William and Kate’s “strategy is to respond by being worthy and serious,” according to one source. The couple visited Scarborough last month to raise awareness about mental health and cost-of-living issues: “Expect them to be somewhere even worthier when Spare comes out,” says the same source.
Wouldn’t it be better — or “trollier” — just to announce William’s own bombshell autobiography, Heir, in early January? No, no, Kate and William are eager to imitate the late Queen’s highly successful approach to life on the royal front line: pitching in nobly with the ribbon-cutting humdrum at home and doing the dignitary routine abroad. In Boston last week, the Waleses must have been pleased to have rubbed shoulders with senior members of the Kennedy family — America’s closest thing to royalty — whereas Harry and Meghan received their made-up woke gong from the seventh child of Robert F. Kennedy. “They had a Kennedy-off,” says an insider: “William and Kate won.”
The new Prince and Princess of Wales also met President Joe Biden, who happened to be in Massachusetts on a fundraiser at the same time. ‘It was all very last minute,’ says a source. “But the White House were if anything keener than Kensington Palace to make it happen. That sort of thing gives Kate and William a sort of clout that Harry and Meghan just do not have.”
William and his father seem to be co-ordinating their “damage control” efforts whenever Harry and Meghan launch another broadside across the Atlantic. Charles’s new spokesman, the former tabloid man Tobyn Andreae, has a rather different style to William and Kate’s new PR man, Lee Thompson, the former vice president of communications at NBC. But the two men are said to have established a good working relationship. Look at the co-ordinated — albeit somewhat panicked — reaction to Ngozi Fulani’s claim last week that she has been racially abused at Buckingham Palace. William learned of the story before he flew and was eager to deal with the matter quickly so it wouldn’t overshadow the trip. Yet Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace took care to issue complementary messages about racism being “unacceptable.” Poor Lady Susan Hussey, William’s godmother and the accused, had to shuffle off in disgrace after decades of loyal service. What would the Queen have said?
After Elizabeth II’s death, there was said to be a bit of muddle among the various palace aides as to who should do exactly what, as the royal households all shuffled up a notch. But nothing brings the King and the Prince of Wales together like incoming fire from Harry and Meghan. In this strange way, Harry has managed to make his paranoia real. He has convinced himself that “the firm” has conspired to destroy his marriage from day one and now, with all these hostile public performances, he acts in a way that makes it impossible for his family to do anything other than work against him. This compounds his persecution complex. Some therapist should probably suggest that to him.
Or perhaps Harry and Meghan are suffering from something similar to what the nineteenth-century French psychiatrists Charles Lasègue and Jules Falret identified as folie à deux, a disorder whereby two individuals in close association become codependent on a shared delusional system. In such cases, the shrinks say, a husband and wife can act “as a resonator, increasing the pitch of their narcissism.” Harry and Meghan aren’t just cynically fishing for empathy in the great lakes of woke America, then. They fully believe themselves to be star-crossed lovers destined to bring down structural racism — a Bonnie and Clyde against the system.
It’s also possible that the Sussexes realise at some level that they are fast losing that precious “clout.” The American elite can be just as snobbish as our own, and egocentric Hollywood stars aren’t all that impressed by a breakaway duchess who used to be an actress in Canada. Some newspapers gleefully reported that Harry and Meghan were “snubbed” by Barack and Michelle Obama on the occasion of the 44th president’s sixtieth birthday. “Meghan and Harry are just not in that same league of celebrity,” said the royal expert Dickie Arbiter, who monitors such matters. The point is, if influence-mad celebrities feel they must side with Harry and Meghan or William and Kate, they will probably choose the couple closer to the throne.
Meanwhile, Meghan’s much-hyped Archetypes podcast, for which Spotify paid some $25 million, has been much ridiculed. The first season ended last week, and the show has already slipped to seventeenth place in the streaming service’s top podcasts US chart.
That may or may not have something to do with the decision of Mandana Dayani, president of the Sussexes’ Archewell foundation, to stand down this week. “Dayani’s transition was mutually planned, with intent for the duke and duchess to now take full lead of their company,” said Meghan and Harry’s “global press secretary.” “They go through so many staff it’s hard to know what is going on,” says another royal insider.
Will the Harry & Meghan show follow a similar path to Archetypes — a sharp spike in interest or initial disgust followed by a slow descent into irrelevance as the algorithms catch up to the fact that people don’t really care about Meghan and Harry’s worldview? Or will the feud between Harry and William keep audiences glued throughout the Christmas period? People only ever really watch soap operas for the joy of seeing other families fight. It’s just that little bit extra-special at this time of year.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
