Harry and Meghan have reached peak Sussex

Three years after dramatically withdrawing from royal life, Harry and Meghan have let it be known that they are retiring from royal strife.

According to a report in The Sun this week, the pair are to stop writing memoirs and making fly-on-the-wall Netflix documentaries that criticise the royals.

They have apparently exhausted their material and will only feature behind the cameras in future productions. “That period of their life is over – as there is nothing left to say,” one insider reportedly said.

The news was not as earth shattering as the Sussexes might have hoped, coming in a week when Kyiv was under renewed attack, fighting in Sudan claimed more casualties, and the race for the Republican nomination got more interesting,

Although the world, those of us who noticed, probably agreed this was a good development, reactions were more of bored relief than gobsmacked wonderment.

For the truth is, excitement over these royal runaways was already fizzling out, all the titillating exposes having failed to create the A-list aura they so crave in their new homeland.

Since they departed the house of Windsor to set up a quasi-court in California, Harry and Meghan have bombarded us with revelations, mostly about the horrors of their royal experience.

His grievances – with the press, his father, his brother, his mother-in-law – were the typical whinge of the spoilt brat, born with every privilege but no discernment.

Hers, as the outsider, were potentially more explosive: suggestions she was a victim of racism or, as Harry later put it, “unconscious bias”, rocked the royal family.

It has been 40 months of complaint, long distance savaging, froideur and hurt. The Sussexes have executed their campaign of estrangement unremittingly, against a backdrop of upheaval, for Britain and the royal family.

Their early shots, in that Oprah Winfrey interview, were fired from the comfort of Montecito while the UK locked down during the Covid pandemic. I think sympathy for the couple, preoccupied with petty slights while Britons suffered, never fully recovered from that moment.

Their salvos continued as the beloved Queen’s health deteriorated and even on her death, Harry’s thoughts were for his place in the pecking order – why could his wife not be at HM’s bedside too? – rather than on the enormity of the occasion.

And at his father’s coronation, the Sussex circus threatened (unsuccessfully in the end) to distract from the big day with their will-they-or-won’t-they-turn-up charade.

But where has their misery narrative got them? Harry and Meghan, feted when they landed stateside, are now more often figures of fun, mocked as the cartoonish “Prince and Princess of Canada” in the satirical show South Park, which saw them embarking on a global “we want privacy” tour.

More recently, their claims they were involved in a “near catastrophic” car chase with the paparazzi in New York were met with scepticism from the city’s police and mayor and disbelief from seasoned Sussex watchers.

The problem with their “era of visibility” is that we have seen too much of them. The royals’ unique selling point traditionally has been their mystique and, as individuals, few members of the family would benefit from closer scrutiny.

Harry thrived in the public eye under the protection of protocol, with minders orchestrating, as much as possible, his official forays and covering up his faux pas. Left to his own devices, he comes a cropper in cringeworthy television appearances and “poor me” confessionals.

Meghan, the more accomplished performer, achieved real stardom through marriage, not acting, but then squandered her cachet by disowning the very institution that had exalted her.

Today, they seem a sorry spectacle, apparently leading separate social lives. The journalist Petronella Wyatt said: “Friends of mine who live near them are always bumping into Meghan at parties these days. She tends to leave Harry at home.”

He, more than her, is now dealing with the consequences of having opened hostilities. He is fighting legal battles on several fronts and is expected to be in London next week to testify against Mirror Group Newspapers, the first senior British royal to give evidence in court for 130 years. 

He is also the subject of an ongoing visa row in the US after he naively discussed his drug use in his memoir, Spare.

Perhaps going to parties is not Harry’s priority right now. Perhaps he is beginning to tire of the frivolous existence he has embarked on with Meghan in America, all talk and no action, despite their stated intention on their Archewell website to “lead the way with compassion” and “change the world”.

While a period of silence would be welcome from these two, the most likely scenario is that we will hear plenty from both of them in the weeks, months and years to come but they will be increasingly uncoupled, professionally at least, in their outbursts. A rebranding to dread because we may end up with more, not less, Sussex.

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