Harry and Meghan are in a hole and should stop digging

My wife and I used to watch “Suits”, the New York-based legal drama that established Meghan Markle as a B-list celebrity. The show was all about the conflict between romance and ambition, with the lawyers constantly circling each other and their clients amid ever more outlandish claims of betrayal and fraud.  Everyone was angry, forever walking out on each other.

We gave up watching after Season 7, when Markle’s character, the gushing but laser-focused Rachel Zane, left with her husband Mike Ross – a phony who came good – to begin a new life in Seattle.

At one point during all this, Zane … I mean Markle, ran into Prince Harry, who was at a bit of a loose end, being the second son of the Prince of Wales and the younger brother of Prince William, both of them in full-time training to be King of England. He didn’t have a job. He had left the Army and was apparently destined to spend the rest of his life waving.

Meghan, for her part, was on vacation in London, looking for “a nice English gentleman to flirt with”.

I can only speculate here, but it seems safe to assume that the actress, having been introduced “by chance” to Harry, became intrigued by the idea of marrying into royalty. Those who know them don’t doubt that the couple are in love, but in love, as in life, there are always calculations.

Suits was winding down, she was 36 and if she was ever going to make a better life for herself now was probably the time, and this the perfect opportunity. The fact that Harry was tall, handsome and “ripped” will not have escaped her attention, but it was surely the fact that he came from the ultimate in “good family” and called the Queen “Granny” that loomed largest in his legend.

For his part, Harry was desperate to minimise the waving thing. He had seen what happened to his uncles, Andrew and Edward, the former bored, fed up and, as we now know, soon to be enmeshed in scandal; the latter, having failed to make it in actual show business, reduced to playing walk-on parts in the ongoing family pantomime.

Meghan may not have been Hollywood royalty (you need a succession of big movies to be that), but she knew what it was like to be recognised in the street and to be written about as if she was a commodity rather than a person. On top of that, she was beautiful and, you’d have to say, sexy, and she had a healthy bank account. What was not to like?

And so they got married, just like in the fairy tales, and lived happily ever after.

Except, as “Finding Freedom”, a soon-to-be-released biography of the couple by “royal watchers” Carolyn Durrand and Omid Scobie, confirms, they didn’t – live happily ever after, that is.

Again, I can only speculate, but it seems obvious that everything that was supposed to go right went wrong from the start. Meghan, now the Duchess of Sussex, didn’t like waving either, and she didn’t get on with her new sister-in-law, the Duchess of Cambridge and future Queen – herself a commoner by birth – who, if gossip is to be believed, looked down on the American as a fortune-hunter and parvenu, unfit for palace life.

Harry, at the same time, looked to be increasingly unhinged. As with each of the Cambridge births he dropped further and further down the line of succession, he could see his life panning out in front of him – attending military gatherings, touring the Commonwealth, organising and reorganising the Invictus Games, always playing second fiddle to his brother who, as first-born, got the only job worth having, leaving him and his wife, as they aged, dissolving into the shadows.

The two princes, as is well known, are damaged. The death of their mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, in a car crash in Paris in 1997, while canoodling with her latest boyfriend Dodi Al Fayed, was traumatic. More than once, the two have spoken about its lasting impact on their lives.

But while William, as the future king, eventually managed to put it behind him, Harry carried the memory of his mother’s death like a headstone round his neck. Was it any wonder that the young man, still only 33, with his chosen career already behind him, was in the market for radical change?

According to Durand and Scobie, the problem with the marriage from the point of view of the Palace was not that Markle was American (a plus, you might have thought, given the current state of the Special Relationship), or even that she was bi-racial, with a black mother and a white father (surely just what the Windsors needed in post-Brexit Britain). Rather, it was that she was a “showgirl,” who came laden with “baggage”, most obviously a father who, however unfairly, gave the impression of having drifted off the set of the Jerry Springer Show.

But if snobbery was part of the problem, there was also the small matter of the Duchess’s rapidly developing sense of unfulfillment. She was used to Hollywood swagger. Parties in southern California were a blast. TV was fun. You got to play parts that were entertaining and paid for your millionaire lifestyle, with cash to spare. By contrast, life in the Royal Family turned out to be as dull as a march-past by the RAF Regiment on a damp February afternoon.

What to do? Harry could probably have survived the life into which he was born, especially if he had married the daughter of an Earl or a retired General. It’s not as if he had secretly been planning to study classics or embark on a career in diplomacy or corporate management. But he was damned if he was going to submit his wife to a life to which she was temperamentally unsuited and in which she was held in low regard by members of his family and their courtiers.

In the meantime, of course, young Archie was born – not a prince exactly, nor even heir to the Dukedom, which remains in the Sovereign’s gift, but a boy with his whole life ahead of him whose parents had clearly had enough from Day One of press intrusion and an unseemly undercurrent of speculation concerning his appearance.

The stage was now set for the couple’s decision to “step back” from the Royal Family. A statement was put out to the effect that Harry and Meghan would in future make their own way in the world, earning their own money and leading their own lives.

The Queen, we are told, was shocked. She hadn’t been told. William was disappointed, his wife perhaps less so. Prince Philip’s thoughts on the subject can only be imagined. But if the decision to step back took the Palace by surprise, it was what happened next that shook them to the core.

Harry and Meghan took flight, first to Canada (which at least was in the Commonwealth) and then to Los Angeles, where they have since anchored themselves at the lower end of the Jet Set, living in a borrowed mansion until they work out how much money they have to invest and what sort of income they should expect in the future. For several weeks the word was that Sussex Royal would be their brand, suggesting some sort of digital enterprise that monetised their royal status while conveying an impression of philanthropy.

But then it was announced that they could no longer even use the royal handle. From now on, by decree of Her Majesty, they were merely a Duke and Duchess. Harry’s princely title was placed in suspension, pending a prodigal’s return, rendering him no longer His Royal Highness, but simply His Grace, married to Mrs Grace.

Who knows what will become of them? They are not monsters, and the one thing that is certain is that they have not had it easy. As a result, they are defensive to a degree that is unhealthy, and litigious with it. The suspicion has to be that if they stay together, like a latter-day Duke and Duchess of Windsor, they will gradually fade into the background of La La Land, so that one day some movie star at a party will stare at Harry – by now resembling a taller version of the Major in Fawlty Towers – and ask, “Hey, aren’t you that dook that used to be King of England?”.

It could be argued that they were handed the shovels. But there is no doubt that they themselves dug the hole into which they are now disappearing. How they get out of that hole and build new and fruitful lives for themselves and Archie will be the stuff of tabloid legend for the next 30 years.