The best thing we can say, as 2023 limps to a close, is, at least nothing caught on fire.
In 1992, the late Queen famously stood in the London Guildhall to give a speech and told the audience that it was “not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure.” Her three married children had all separated from their spouses and her beloved Windsor Castle had come close to burning down.
Here we are just over 30 years later and I think we can argue that 2023 is a year that Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, won’t “look back with undiluted pleasure” either.
Mocked, dumped, satarised, evicted, spurned by family, dubbed “f**king grifters”, and papped relentlessly. This year has been one that has seen the couple’s star not so much dimmed as having been flicked off at the switch.
Then came the coup de grace, when trade bible The Hollywood Reporter gave their pronouncement on the Sussexes’ last 12 months, dubbing them some of 2023’s biggest ‘losers’.
And with that one word it confirmed one fact: This has been the Sussexes’ very own annus horribilis.
What is so remarkable is that this time last year, the picture looked diametrically opposite for the couple. On December 7, Harry and Meghan took to the red carpet in New York to attend the RFK Foundation’s Ripple of Hope Awards, where they were set to pick up a gong. Meghan looked dazzling, Harry looked pleased as punch and the fortunes of the House of Sussex could not have looked in more ruddy health! Success, acclaim and vindication all seemed to await them.
Instead, the beginning of their great slide would begin the very next day when the first “volume” of their Harry & MeghanNetflix docuseries landed.
The show, six episodes in total, would be the couple’s first real, comprehensive opportunity to set out their record of events; to get off their chests how and why things soured so dramatically that they handed in the first royal resignation letter since Edward VIII and Wallis had slunk off to France.
Except that all that Harry & Meghan had to offer was just a tediously long, overwrought regurgitating of their Oprah Winfrey interview’s greatest hits, with the added bad taste of a mock curtsy.
For the benefit of the cameras, the duo revisited old hurts and already-run ground, all of it just re-told with dramatic pauses and a deluge of iPhone footage spliced in.
Then, less than three weeks after that, in the first days of 2023, came the great sonic boom that was Spare, which promised to be an unflinching personal excavation by Harry.
If you are reading this then I don’t need to reel off the book’s litany of claims, like Prince William allegedly striking him during a physical altercation over bullying accusations made about Meghan by their shared staff resulting in the destruction of the most famous dog bowl in history, or l’affair frozen “todger”.
Still, the tome sold like the clappers with publisher Penguin Random House excitably cranking out a press release the following day trumpeting that it was the fastest selling nonfiction title in history.
However, something curious was going on. Even though Harry and Meghan were attracting attention, media coverage and stoking the fires of public obsession, the public, including notably American audiences, were turning on them.
In the space of barely five weeks, from days before Harry & Meghan debuted in early December to mid-January, the week after Spare was released, the couple’s support in the US toppled off a cliff.
In that time, Harry plummeted 45 points in public support while Meghan fell 36 points, according to polling done by Redfield & Wilson for Newsweek.
(A year to the day, the same poll showed that while the Sussexes have regained a lot of ground, they have still not managed to return to their pre-Netflix numbers.)
What soon became apparent was that Harry & Meghan and Spare had not proven to be persuasive or nuanced or even that revelatory but had instead boomeranged. The duo looked like they had traduced his family’s privacy and strung out a series of well-founded grievances into a money-grabbing, sympathy-seeking play.
Around this time, the world later learned, King Charles demanded the keys back to their UK home, Frogmore Cottage, where ‘cottage’ sounds like something of a misnomer given it’s a five-bedroom Grade II property on the private royal estate that got a $4 million plus reno.
Whether this was retribution for Spare and its portrayal of the king as a lemon of a father or whether, as a friend of His Majesty told the Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes, “He can’t be seen to be keeping luxury homes on standby for his children”. The Sussexes were out.
It was to be the first humiliation in a year chock full of them for the duke and duchess.
When Harry, and only Harry turned up for the coronation, he cut a sad, lonely figure, dumped in the third row and so keen to get out of the land of his birth he went straight from Westminster Abbey to the airport. I’m surprised he didn’t wheel his carry-on in with him into the Abbey.
Then in May it was time for the duke and duchess to collect another award because it had been six months since their last one. So they jetted off to New York, Meghan frocked up in a stunner of a dress and then she gave a speech that has all but been lost after becoming involved in what they described as a “near catastrophic” paparazzi chase.
Their overwrought take on what had happened was then punctured by the New York Police Department and the city’s mayor’s casting of events. Embarrassment? Ah, we meet again.
June was not a month that the Sussexes would probably care to remember when it was announced they had “mutually agreed” to part ways with Spotify. After only one lacklustre Christmas special in 2020 and only one series of Meghan’s tedious Archetypes the streamer had decided to move on, resulting in the couple losing not only reportedly losing millions but a hell of a lot of face.
It was a humiliating blow that further popped the Sussex balloon. Increasingly they were looking like two people around whom so much hype and buzz had given away to blunt reality, a sort of Wizard of Oz curtain-pulling back.
One bright spot: when Harry became the first senior member of the royal family in 130 years to take to the stand when he got his day in court as part of his hacking case against the Mirror Group Newspapers.
Around this time too speculation began to burble up about the state of their marriage with the Telegraph reporting that “a leading hotel chain in Montecito” had “a room set aside for Harry where he occasionally stays on his own.” Harry and only Harry then gallivanting off to Japan and Singapore for a charity polo match, during which he positively beamed like a megawatt bulb fresh out of the box, hardly helped the rumours of marital strife.
The debut in August of Harry’s long-awaited Netflix project Heart of Invictus failed to make any sort of splash. While incredibly moving and beautifully shot, subscribers showed little if no interest in the series.
The Invictus Games, in September, were a brief bright spot with Harry in his element as he supported wounded military service people and veterans, bounding around and dispensing high fives and hugs like a one-duke hype machine.
In October the Sussexes’ Archewell Foundation hosted a “Parents’ Summit” focused on “Mental Wellness in the Digital Age” in New York as part of World Mental Health Day, a brief glimpse of the Sussexes on their game.
When in November the Times reported they were interested in a royal Sandringham Christmas, Buckingham Palace responded by changing their unlisted number. (I jest but …)
December offered a high point, at least for Harry, when he won his hacking claim against MGN, letting him take the moral high ground and put out a cringey statement involving dragons. As toe-curling as him going all DIY Galahad might have been, it is to Harry’s credit that he fought so hard here to see the truth come out.
The same month, industry bible The Hollywood Reporter officially labelled the Sussexes as some of this year’s biggest losers, describing them as having “fled a life of ceremonial public service to cash in their celebrity status in the States” only to see “the Harry and Meghan brand [swell] into a sanctimonious bubble”.
Regular reports claiming that Meghan was on the cusp of launching some sort of digital lifestyle business have so far failed to eventuate, along with her activating the @Megahn Instagram account that is widely reputed to be hers.
There’s more, so much more that happened this year but the question I keep coming back to is, how did it come to this? How did the Sussexes go from being the hottest of sizzling hot property, talent being fought over by the biggest entertainment behemoths in the world, to being called out as losers by the Reporter and becoming regular punchlines? (Family Guy and South Park.)
The last year has really crystallised how much of a miscalculation the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have strategically made in setting up their US lives.
What seems clear from this vantage point is that the one-two punch of Netflix and then Spare made them look like they were trapped in a Groundhog Day of aggrievement of their own making. They badly misjudged the public’s appetite for them taking a historic falling out and then making it into their own personal cash cow.
There also came a tipping point when they went from looking like righteous truth-tellers, valiantly standing up to a storeyed institution, to them looking like they were milking all that family misery to make tens of millions.
Rather than spending their crucial first years in the US really laying down a strong foundation for their brand and their careers, instead they have seemed relentlessly focused on litigating and re-litigating every slight and injustice ever committed within a one kilometre radius of royal lands. Having streamed their shows, read the book, and watched Harry’s TV interviews, it has often felt like a Jerry Springer episode where the guests won’t get off the stage.
Meanwhile, now that the world has finally gotten a chance to see what the Sussexes have to offer as producers, I think we can say that so far the duo is indifferent at best at their new careers.
What is clear is that the duke and duchess’ ‘eat your vegetables’ programming with its lofty aims and earnestness hasn’t worked: viewers only want the high fructose corn syrup-laden junk food of the great royal falling out. (And there comes a point when they are full up on that too.)
Of their three series released in the last year, it is only Harry & Meghan that has performed. (There was also the blink and you’ll miss it Live To Lead.)
The problem for the duke and duchess is that they seem driven by, and pulled by, competing forces – by financial need, by an unslaked thirst for royal family point scoring, by wanting to be leaders on key issues and to also support the 19 different causes laid out in their recent Archewell Foundation impact report.
By trying to be, simultaneously, quasi-states people, philanthropists, TV makers, podcast hosts, and authors, all while enjoying the celebrity good life, they have failed to actually really make any great inroads on any of these fronts.
It is all a muddled, busy, higgledy-piggledy tangle of projects and goals and causes.
Let me say that it is to Harry and Meghan’s credit that they do any charity at all – they are under no obligation post-palace to do anything and can spend their days eating tins of Quality Street on the couch and making large donations to Republic UK. But they keep getting in the way of themselves, dashing from cause to cause.
Still, as we approach the four year mark of Megxit, the Sussexes have largely failed to live up to the promise and possibility of their emancipation from the royal cage. They are not doing things ambitiously differently or have made massive waves. Left to their own devices their hearts are clearly in the right place but that has not translated into anything wildly innovative or exciting.
There is also the issue of follow-through. Anyone remember Meghan’s 40x40 initiative?
Fundamentally, the last 12 months have represented a massive erosion of the goodwill and sympathy afforded to the duke and duchess. They have squandered much of their public capital fighting a one-sided public war with the Palace while proving to be insipid content creators who have little to recommend them beyond their titles.
Consider too that all of this has been playing out against the backdrop of the unfathomable suffering on display in Ukraine and the Middle East.
To quote that same 1992 speech of the late Queen: “I sometimes wonder how future generations will judge the events of this tumultuous year.”
More Coverage
Close to a year to the day that Harry and Meghan were at the Ripple of Hope Awards, the duchess was papped in California making her way through a parking lot with a bodyguard, the couple a cautionary tale about the dangers of being all sizzle and very little actual sausage.
And yet, I don’t think that Harry and Meghan are out for the count, by any means. America is, after all, the land of second – and third and fourth – chances.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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2023-12-27 09:14:23Z
CBMilAFodHRwczovL3d3dy5uZXdzLmNvbS5hdS9lbnRlcnRhaW5tZW50L2NlbGVicml0eS1saWZlL3JveWFscy9vbmUtd29yZC1jb25maXJtcy1tZWdoYW4tYW5kLWhhcnJ5LW5pZ2h0bWFyZS9uZXdzLXN0b3J5L2FiYTUzMGRkYzM3MzQ5ZWIwMDRkZjY2Y2UzZjFmMGZi0gEA
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