Hollywood prestige tanking? Financial desperation? Filial tenderness towards a sick father? A Wind in the Willows nostalgia for Archie and Lilibet to experience an egg-and-spoon race on a sunny Sports Day at a trad British school? There has been a fire hose of explanations for the Duke and Duchess of Sussexes’ bombshell return to England after six years in the hellishly serene wilderness of Montecito. If you happened to be early to bed in the UK when the news dropped Wednesday night, it felt very 1940 – everyone waking to discover that Germany had invaded Norway overnight.
So here’s the scoop about the Sussex thunderbolt: I can confirm Meghan has a job. The identity of the show is not yet clear, but it allows Harry, at last, to get her buy-in for his growing desire to get the hell out of paradise and go home to the world he understands.
For the last few years, when he was not engaged as an enthusiastic parent to Archie and Lilibet, the once Tiggerish Harry has been moping around their nine-bedroom, 16-bathroom Montecito mansion, suing tabloids, and instructing staff not to share any negative press with Meghan. “But then,” an ex-staffer told me, “a friend or somebody in the kitchen will be like, ‘Oh ma’am, I’m so sorry today. That’s so mean,’ and she’s like, ‘What happened?’ And then it’s a fucking tornado… She can’t get out of bed.” Their California funk wasn’t just a failure to escape the hounds of hell from the tabloid press who covered them every day as if they’d never left England. Tension around money was ratcheting up as projects with Netflix and Spotify were either minimally renewed or bit the dust entirely, and then - catastrophe - after two victories against the press in his phone-hacking lawsuits, Harry lost big time in his privacy case against the Daily Mail, and is now on the hook with six other defendants, including Elton John, for $24.3 million and, on Friday, they were ordered to fork over the first $13 million. There are rumors that Harry and Elton are no longer on the best of terms, perhaps because Elton is tired of reading that he is going to pick up most of the tab. (“I’m not a human ATM,” he reportedly said grumpily.)
It was always the best option for Meghan to return to acting, something she was genuinely good at, until she threw it in to marry Harry. In 2023, when replays of her old hit cable show Suits were inexplicably all the rage on Netflix, it would have been a legitimate pop-culture sensation and a major payday if she had let her agents pitch her for a reboot. But no. Duchesses don’t do ensembles. Meghan believed she could pull off some kind of manic multi-hyphenate mishmash of entertainment enterprises in between accompanying her husband on ersatz royal tours to promote random global uplift. As Martha Stewart noted, “If you’re an actress, it’s hard to then transition to a princess and then from a princess into a homemaking guru on a television show. It doesn’t sort of follow.” Last month, Meghan appeared on Master Chef Australia as a surprise celebrity judge, and I am told it was a tonic to her mood. She finally realized how much easier - and more fun - it is to perform in a hit baked by someone else. She was back on the market, and it did not take long for Hollywood’s mega-deal machine, WME, the talent agency that still represents her, to get her a role.
The move to the UK solves two identity crises for the Sussexes in one blow. It was Meghan’s fish-out-of-water misery in London that made a return to England so unlikely before now. Serial failure in Hollywood is a Harry Potter cloak of invisibility, but at least she didn’t have the impenetrable British class system to decode. Harry has never had a real power base there - what’s a penny-ante British prince in a town of $100 million Tom Hollands - and their joint irrelevance had reached a tipping point. A job for Meghan frees Harry to make a last run at staying royal before his father dies and his brother ices him out for good.
As one of the least self-reflective people in the world, except about his own grievances, Harry is blessed with a naive obliviousness about the damage he caused his family with the Oprah interview, the Netflix documentary, and his scorching memoir Spare. It was a three-fer that I am told, Queen Camilla, any more than William, will never forgive him for. But she will tolerate however Charles chooses to proceed for the sake of her ailing husband’s peace of mind. In typical form, Harry only informed his father on Sunday, just three days before the news broke. The king and William, btw, are now gathered with other family members at Balmoral in Scotland. Hold the bagpipes.
How will it all play out? With the Sussexes back in the country, William and Kate will up the diary dates, stay poker-faced, and ensure they never cross paths with the Sussexes except at family funerals. Privately, they will fume when eclipsed by each Harry and Meghan news update, such as the first big reveal of Archie and Lilibet photographed from the front. But tant pis. Now that William is Prince of Wales and has inherited the Duchy of Cornwall, with a fortune of approximately $30 million a year, he is so much more powerful than in 2020 when Harry left the monarchy behind. There is no chance Harry will regain his status as a working royal.
The king is leery of allowing Harry the latitude of indulgence that his mother bestowed on Prince Andrew, but the return of his prodigal son (and adorable grandchildren) could offer more than paternal consolations — a sliver of emotional leverage against William’s haughty flexes in interviews about “change [being] on my agenda” when he ultimately ascends the throne.
So who will be the Tyler Perry of the shires willing to offer Harry and Meghan the loan of an appropriately grand and isolated house near good schools? After visiting the king at Highgrove in July, the Sussexes went on to spend a blissful summer weekend at Princess Diana’s ancestral home, Althorp House, with Harry’s Uncle Charles (soon to publish his own long-withheld memoir about his sister) and, I am told, his favorite aunts, Sarah and Jane, who have never lost their soft spot for Harry. Such a tender family reunion must have been a salve to the Sussexes’ battered pride. There may be eternal frost from the Windsor side, but there will always be the Spencers whose exalted lineage goes back over five hundred years. It is widely thought that Charles Spencer will offer up a house at Althorp, which sits on 13,000 acres in Northamptonshire. Didn’t Harry just say that Buckingham Palace wasn’t safe enough for his family to stay in? Yes, but perhaps he’s also begun to realize that any British private school is safer for his children than equivalent schools in the U.S. that have active-shooter drills in kindergarten. Lambrooke, in Berkshire, where the Wales children – George, Charlotte, and Louis – have been enrolled, is a discreet fortress for the children of the elite. Northamptonshire is a very grand and ducal county with a ton of excellent feeder schools to such academic toppers as Oundle.
Despite all the snarling comments under Daily Mail stories telling the Sussexes to go to hell, Harry could win back the British public if he bounds around charity events for veterans and sick children, doing balloon sword fights and goat yoga. His dire poll ratings had already been on the rise since his July visit. If Meghan appears in a show that finally works, and they both keep smiling and shut the fuck up, slowly but surely… The good news for Harry’s old adversaries in the tabloid press is that that’s never going to happen.
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