Meghan Markle is a “new woman” with a hide “like a rhino” who is confident about stepping back into British life because she now believes she has people around her who are dedicated to protecting her, according to a source close to her.
Meghan told Oprah Winfrey that last time she lived in the UK she ended up ideating suicide and that she was the subject of racist speculation about her then-unborn likely children’s skin color. The source said she was in a “very different place right now.”
The source said there is not a single reason why her, Harry and the family have chosen now to move back to the United Kingdom saying various “stars have aligned” including the children’s age and schooling options, while insisting that there were still acting opportunities for Meghan in the UK despite reports this weekend that poured cold water on claims she had been offered a part in the Guy Ritchie aristo-gangster-caper series, The Gentlemen. The Royalist has sought comment from Ritchie’s production company, Toff Guy Films, about the status of the negotiations; however, cynics will note that historically those seeking to make it big in the movie business have moved to LA, not away from it.
There is a growing suspicion that Harry and Meghan’s move back to the United Kingdom does not tessellate with a normal person’s understanding of the phrase “moving back,” which implies an essentially open-ended commitment to starting a new life in a different country.
Sure, they will arrive on a plane at Heathrow at some point in the next week, and they will enrol their kids at a posh school where the kids wear silly uniforms, but their camp are briefing me they do not even know themselves if they will be here for a year, while a source tells the London Sunday Times that they might only be in the UK six months, while an official rep tells the New York Times they are only here for the autumn!
The quote given to The New York Times is the only on-the-record line I can find anywhere about the move. A rep says Harry and Meghan have “decided to spend an extended period in the UK this autumn.” The autumn? Is that September, October, November? Is there a legal definition of fall we are working to here?
Frankly, it sounds to me that the NYT has it about right; I’d be utterly amazed if Meghan can make it through November in Princess Anne and Jeremy Clarkson’s Cotswolds, let alone February, especially as it now transpires Meghan is no longer needed urgently in Britain to act in the third series of Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen for the simple reason that a third series that has not been commissioned.
Tina Brown trumpeted the news that the deal (or the non-deal) had fallen through on her Substack.
The exact quote to the London Times about their plans is decidedly vague: “It’ll be an extended period of time. It could be six months, it could be a year, it could be more. I don’t think even they know yet. They might suddenly go, ‘Why don’t we try Canada for a while? Why don’t we try Australia?’”
WTAF? This isn’t a gap year folks! You’ve got kids! Who puts children into a new school in a new country on the basis that the family “might” be there for six months, or might “try Australia” instead? For a couple who have made mental health the centrepiece of their public identity, the lack of priority put on childhood stability and consistency being sketched here is extraordinary. If the children are being put into school in Britain, it would be profoundly unfair to pull them out after six months without giving the thing a proper go.
The school-place story, that places had “just come up,” is also a stretch. British private prep schools are desperate for pupils. The government’s imposition of VAT on fees has sent numbers through the floor, and many schools are wondering whether they will survive at all.
The question of why they left California in such a terrific hurry has led Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation to suggest in the Daily Mail that it may be connected to Harry’s drug taking and his visa application. I don’t know whether that is right. What is clear is that a great deal of this looks like a massive PR operation designed to distract from a genuinely disastrous year, and specifically from Friday’s excoriating court judgment against Harry, which left his reputation, and that of David Sherborne, in tatters. It was an absolute humiliation.
A lot of my scepticism about all this is informed by a conversation I had in March of this year with a friend of Harry’s. I had been holding that material back for my book THE DUKES but for obvious reason I decided this week to publish it now.
The conversation took place against the backdrop of the stalled RAVEC decision on Harry’s security. The friend told me, with some deliberateness: “If he doesn’t get the security, he will just go house hunting anyway.”
The security question remained his central grievance, the friend explained, but he was no longer prepared to let it function as a veto on his plans. If the establishment would not give him the protection he considered his right, he would “put it up” to them. He would buy a house, move into it, and essentially dare the local police force not to protect him.
He had a location in mind: the Cotswolds, close to his father’s home at Highgrove, where Harry was happy as a teenager and young man, where he drank in pubs with William in easier times, where he knows every lane. “He enjoys hiking and outdoor activity,” the friend said, “and is used to that pattern of life in California, where he walks his dog on the beach or hikes in the canyons.”
I noted all this. Then I asked what seemed to me the obvious question: what about Meghan? Surely London beckoned for her, if the business was to expand to Britain?
The friend shook their head. Harry “definitely did not” want to live in London. Too crowded, too hectic. The countryside was where he wanted to be.
As for Meghan, it was all about the business. If As Ever developed sufficient commercial traction in the United Kingdom, that might make it practical for her to divide her time between locations. If it didn’t, there was, the friend acknowledged, little “practical reason” for Meghan to be based anywhere other than the United States.
I asked again: so Harry would be in the Cotswolds, and Meghan would be in California, for weeks if not months on end?
The friend shrugged, without any observable discomfort, as though this were simply a practical solution to competing demands rather than a description of a marriage operating at very considerable distance. The following day, the Wall Street Journal published a piece raising, for the first time in a mainstream outlet, the possibility that Harry and Meghan might divorce. The friend dismissed it when I raised it.
That conversation is why I do not believe the story as briefed. The blueprint, as described to me then, was Harry in Britain and Meghan in California.
The idea that Meghan can go and live in the Cotswolds (or Australia, or New Zealand, or Canada) while selling a California lifestyle brand is absurd. As Ever is a Montecito product. Jam, flowers, sunshine and the canyons. You cannot front that from a rented farmhouse in Oxfordshire in November.
The Times’ source describes them as an “international couple.” I suspect it may turn out to be more of an international person, and that the international person is Meghan.
We know Harry wants to come home. He has made it very clear how much he misses England, right down to that telling “currently I may live in the United States” in his Remembrance Day essay. He has no old friends in California to speak of apart from David Langdown, who is his head of security. It is no surprise he is miserable. It is no surprise he is excited about coming home.
If William and Catherine have any sense, they will stay well away from all of it and see if it implodes.
The story also demonstrates one great truth about the British press: newspapers will run any old rubbish in the middle of August.
What matters now is what actually happens, rather than what anyone says is going to happen. But humans cannot resist trying to predict the future, and that is why I am tempted to believe the person who sat across from me in March and told me, without any obvious discomfort, that these two people want very different things and are going to need to live in different places to achieve them.
