NOTTINGHAM. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex arrived at the Community Recording Studio in the St Ann’s neighborhood of Nottingham this morning for their first joint public engagement since moving back to Britain in August, and were met by a crowd of media that comfortably outnumbered the members of the public who had turned out to see them.
I was standing outside the studio for half an hour before they arrived. When I got there, the public presence amounted to a handful of people. The press pen, by contrast, held somewhere between 80 and 100 photographers, reporters and camera crews, with a drone overhead. Barriers had been set up along the street. There were no crowds waving Union Jacks.
That is the honest picture from the ground of a visit was, for all intents and purposes, a joint royal visit, whatever Buckingham Palace says about the couple being private citizens. The format, the itinerary, the barriers, the photographers, and the fact that the journalists of the royal rota (the press pool Harry once dismissed as an extended arm of the royal family) were invited back in to cover the day: every element was borrowed from the old playbook.
The message the couple wanted to send was clear enough. We are back in Nottingham, where it all began, and we are as royal as we ever were.
The city was chosen for its symbolism. It was here, in December 2017, days after their engagement was announced, that Harry and Meghan did their first official engagement together. Tom Bower’s book on the Sussexes opens with that visit, describing the chaotic scene of photographers yelling, the crowd screaming and Meghan working the barriers, saying, “Hi, I’m Meghan.” On that day there were thousands of people in the streets.
Today, when I asked a group of men from the auto workshops opposite the studio what they thought of the couple, I got a couple of “no comment”s. One of them, the owner of the garage, told me off camera that he didn’t think much of them. He also said he regarded them as members of the royal family, which, as it happens, is exactly the problem.