Meghan and Harry: The Real Story

to the real business of exploiting each other financially. For woke activists whose concern for the environment is so great that Harry sometimes struggles to get out of bed, his and Meghan’s choice of Goldman Sachs as their second institutional benefactor might seem surprising. This is a company which was criticised during the Credit Crunch for unethical conduct as it bet against financial products it was also recommending to clients, in the process making itself billions while costing its clients a commensurate amount. This resulted in them agreeing to pay $5.1 billion to settle accusations of wrongdoing in their RMBS business with the US Justice Department and state agencies including the New York Attorney General’s Office. A decade later, they were still being fined for malfeasance, this time £34.3m by the British Financial Conduct Authority for misreporting more than 200 transactions over a ten year period. Had Harry and Meghan still been functioning under the aegis of the Royal Family, there is no doubt that they would have been prevented from entering into ongoing relationships with institutions whose performance has attracted such penalties. But now that they are free agents, they are able to make what deals they wish, though the hope remains that they will not end up tainted the way the former Duke and Duchess of Palma de Mallorca were.

To ensure that they retained the liberty to wheel and deal as they saw fit, Meghan and Harry closed down their royal office in England. This meant that the limited policing to which they were subject disappeared. They gathered their Buckingham Palace staff together and gave all fifteen members of them notice at the same time. ‘This came as a bolt out of the blue,’ one of them told a friend of mine. ‘No one saw it coming.’ All of them had displayed commendable loyalty and tremendous dedication, sometimes in the face of great provocation, as they were the ones who were the frontline operatives dealing not only with a critical press but also an upset couple who could not handle the frustrations placed in their way. As a result, neither Meghan nor Harry had been easy to work for, nor had their staff found the tasks with which they were faced cut and dried. Despite this, they were, to a man and woman, committed, and expected, when they were hired, that they would remain en poste for a considerable length of time.

Royal positions used to be for life, and while they have become merely long lasting, they are not expected to be transient appointments. Yet that is what all the Sussex jobs turned out to be. Some, like Sarah Latham, were controversial, though she has behaved so impeccably that she has been snapped up by the Queen to advise on special projects, reporting directly to Her Majesty’s Private Secretary Edward Young. However most, like Fiona McIlwham, their Private Secretary who was on secondment from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, were not. David Watkins, poached from the fashion house Burberry to act as their social media expert, found himself out of a job when he had been promised job security, as was Marnie Gaffney, assistant communications secretary who had helped to organise their tours of Australia and Africa. All had performed excellently, had given constructive advice, had often tried to fulfill their tasks under extremely trying conditions, not the least of which was the counterfoil office across the Atlantic Ocean pushing a different agenda and causing many of the problems with which they then had to deal. This of course is what sealed their fates, for Meghan and Harry did not want to hear that associating with companies like JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs on an ongoing basis was tantamount to despoiling their royal status, nor were they prepared to run the risk of having their Buckingham Palace office scupper deals by tipping off the powers-that-be about activities that would be deemed dubious in Britain but would be regarded as admirably sharp in America. Like all people who operate at the highest level, Harry and Meghan wanted to achieve the maximum that the traffic would bear, and did not wish to be limited with what the palace regarded as the niceties of what is suitable and unsuitable for royalty. As someone from the palace told me, ‘Meghan’s attitude is: All dollar bills are green, and once they’re safely in the bank, it doesn’t matter whence they came. All that matters is that they’re there. Harry backs her up totally, in this as in everything else.’

Ultimately, Harry and Meghan have only one thing to offer that no one else does: his royalty. Neither of them has a talent beyond putting themselves forward as performers on the world stage. Being good public speakers is one thing, another is what do they have to say? As long as they were functioning under the royal umbrella, they were protected against the perception of opportunism, but now that they are openly in the marketplace, they no longer enjoy the kudos that non-commercial royals possess. They are in reality royals for sale or hire, a tricky position to be in while having to retain the prestige customarily associated with the non-commercialism of royalty.

Other royals, over the decades, have tried to convert their prestige into dollar bills. Ultimately, all failed. Whether it was King Michael of Romania, whose grandmother Queen Marie had been so popular that she was given a ticker tape parade down Wall Street, or King Peter of Yugoslavia, or the descendants of Russian, German and Austrian, Italian, Greek, Danish and Spanish monarchs, none of them found it possible in the long run to alchemise the glitter of royalty into serious money. They either married it, or they learnt to do without it, for, after the initial flurry, during which they were offered coinage appropriate to their rank, interest waned. Of course, Meghan has an advantage none of them had. She is an American, and moreover one who is experienced in working the entertainment