In November 1948 Prince Charles became the first post-1688 heir to the British throne to be born without the ritualised scrutiny of his arrival on behalf of the people. Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government had wasted no time in sweeping away the outdated practice. But Charles revived its spirit in 1982 and 1984 with the births of William and Harry, when he and Diana proudly – and dutifully – brought their sons out onto the steps of the Lindo Wing for public inspection and approval, within hours of their births.
Prince William continued the tradition unquestioningly – though by 2013 the performance had turned into a menacing and undignified scrum among the ever-growing mass of paparazzi, in a most alarming free-for-all. But William still did his duty sturdily, beside him Kate, immaculate and smiling despite the traumas of delivery. As an heir to the throne who had done his homework, Prince William knew about warming pans and the importance of making the people feel that you were at one with them.
But as the ‘spare’, his younger brother had received no such special instruction in the ancient legend, let alone its sociological importance – and if he had, Harry could not have cared less. The heir could choose to suffer the ordeal of inspection on the Paddington steps if he wished. The spare had other ideas, and his wife totally agreed. Harry and Meghan were resolute that their newborn baby’s first sight of the world should not be the same insane and lethal camera-flashings that had attended – had actually brought about – the death of Diana.
A cursory glance at the photograph of baby Harry in his mother’s arms outside the Lindo Wing in September 1984 also suggested that Diana must have spent a good hour or more washing and blow-drying her hair before she emerged onto the steps for her ‘spontaneous’ greeting of the people. Cautious Kate might put up with all that primping and prepping for the sake of ‘the Firm’, but mercurial Meghan would not.
So Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, had agreed that their new child should be delivered at home in the peace and seclusion of Frogmore ‘Cottage’ – not so much a cottage, in fact, as a collection of cottages in Windsor Great Park that had recently been renovated and amalgamated into a long, twenty-three-room dwelling at a cost of some £2.4 million in public funds. Here was another mildly difficult issue. If the royal parents were not going to display their baby to the public for the sake of warming pans, what about all those pots and pans and cooker(s) in their lovely new kitchen? Perhaps some public gesture would be appreciated to say thank you for all that taxpayers’ money?
As events turned out, the question would be academic. Baby Sussex took his time a’coming, and when his expected arrival became two weeks late Meghan’s doctor (a secret, whose name has not been revealed to this day) advised a hospital-assisted delivery. Frimley Park was a perfectly good NHS hospital a dozen miles down the road near Farnborough, but the couple set off instead with Meghan’s mother Doria on the longer journey to London and Britain’s most expensive delivery facility, the US-owned Portland Hospital, famous for its celebrity births. Victoria Beckham, Liz Hurley, Kate Winslet – all these glamorous mothers had delivered their babies in the luxury of the Portland, where a basic birth package starts at £6,100, with four-poster cots for the babies. And not a nasty, smelly railway station in sight.
Here was another issue with Harry and Meghan – the deluxe, five-star instincts to which these reach-out-and-touch-me tribunes of the common people so regularly surrendered, from their fondness for private jets and Hollywood friends to their need to ‘hide away’ in expensively renovated twenty-three-room ‘cottages’ or, when they first moved to California in 2020, an $18 million, twelve-bathroom Tuscan-style mansion occupying twenty-two acres in Los Angeles’ exclusive Beverly Ridge Estates.
‘It’s a matter of security,’ their handlers would explain. ‘And they DO need their privacy.’
But the Portland Hospital did its job efficiently and confidentially through the night of 5 May 2019. On the morning of 6 May, Meghan was duly delivered of her delayed but healthy son, weighing in at 7lbs 3oz. Baby Archie had arrived with the dawn at 5.26 a.m., allowing grandmother Doria and the happy couple to return to Windsor with their precious cargo undetected. Their stratagem was bolstered by Buckingham Palace’s putting out a strangely misleading statement at 2 p.m. that day saying that the Duchess of Sussex was just going into labour – when she had, in fact, been delivered of her new son eight hours earlier.
Harry and Meghan had played fast and loose with both royal tradition and the truth, but for once they had successfully outwitted the hated press.
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Family Matters
‘He is the one person on this earth that I can actually talk to about anything and we understand each other.’
(Prince Harry, January 2006)
The helpful ‘friends’ who brief the media from time to time about the inner thoughts of royal folk have let it be known that elder brother William did not think too highly of Harry and Meghan’s ‘prima donna’ manoeuvres to conceal the birth of their son in May 2019 – and this impression was confirmed by the failure of William and Kate to visit the new arrival for a full eight days. By contrast, the Queen, Prince Philip, Charles and Camilla all turned up within hours to coo over the baby – and it seemed strange that, when the Cambridges did finally pitch up more than a week later, they didn’t bring along little George, Charlotte and Louis to welcome their new cousin.
But Harry won the next round. On 8 May he had appeared with
