In Malta, Elizabeth had tasted ‘normal’ life as a young naval officer’s wife, not a king’s daughter – it was the first and last time that she was able to sunbathe and swim off a beach, to drive her own car unnoticed around the streets, to visit the markets if she wished to, and to do her own shopping with real money out of her handbag. It had set her up so well to come back home and do her duty.
Meghan and Harry were due to visit Southern Africa after the birth of their new baby, and to take the newborn child with them. Perhaps that would be a good time and place to start exploring the practicalities. Modern South Africa, with its black-majority rule, could be just the spot – and the couple themselves seemed interested by the notion. Their relationship had taken flower in Africa after all, so maybe it, or somewhere else in the Commonwealth, might provide their next step. Cape Town could be their Malta.
In the meantime Meghan – seven months pregnant and right in the throes of her Vogue guest-editorship – began her new Queen’s Commonwealth Trust duties on International Women’s Day, 8 March 2019, with a panel discussion on how to support and empower women’s lives around the world. The event was hosted by King’s College London, of which the well-connected Geidt was chairman of the council, and he greeted Meghan warmly with a ‘Mwah! Mwah!’ brush of the cheeks.
‘They clearly respected each other,’ recalls one of the royal press pack at the occasion. ‘You could tell Meghan looked up to him – although, in fact, once Geidt had greeted her, he stayed in the background, which was very much his style, of course.’
The panel included the pop star and activist Annie Lennox, as well as Julia Gillard, the former prime minister of Australia, with Anne McElvoy, senior editor of the Economist, in the chair. McElvoy introduced Meghan as ‘a royal not afraid to embrace full-on feminism’.
Asked how her pregnancy was going, Meghan replied that she had been watching a Netflix documentary recently that referred to a pregnant mother feeling ‘the embryonic kicking of feminism’ inside her.
‘I loved that. So boy or girl, whatever it is, we hope that’s the case … I hope that men are part of the conversation. My husband certainly is.’
Not renowned as one of nature’s monarchists, the liberal and sceptical Ms McElvoy later admitted that she was impressed by the way in which the young American held her own among the other formidable panel members. McElvoy got the feeling that Meghan might well become ‘more frank in the future on the insidious effects of prejudice’.
‘She is espousing a kind of pluralism and progress that crosses the political divide,’ McElvoy wrote two days afterwards in the Sunday Times – though she did feel impelled to issue a warning against too much sermonising: ‘If you preach about climate change,’ she wrote, ‘be careful with your use of helicopters.’
The following January 2020, with the news of the departure of the Sussexes from Britain on the front page of every paper – the Sun coined the term ‘Megxit’ – McElvoy confessed that she had picked up no inkling of defection plans from anything Meghan had said on that International Women’s Day panel, nor while chatting to her informally behind the scenes.
‘I met a poised, warm, heavily pregnant woman,’ she wrote. Meghan had presented herself as ‘jovial and open’ with a clear ‘commitment to combining royal life with charitable work’, and she had seemed to be in it ‘for the long haul’.
Just ten months before Megxit, in other words, Anne McElvoy had not detected the slightest sign of disaffection or departure on the part of the Duchess of Sussex. But that was before Meghan and Harry were impacted by the arrival of their first baby and all that that entailed.
23
End of the Double Act
‘It’s not enough to just survive something, right?
That’s not the point of life.
You’ve got to thrive – you’ve got to feel happy.’
(Meghan Markle, October 2019)
And so, dear reader, events take us back to the start of all this – to those first two chapters, you remember, with the mystery of the secret hospital birthplace of baby Archie ‘somewhere in London’ and all the haughty melodrama of those unnamed godparents? That was the beginning of our book – and now it has become the beginning of the end.
Because what does such bizarre and paranoid behaviour indicate about the parents involved? It surely tells us that they were both very worried and scared – and we may also conclude that in their panic Harry and Meghan had developed an exaggerated idea of their own importance. The months since their marriage had demonstrated that the couple share a common character flaw – they both have a tendency to cascade downwards from their peaks of generous self-confidence into miserable moments of self-pitying victimhood. They see the world as hostile and start behaving in self-destructive ways that make that hostility come to pass.
But that is not our point for the moment. The basic takeaway is that the May 2019 birth of Harry and Meghan’s first child had a transformative impact upon the thinking and actions of both his parents. Complications that would once have been accepted became intolerable – risks that had been bearable became impossible threats. So here we have located another major reason why, within just ten months of his birth, Archie’s parents would be upping sticks and leaving Britain with the cherished child who has changed their view on life so much.
‘I will always protect my family,’ said Harry, following the birth of his son. ‘And now I have a family to protect.’
‘Arche’, we have already
