So, here we have a couple of brothers who loved each other dearly – most profoundly and genuinely, in fact – but who could give as good as they got when it came to a clash over something that mattered intensely to them. For William it was the future state of his monarchy – his sacred trust; while for Harry it was the love of the complex and captivating woman who had finally made sense of his life.
Even in the fierceness of their disharmony the two of them could clearly see and agree on some of the things that they needed to do next – extracting themselves from each other’s pockets for a start, and setting up their homes more separately. In November 2018, with Meghan just a few months pregnant, it was announced that she and Harry would quit their Kensington digs at Nottingham Cottage the following spring and move into Frogmore Cottage at Windsor. The prospective mother and father both liked the idea of bringing up their baby in a more rural setting.
That meant the brothers should also split apart the offices they had shared at Kensington since 2012. Harry put in a request to set up his own office and mini court, possibly at Frogmore – but that was a step too far for both the Queen and Prince Charles who would have to finance the new arrangement. Harry and Meghan were told that they would have to house their staffs in offices at Buckingham Palace under the supervision of Sir Edward Young – which was hardly the destiny that either side wanted. Still, BP was the royal headquarters, and the couple were willing to see how things might work out.
The saddest separation in many ways came from the two brothers’ decision to split up the Royal Foundation, the thriving charitable enterprise that they had created together ten years earlier to promote their various good causes. Raising and paying out a good £7 million or £8 million per year for some twenty-six charities, the Royal Foundation seemed to embody both the legacy of Diana and the harmony of her sons in perpetuating her name. When the ‘Fab Four’ had gathered in February 2018 to launch the first Royal Foundation Forum (see picture section 2, page 6) with Meghan encouraging women to ‘use their voices’ to speak out against sexual harassment, it had looked as if the two married couples could carry the Royal Foundation forward into a new dimension.
But that was not to be. On 20 June 2019, not long after Archie’s birth, it was announced that the Royal Foundation’s assets would be divided. William and Kate would take over the existing organisation, while Harry and Meghan would establish a charity of their own aiming at ‘global outreach’.
The following day, 21 June – which just happened to be William’s thirty-seventh birthday – Harry and Meghan filed trademark number UK00003408516 with the Intellectual Property Office of the UK government for ‘Sussex Royal – The Foundation Of The Duke And Duchess Of Sussex’. On 1 July Sussex Royal received its certificate of incorporation as a private limited company at Companies House.
Sussex Royal was the work of Harry, Meghan and her team of American advisors headed by the powerful Hollywood talent and PR agency Sunshine Sachs – the creation of the amiably named Ken Sunshine and PR guru Shawn Sachs. Its clients included the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Barbra Streisand and Justin Timberlake – along with such left-ish US political figures as father and son Mario and Andrew Cuomo, and, on occasion, the National Convention of the Democratic Party.
When she got engaged to Harry in 2017, Meghan had announced a definitive end to her showbiz career. But she had retained her Hollywood ‘three As’ – her agent, attorney and accountant – to field calls relating to the professional side of her life, and she remained particularly close to Keleigh Thomas Morgan, the Sunshine Sachs representative with whom she had worked while she was acting in Suits.
Thomas Morgan had become a friend and in due course a fellow new mother – she had occupied a prime seat at the royal wedding – and as Meghan’s relationship with Buckingham Palace went awry, Keleigh moved into the Edward Young vacuum to give Meghan the benefit of her professional advice. Keleigh lent a hand with the recruitment of faces for the Vogue special issue and when the break-up of the Royal Foundation raised the question of how Meghan and Harry’s new separate charity should be developed, she was part of the discussions that led to the clever brand name of Sussex Royal, with its elegant gold ‘HM’ monogram on dark blue surmounted by a crown. She was also on hand at the end of July 2019 when the contents of Meghan’s ‘Forces for CHANGE’ Vogue were previewed – and were met by stern and rather worrying disapproval from the British press.
‘Meghan’s “woke” Vogue is shallow and divisive,’ wrote Melanie Phillips, leading the way in The Times with the African-American slang term that had recently won its place in the Merriam-Webster dictionary ‘as a byword for social awareness … “I was sleeping, but now I’m woke.”’
‘Meghan’s virtue-signalling is all about boasting,’ reported Phillips. ‘It flaunts the signaller’s credentials as a morally virtuous person. It screams, “Me! Me! Me!”’ The new duchess clearly did not understand, said Phillips, that her new, royal status ‘precludes political statements. She still hasn’t grasped that the role of the monarchy is to unite the country.’
The lack of political balance among the women activists Meghan had chosen for the Vogue cover, for example, was 100 per cent out of whack. All fifteen were quite aggressively left-wing – and some of them were famously subversive, like Jane
