Sunshine Sachs proposed different tactics but similar cunning when it came to the ten-day tour of Southern Africa for which Meghan and Harry were preparing at the end of September. Like all royal tours, the trip had been organised by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Whitehall to promote the British government’s interests in the region. The tour’s official purpose was to foster Britain’s friendship with the countries they were to visit – South Africa, Botswana, Angola and Malawi – and to deliver a helpful boost on the side for local British-linked businesses and commercial interests.
From Buckingham Palace’s point of view, there were the lingering elements of the Geidt–Manning strategy, to which Harry and Meghan were now signed up, intended to build on ambitions to develop the Commonwealth. And there was the ‘Diana dimension’ of the trip that Harry would make to Angola, where he was due to visit and be photographed walking through the very same minefield at Huambo that his mother had famously visited in 1997. Harry’s speech for the occasion would deliver sentiments along the lines of finishing what had been started.
Within those limits Sunshine Sachs worked with the couple to develop their personal redemption tactics. There were to be a minimum of smart clothes or fashionable costumes and poses that suggested Vogue. Luckily there were no state banquets scheduled, so that would remove the risk of them being photographed in formal dress. Just some simple, ethically sourced dresses, please Meghan – ‘cool brands that are doing things right’.
There must be no private jets – commercial flights only. And let’s arrange some sessions of that community cooking that enjoyed such success among the Grenfell survivors. On the other hand, any talk of female empowerment must not be too strident. Sorry, Megs. Make some of the visits to girls’ schools and centres private. And above all, let us see as much as possible of Archie. There was to be no more of this ‘secret baby’ nonsense.
Harry had experienced this sort of thing before, of course, in the days of Mark Bolland’s campaign to rehabilitate Camilla’s reputation. But when it came to the dark arts of public relations, Lord Blackadder had nothing on Mr Sunshine.
The early parts of the tour went largely to plan. The photography schedule was cleverly shifted away from the airport so that there were no shots of the couple coming down aircraft steps. The first pictures to go out in the newspapers – and on @sussexroyal – came from Nyanga, a poverty-stricken township in Cape Town, described by Tom Bradby, who was covering the trip for ITV, as ‘the murder capital of South Africa and one of the most dangerous places on earth. Violence against women in Nyanga is endemic.’
Meghan and Harry visited Nyanga’s Justice Desk, a charity supported by the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust that they now jointly headed (with Christopher Geidt as their chairman of trustees), and they mingled informally with children who were learning about their rights and taking part in self-defence classes. There were also some female empowerment lessons going on and it was impossible for Meghan not to give expression to what she felt in her heart. She just had to stand on a tree stump to speak to these young women with whom she identified, and for the first time since her marriage she referred to herself in public as a ‘woman of colour’. As Harry watched her saying these words, the love and admiration shone out of his eyes.
Archie proved the star as planned. On Wednesday 25 September Meghan and Harry took their four-month-old son to meet Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning anti-apartheid campaigner, who, as Archbishop of Cape Town, was known as ‘the Arch’.
‘Arch meets Archie!’ was Digital Dave’s caption for the Instagram footage of the little boy giggling obligingly as Tutu held him in his arms. It was the first time that such a young royal baby had been featured on a royal tour and the happy pictures went around the world.
Leaving Meghan and Archie to enjoy some quiet time in Cape Town, along with some of Meghan’s private and less-publicised engagements, Harry went north to Angola to do his stuff visiting Diana’s still-not-totally de-mined minefield at Huambo.
‘It has been quite emotional,’ he said on Friday 27 September, ‘retracing my mother’s steps … to see the transformation that has taken place, from an unsafe and desolate place into a vibrant community.’
Harry said he knew what his mother would have done if she had still been alive. ‘She would have seen it through … Let’s finish what was started. Let us consign these weapons to the history books.’
Talking of finishing what was started, Harry had prepared a very private memorial to his mother for that last Friday in September. The prince had long been indignant that Rupert Murdoch’s News International had not paid the full price for its phone-hacking activities against himself, William and Kate ten years earlier. The closed-down News of the World had been reopened within months as the Sun on Sunday, recycling the same diet of scandal and intrusion that rapidly made it Britain’s top-selling newspaper again. For some time since his marriage, and with Meghan’s encouragement, Harry had been consulting David Sherborne, the leading media and privacy barrister who had been winning cases for dozens of Murdoch’s phone-hacking victims – and for Mirror Group victims as well.
The newspapers had settled with all of Sherborne’s victorious clients for large sums of money at the court door – ‘out of court’ – to avoid the humiliation of their executives having to appear in the witness box and to confess in public to their personal knowledge of
