And there was a deeper reason why the couple should pay off the Frogmore debt and live henceforward on an independent basis. As they would later explain via sussexroyal.com, the website that they developed during their Vancouver sabbatical, coming off the Sovereign Grant – the royal payroll financed by the British taxpayer – would ‘remove the tabloids’ justification in having access to their lives’.
There were other practical problems to sort out, not least the question of family security and who would pay for it. Would the Ottawa government be happy for them to pursue projects that were close to their hearts in Canada? But after discussions with Genow, Meyer, Collins and Thomas Morgan, the couple felt so confident that Harry emailed both his father and grandmother shortly before Christmas to say that he and Meghan thought that they had worked out a new way in which they could carry out their work.
They proposed to step back and spend more time abroad, while still visiting Britain sufficiently to carry out their basic royal duties – essentially the one-foot-in one-foot-out strategy that Geidt and Manning had first suggested. By being in Canada more and also travelling round the Commonwealth, Harry and Meghan would be able to maintain their work for the Queen, while stepping away from the pressures of the royal maelstrom in Britain.
The new website that they planned to debut when they got back to London set out their ideas as a manifesto with headings like ‘Supporting Community’, ‘Serving the Monarchy’, ‘Strengthening the Commonwealth’ and, most important, their personal hope to ‘carve out a progressive new role within [the institution of the royal family]’.
Sussexroyal.com was the work of Ryan Sax, the Canadian website designer who had previously helped Meghan devise her lifestyle blog ‘The Tig’, named after her favourite Italian red wine Tignanello. The Tig had broadcast Meghan’s thoughts on fashion, food and beauty, as well as highlighting her humanitarian work and the activist women who inspired her. She had closed The Tig in the spring of 2017 as her relationship with Harry intensified. Now she worked again with Sax on the navy blue and grey design that expounded the new Sussex strategy almost as a fait accompli.
Worried that the news of their plans might leak if he put too much in writing, Harry emailed his father to say that he was looking forward to discussing the practicalities in detail when he and Meghan flew back to London early in the new year. They were due to arrive on Monday 6 January, and Harry suggested that he and Meghan could head straight off the plane for Norfolk that morning. They could meet up personally to discuss the whole scheme with Charles and with William, if he was happy to join them – and most of all, of course, with Granny herself at Sandringham.
Finally, it seemed, the Sussexes did have some plans for which they were willing to seek the permission of Her Majesty.
26
Sandringham Showdown
‘The monarchy is something that needs to be there … It’s a form of stability and I hope to be able to continue that.’
(Prince William, 21 June 2003, his twenty-first birthday)
When Prince Harry had outlined his adventurous new plans for his future, speaking to his father and grandmother on the phone over Christmas 2019, the Prince of Wales and the Queen had both seemed open to the prospect of talking further. Harry should come up to Sandringham when he and Meghan got home early in the new year, they agreed.
But when the prince phoned their offices from Vancouver to get a date in the diary, it seemed that he was not so welcome. Her Majesty would not be available for another month, he was told by her staff. How about 29 January?
Harry and Meghan were seething as their Air Canada flight made its dawn touchdown in London on Monday 6 January. They toyed with the idea of driving straight from Heathrow to Sandringham – which would certainly have provided a new year surprise for the Queen. But an unannounced arrival could also have put important noses out of joint, and the couple opted for prudence, for the moment, driving instead to Windsor where they summoned a meeting at Frogmore Cottage with their top aides.
Heading the team was a young diplomat, their private secretary Fiona Mcilwham, who had joined the Sussexes from the Foreign Office just before their trip to Africa – she had travelled with them for three days to get some flavour of how a tour worked. A ‘wannabe supermum’, according to her Twitter account, the stylish Mcilwham had become one of the youngest British ambassadors in UK history when she was appointed head of mission to Albania in 2009 at the age of thirty-five.
Sussex communications were in the hands of a red-haired American, Sara Latham, who had served her apprenticeship in Bill Clinton’s White House, then gone on to become senior campaign advisor to Hillary Clinton in her presidential campaign. A dual US-UK citizen, Latham had also done time with the Blair administration as special advisor to culture secretary Tessa Jowell.
But the key negotiator and spiritual head of the whole team, to whom Harry himself would defer was, of course, Rachel Zane. Meghan had not spent seven years playing that hotshot lawyer in Suits without developing the confidence that she could handle the cut and thrust of a high-stakes duel like this – nor without some of the prized techniques of her screen character rubbing off.
‘Don’t sign anything unless you can get something in return’ was the key commandment drilled into Rachel by her father Robert Zane, the high-powered black attorney who was both her nemesis and her inspiration in the series – along with ‘Stand Your Ground’ and, most frightening of all, ‘Never Underestimate the Power of a Good Slap – or Two!’ These were some of the choice Zane negotiating tactics featured by her TV network in an April 2018 article, ‘What Rachel Zane Has
