It was reliably reported that Her Majesty remained well-disposed towards her grandson and granddaughter-in-law. She wished them well in their new life in Canada – and her ‘eighth great-grandchild’ as well, of course. But it was also said by those in the know that the couple’s erratic and impulsive behaviour for the past year had not inclined Queen Elizabeth II to entrust the Sussexes with the use of the word ‘royal’ any time soon.
For several weeks in January Harry returned to Vancouver to spend time with Meghan and Archie. Now he was back in London living up to his commitments and fulfilling his pre-arranged schedule of engagements – his final ‘royal’ engagements – before 31 March, the exit day that he refused to call Megxit Day, since he made the decision to leave himself.
Here in Abbey Road the crowd was buzzing. Thirty minutes before the prince was due to arrive, the pavements were already packed. Half of north London seemed to have heard that Prince Harry was due in NW8 this morning and was eager to wish him well. That has always been the thing about Harry – people really LIKE the guy.
‘He’s so warm and human. He’s natural, not like the rest of them.’
‘I reckon that she was always scheming to get him back to America – people say she’s planning to run for president one day.’
‘Just as well William is the sensible one – I wonder what went wrong between those brothers? They started off so close.’
Then cheers and applause broke out. A Range Rover came into sight from the south and out got that familiar red-haired, lanky-looking fellow wearing black jeans and a denim shirt. It seemed like Harry was planning to play George Harrison when he got out on the crossing. In 1969 the other three Beatles dressed up in smart, almost formal suits for their LP cover shot, but not George the Hippy, the cool and unpretentious one – Meghan’s favourite.
‘Is that why they gave “Harrison” to Archie as his second name?’
There was suddenly an electricity among us all – a palpable sense of emotion: lumps in throats and tears starting. That is how it always is with our royal family, stirring the irrational depths of us gullible Brits – ‘our finest hour’ etc. There were no public address speakers outside the studio to share whatever Harry and Bon Jovi were singing inside, so people tried a few choruses of their own.
A firestorm of camera flashes greeted the smiling prince as he emerged from the studio and headed up the road to the zebra crossing – and well, turn to page 7 in picture section 3 to see how it all turned out that chilly February morning on Abbey Road with Harry and Bon Jovi and two members of the Invictus Games’ choir.
So you have deprived us of all this happy craziness, have you, Sir Edward? You and the other characters in grey suits who have so cleverly negotiated Harry and Meghan out of our lives and across to the other side of the world?
Well, thank you very much. Of course, Harry and Meghan were a bizarre exercise in self-indulgence. I am sure you found them a nightmare. They were – and they remain – a deeply flawed fairy tale. But could you not say exactly the same of the monarchy that you serve?
27
Abbey Farewell
‘I can assure you, marrying a prince or princess is not all it’s made up to be.’
(Prince Harry, March 2020)
It would have been an imaginative gesture for Prince William and his wife to walk down the aisle of Westminster Abbey in the company of Harry and Meghan on Monday 9 March 2020 to celebrate Commonwealth Day, since that afternoon would be the couple’s final 2020 appearance as working royals in Britain. Anyway you looked at it, the service was a historic occasion that the newspapers had billed loudly as the brothers’ farewell – and unbeknown to the media, Meghan was already booked to fly back to Vancouver to rejoin Archie that very evening.
This was the hallowed site, after all, where for centuries British monarchs have walked in procession to be crowned – we are talking Edward the Confessor here, nearly a thousand years ago. And this was the aisle down which the two young princes had stepped it out together so bravely and poignantly, side by side, twenty-three years earlier, following in the wake of their mother’s coffin.
Now they had the chance to step it out again side by side as brothers, supporting their grandmother in celebrating the seventy-first anniversary of her beloved Commonwealth of Nations – though in a confusing, almost contradictory way. Working with the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust was one of the few post-Megxit roles that Harry and Meghan had been allowed to keep – but at the same time Harry had been deprived of his status as Commonwealth youth ambassador.
The distinction seemed mean-spirited. Harry was allowed to stay president of the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust (with Meghan as his vice-president), Buckingham Palace explained, because he had been appointed by the trustees and not by the Queen. But he was barred from being youth ambassador because that was a job ‘in the Queen’s gift’ – the honour having been stripped from him as so many others had been in the palace negotiations of the previous month.
It was difficult not to agree with the verdict of Meghan’s friends Scobie and Durand. ‘Harry and Meghan would have reached a more beneficial agreement to allow them to live the life they wanted,’ reported the joint authors, ‘if they had handled things in a [more] private, dignified way.’
The couple had been so hustling and aggressive, in other words, that they had shot themselves in the foot.
When it came to the procession that day, protocol also interfered.
