I get that many are not a fan, but there’s a few points raised on here that’s also in this piece- 1) that the press keep falling for these ridiculous stories from the Sussex camp of why they are moving and 2) that Harry is coming with the kids and Meg will not be spending much time in the UK.
From Tom Sykes substack:
‘The news that Harry and Meghan are “moving back to Britain” broke on Wednesday evening, UK time. Today, Saturday, less than 72 hours later, one of the central planks of the story, Meghan’s acting gig, which was supposed to answer the most glaringly obvious question about the whole enterprise—why on earth would Meghan want to come back to this racist, classist, bird-and-fox slaughtering hellhole where everyone hates her—has given way.
Reports, which began in the Australian media and were then picked up by Deadline and the Hollywood Reporter, said she was in talks to join the third series of Guy Ritchie’s Netflix aristo-caper The Gentlemen, which shoots in Britain (the first series was filmed largely at Badminton House, about ten miles from Highgrove).
ITV News went further on Friday, reporting that Meghan was packing up the family’s belongings and shipping them across the Atlantic after being offered the role, and that the offer was what “tipped the scales.” Sources close to Harry were hinting much the same to me. Here, at last, was a reason for the Duchess to swap Montecito for the muddy mire of the Cotswolds.
Now Tina Brown (who hired me many years ago to be the Daily Beast’s royal correspondent) has posted that “backlash” to the proposal has led to the offer being withdrawn. CC Fresh Hell Tina Brown
I have approached the Sussex office for comment about the reported collapse of the Ritchie talks. No reply yet.
So where are we, exactly?
Here is what I think is happening, and it is what I alluded to yesterday, drawing on a conversation I had in March with a friend of Harry’s, an account I had been holding back for my book THE DUKES and decided this week to publish.
Harry and the kids are moving back to Britain. Meghan is going to come and go. Mainly, go.
The friend I spoke to in March was quite specific. Harry wanted to be in the Cotswolds, the countryside around Highgrove where he was happy as a teenager, where he knows the pubs and the back roads and the footpaths. He “definitely did not” want London.
And when I asked the obvious question, what about Meghan, the answer was that it was all about the business. If As Ever gained real commercial traction in Britain, she might divide her time. If it didn’t, there was, the friend acknowledged, little “practical reason” for her to be based anywhere other than the United States.
I put it to them directly: so Harry in the Cotswolds, Meghan in California, for weeks if not months on end? The friend shrugged, as though this were simply a practical solution to competing professional demands rather than a description of a marriage operating at considerable distance.
It is not hard to see why the Sussex office would rather the world didn’t frame Harry’s move back to England this way. Say out loud that Harry is relocating and Meghan is visiting, and the speculation starts immediately about whether a physical separation is the prelude to an emotional one. Far better to let the newspapers fill in the gaps with anonymous briefings, which is precisely what has happened, because when you consider what has actually been said by their office about this move on the record and the answer is…Nothing. Zero. Zilch.
Harry and Meghan briefed a whole raft of newspapers on Wednesday that they were coming to the U.K. for an “extended period” but the closest thing to an official confirmation is that their representative apparently notified IPSO, the press regulator, of their “relocating.”
That is it. Everything else is briefing, suggestion, and the phrase “extended period,” which the Sussex side has used in the background and which commits them to absolutely nothing.
The Sussexes are private individuals and can say what they like. They take no taxpayer money, unlike the King, whose press office is funded by the public and who therefore has a different set of obligations to “the truth” as opposed to “his truth.”
Harry and Meghan run a commercial operation and they are perfectly entitled to let the press run away with a story that suits them and never correct it. It is up to the media whether we interrogate their claims carefully or simply accept them. And in the middle of August, with nothing else to write about, precious little is being interrogated by the legacy media.
I definitely believe Harry and the kids are coming back. From Harry’s side, the whole thing makes perfect sense. He has been adrift in America for ages: he has no purpose, no business, he has no charities, no old friends beyond his beloved bodyguard, “Langers,” no security, no official role. He has wanted a greater presence in Britain for years; I have been reporting that for a long time.
Now, crucially, the risk management board assessment he has spent six years fighting for was completed at the end of July (the findings have not yet been shared with him, and it was conducted before he told officials he was coming back), with government sources telling the Times this week that a decision to live in Britain “will change the nature” of the security consideration. If that unlocks armed police protection, it could save him millions of dollars a year in private security. For Harry, coming home is a rational move.
For Meghan, it is almost impossible to construct a case. She hated Britain the first time round when she was revered as a princess. She told the world she found its institutions racist. She does not share its sense of humor, and upbraided Harry’s friends for the jokes they told. She is opposed to hunting and blood sports in a part of the country where both are the social calendar. She is, to use the shorthand, extremely progressive, in a defiantly un-woke social corner of England. She hates the rain. She told Omid Scobie she was never going back.
The social question is not trivial for a brand built on being at the center of a glamorous life. Who, exactly, is going to have her to dinner in the Cotswolds? Jeremy Clarkson, the nearest thing the area has to a King, wrote a vile column saying he wanted her paraded through the streets and pelted with excrement, for which he was forced to apologize. The Beckhams, the undisputed rulers of the Oxfordshire side of the Cotswolds celebrity set, fell out with the Sussexes years ago. Rebekkah Wade for tea, anyone? The Cotswolds are a small world, large parts of which are run by Princess Anne, and the Sussexes have spent six years burning every bridge into it.
And how does the As Ever lifestyle operation, which sells California sunshine, strawberry jam, and Montecito abundance, function from a damp, grey, muddy corner of Gloucestershire? It doesn’t. The entire commercial proposition depends on her being in Cali.
I am sure they will both arrive at Heathrow airport before the end of the month, as their office promises. I am sure Meghan will be here for the children’s first day at school. But if you believe that Meghan is going to spend the next few years living more than 90 days a year in the United Kingdom (which would make her tax-resident), I think some ergot has got into your fruit spread.
Three days in, with no statement and Meghan’s tentpole job gone before she started it, “they are moving back to Britain” looks to me very like a PR flash bang to distract from the fact that, actually, “Harry is moving back to Britain with the kids.”