Harry and Meghan’s surprise return to home turf will have two very nervous senior royals bracing for impact.
Daniela Elser
Queen Camilla will join the next season of I’m A Celebrity. Princess Anne will release her own line of frisky knickers. King Charles will take up competitive Morris dancing.
Why not? With the thermonuclear news that Prince Harry and Meghan, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are reversing Megxit like two noisily beeping big rigs and moving back to the UK any and every bonkers royal scenario is now on the table.
As far as bombshells go, this is the biggest royal shock since Queen Elizabeth went to the great racetrack in the sky and King Charles instituted new green recycling bins. Whodathunk it – nearly seven years after the Sussexes flitted off to North America that they would pull the plug on their great Megxit project and backpedal all the way to Berkshire. (Well, the hot money is on the Cotswolds.)
But hark! What is that sound through yonder Audi window breaks? That incandescent roar? That guttural howl? That, I’m guessing, is the noise emanating from Prince William and Kate, The Prince and Princess of Wales when they found out the Sussexes are inbound.
It’s hard to think of a situation more disastrous for the Waleses than Harry and Meghan cashing in their British Airways frequent flyers for a quartet of one way tickets to Heathrow.
On Thursday morning, came the great kaboom: News.com.au’s Bronte Coy broke the exclusive that within a matter of weeks if not days, the Sussexes will have permanently relocated to the land of warm beer and unconscious bias, having already enrolled son Prince Archie, seven, and daughter, Princess Lilibet, five, in local schools.
No one saw such a dramatic about-face coming, given they have spent years carefully constructing and selling their freedom-finding narrative, of being two authentic souls forced to bravely tunnel their way out of the fusty confines of Windsor and far, far away from mean relatives, mean courtiers, and the mean press. As far as climb downs go, this has to be up there with Sir Edmund Hilarry and Tenzing Norgay’s skid back to base camp.
What is crystal clear in all of this is that, for William and Kate, this is a rubbish development.
For more than five years now, the Sussexes have, via Netflix, Spare, podcasts, magazine interviews, and more than 15 hours of interviews, repeatedly hung the Waleses out to dry, making him out to be petty, jealous, angry and willing to resort to a bit of biff and her out to be an unwelcoming mean girl who had no interest in chablis-fuelled sisterly Kensington Palace bonding seshes or sharing her lipgloss. And it was both of them, Harry wrote, who thought him dressing up as a Nazi was a right larf, and egged him on.
The end result is that today the Prince of Wales is about as likely to spontaneously forgive his brother for having gone after his sainted wife as to sell off St James’s to build a hyperscaler’s data centre.
But at least all this while, the duke and duchess were safely Over There, an ocean, eight time zones and 48 states away. The UK, since 2020, has been their patch, theirs to woo and win and wow and if the prince and princess’ haloes were any more golden, the glare would start damaging the royal rota’s retinas.
With the Sussexes off venting their spleens, they have had a clear run at keeping the UK’s focus on their genuinely good and interesting works (selling off bits of the Duchy of Cornwall to build housing for the homeless; trying to stop the polar icecaps melting; deprogramming British children from their tendency to stiff upper lips) without any Sussex-splosions to distract the public and press.
Well that’s all over now, isn’t it?
I’m struggling to see a scenario where, when it comes to William and Kate’s perfectly-oiled machine, the Sussexes’ homecoming does not equate to the equivalent of wrench-wielding Luddites rampaging through those dastardly mills smashing things up.
PM, pre-Megxit, the Sussexes’ schedules at least had some wider Palace oversight to try and prevent royal engagements colliding with one another, but now? Harry and Meghan are truly free agents who can walk any red carpet, do any magazine, TV show, podcast, baking competition, wear, sell, Instagram, YouTube, ideate, percolate, pontificate, post, hashtag, plug, and live stream whatever, wherever and whenever they want.
Unfortunately for The Prince and Princess of Wales, everything is entertainment now. It’s the attention economy stupid. Good works and neat pantsuits won’t be able to compete for eyeballs, clicks and views when they are going directly up against the heat-seeking Sussex missiles.
Just imagine one day coming soon: William or Kate is off on some nicely planned outing; the crowd barricades are in place; the press pack neatly lined up; some scientist/climate change expert/ developmental boffin about to get their moment in the sun. And then, blamo! Meghan pops up at The Ledbury for lunch wearing Diana’s diamonds or announces she’s releasing her own crypto coin or Harry decides to write himself a statement about some political hot potato like small boat immigration and the day is all over for the Waleses. Photos of an HRH peering at a test tube or sitting in a Mum’s group circle looking relatable will just feel dull, dull, dull.
At least to start with, it’s hard to see how the Waleses can win the battle for eyeballs. Who wants to watch the prince or princess do earnest, good things when we could all be watching the Sussex side show?
More broadly for William and Kate, putting Harry and Meghan back in the British isles is an immediate reversion to be subsumed by Dynasty-esque family drammmmmaahhhh. With King Charles seemingly slowly microwaving reheatable relations with the Sussexes, the pressure will now be on William and Kate to do the same.
The general disruption the Sussexes’ return represents to Buckingham Palace goes even further when you consider they are coming back to a deeply divided British public and a Fleet Street still licking its wounds after years of the duke having chased them through the courts. At some point repatriating resident Harry will find out how much the High Court thinks he and other co-claimants will have to pay towards the Daily Mail’s $66 million legal bill after they dragged the paper through the courts.
In this climate, with Harry having spent years now waging war on the media, will certain sections of the press consider the Sussexes very fair game?
Nor do actual Brits exactly have the warm and fuzzies for them given the duke and duchess’s years of making their feelings clear about life in repressive Britain. The most recent polling, done in July, showed the duchess’ net approval had hit a new low of minus 43 and the duke’s on minus 25.
A separate YouGov poll released after their return was announced found that only 21 percent of people think they should move back.
The moral of the story: William or Kate are in for a right time of it, no matter how much they might try to sell a keeping-calm-and-plodding-along spin.
And that other sound you can hear today? That’s Camilla’s trusty corkscrew being put to work. It’s going to be a long 2026.
Daniela Elser is an editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with Australia’s leading media titles.
