Does Megxit mean Megxit? Have the Sussexes really escaped the royal family?
It was a historic breakaway movement that divided the country, and will keep constitutional experts busy for years. Not Brexit, obviously, but Megxit, or Prince Harry and his wife Meghan’s decision to effectively resign from the royal family.
On 8 January, they confirmed plans to raise their son, Archie, overseas, free from the constraints of palace life and a media the prince felt was hounding his wife much as it once did his late mother.
What was originally planned as a soft Megxit – keeping the HRH titles, but working towards becoming self-supporting – became a hard one when Buckingham Palace ruled out the option of being half in and half out of royal life. The Sussexes moved to Los Angeles, near Meghan’s mother; shortly afterwards, Harry’s father, Prince Charles, fell ill with coronavirus back home. By summer the prince was rumoured to be struggling to adjust to his new life, although Meghan’s recent revelation that she had a miscarriage in July sheds new light on what was evidently a sad time for the couple.
Yet the year ends on a more settled note. The Sussexes have signed deals with Netflix and Spotify to produce documentaries and podcasts, declared financial independence by refunding the £2.4m in public money spent renovating their British base at Frogmore Cottage, and postponed (for undisclosed personal reasons) a potentially messy court hearing over the Mail on Sunday’s publication of a letter from Meghan to her father. So has this experiment in quasi-royal living worked?
“You can see from Meghan’s reactions in discussions that have been posted online that she’s really happy to be back in the US,” says Victoria Murphy, royal correspondent for Town & Country magazine and the author of Sixty Glorious Years: Queen Elizabeth II. “If you imagine what they might have hoped to achieve when they decided to go their own way, I’d say they have ticked a lot of those boxes.”
Had she been a working princess, the duchess might well have found it harder to reflect on the Black Lives Matter movement (in a virtual address to her old school’s summer commencement ceremony) or urge Americans to vote in a bitterly contested presidential election. Harry’s relaxed but moving cameo appearance on Strictly Come Dancing to support contestant JJ Chalmers, a fellow ex-soldier wounded in Afghanistan, meanwhile, was a reminder that he can now engage with the media only on terms that suit him.
Yet their ongoing relationship with the Firm remains a work in progress. “Harry’s relationship to the crown is not going to lessen over time; if anything it will be closer when he is the son, rather than grandson of the monarch,” says Murphy. “So everything they do publicly will always be discussed in the context of the royal family.” And there have been awkward moments; the palace’s refusal to let Harry send a wreath for laying at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day looked petty, given he has served in combat. Drafting the Queen’s annual Christmas message may also be a challenge, although Murphy points out the monarch usually glosses over personal difficulties. Meanwhile, the latest series of The Crown, which portrays the young Harry and William as little boys swimming in a dysfunctional goldfish bowl, seems likely only to increase millennial sympathy for the Sussexes. Who would want that life for their own child?
