The Harry and Meghan drama began in Australia. There’s no telling yet how it ends

London: The rot, Prince Harry would have you believe, started four years ago in Australia.

The Sussexes – married for just six months – had completed 75 engagements in 16 days across a whirlwind tour of four nations, including New Zealand, Fiji and Tonga, all while Meghan was in the early stages of her first pregnancy.

Harry and Meghan outside the Sydney Opera House during their visit in 2018. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

According to Harry, Buckingham Palace began to feel threatened that the duchess was “stealing the limelight” on the couple’s first royal tour.

Likening her popularity to that of his late mother, Princess Diana, Harry told the Netflix docuseries that the palace had become angry that she was doing the job of a working royal better than them.

“The issue is when someone who is marrying in should be a supporting act is then stealing the limelight or doing the job better than the person who was born to do this that upsets people,” he said.

“It shifts the balance because you have been led to believe that the only way your charities can succeed and the only way your reputation can be grown or improved is if you are on the front page of those newspapers.”

Harry detailed his version of the drama when he and his wife decided to quit as working royals.Credit:Netflix

After years of rumour and scuttlebutt, this was the first concrete, first-person admission from the King’s sons of a toxic falling out between the pair. It was a clear and personal swipe from Harry at William, the Prince of Wales and heir to the throne.

This week’s second instalment of the Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan has more than likely tipped the scales in the ongoing feud within the British royal family. Papers across the world splash their front pages with Harry’s claims his brother screamed at him, and that his father, King Charles III, said “things that simply weren’t true”.

While much of it was the type of stuff that happens in families every day – fallouts over opinions and actions – some of it was so deeply personal that it was impossible not to feel some sympathy for the couple.

It was painful to hear of Meghan’s suicidal thoughts, about her miscarriage and to watch a clearly devastated Harry talk about the disintegration of his relationship with his brother.

The six-part series had raked in a record number of viewers for Netflix, which is believed to have paid $US100 million for a package of programs from the couple. Like The Crown’s dramatised account of the past 80 or so years of royal life, it has tapped into a rich and seemingly never-ending interest in the institution.

The drama and intrigue spans centuries and the latest chapter, streamed online by hundreds of millions of people, may be delivered differently but is no less compelling than Shakespeare’s many plays about the family politics of the royal court.

It was during the reign of King George III, who ruled until 1820, his sons were known for “their rather scandalous lives” — and in response, the royal family began to publish their public engagements in the Court Circular. Later, gossip surrounding King George IV’s attempt to divorce his wife, Caroline, made the newspapers – the first of the tabloid treatment – which has gone on to become part and parcel of British life.

The reaction to the Netflix series in Britain has been fierce. Overwhelming it has been negative, but that is a reflection of the majority of Fleet Street’s treatment of the couple for many years. While some royal watchers have been sympathetic, they have ultimately been left frustrated that many of the claims from Harry and Meghan since they quit as working members of “The Firm” in early 2020 have not been backed up with evidence.

Prince William and Prince Harry follow the State Hearse carrying the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II.Credit:AP

“What upset me a little is the allegations that were said on the Oprah interview – very serious ones about race, very serious about mental health, needed to be taken seriously,” Robert Jobson, the royal editor for The Evening Standard, said this week.

“Six hours of television, not one of them has been addressed and yet the smear of racism and the royal family is left to linger. They should have clarified that and dealt with it. It’s not fair to do that and it’s not fair either to brandish his brother a bully, a ‘terrifying’ bully without giving [William] a right to reply.”

Harry’s claims about their trip to Australia are potentially somewhat of another deflection of the truth, too. It went unmentioned in the program that various reports highlighted that Meghan hated the trip and did not appreciate the relentlessness and, potentially, the dullness of the work.

While Harry likened his wife to his late mother, framing his older brother as being on the side of the “institution”, it appeared as if Meghan didn’t understand that Diana had to work tirelessly for more than a decade to become a much-loved and revered figure and humanitarian.

Earlier this year, on the release of her book The Palace Papers, royal expert Tina Brown, claimed Meghan “didn’t understand her role” before she toured Australian tour.

“She didn’t like it at all. She found the whole representational job of suppressing your own views and representing the monarchy, for her [it] was just an anathema,” Brown said.

“She didn’t understand why things were set up in that way. Instead of being excited when thousands of people showed up at the Opera House, it was very much like, ‘What’s the purpose? I don’t understand this’, Brown said a Palace aide had told her at the time.

“It’s not how she viewed her role, the world, she did not understand the point of it and for her, yes she was a great success, but it was not something she wanted to do.”

Brown said comparisons between the two were off the mark because Diana was an agent of change from within who only left “The Firm” because of the breakdown of her marriage to Charles.

“Diana was always a change agent within’, she said. “She didn’t leave the Royal Family because she said ‘I’m out’, she got divorced. Her husband wasn’t in love with her, that was the agony for her”.

Harry told the series that he wholeheartedly believed his family missed the mark with fully embracing Meghan and what that could have meant for the monarchy on a global level, as it seeks to confront its links to the British Empire and colonisation.

“Anyone inside that system, whether it’s my family, whether it’s staff, whether it’s PR … have already missed an enormous opportunity with my wife and how far that would go globally,” he says in the series.

The Duchess of Sussex meet crowds who had gathered to mourn Queen Elizabeth at Windsor Castle in September.Credit:Getty

On this point, few have disagreed. The program documented her groundbreaking work with the Grenfell community kitchen after 72 people died after a high-rise fire broke out in the 24-storey block of flats in London.

Royal commentator Jennie Bond made the same observation after the first instalment of the series.

“Meghan really is the incarnation of what a forward-thinking monarchy should look like. The tragedy is that they decided to leave when they could have done so much,” she wrote in her Daily Mirror column.

“The Palace must hold some responsibility for that. Harry also must hold some responsibility for that, too. Meghan was woefully unprepared to enter the Royal Family.

Front row from left: King Charles III, Queen Consort Camilla, Prince William, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, Princess Catherine, and Sophie, Countess of Wessex, during the ‘Together at Christmas’ Carol Service in London.Credit:Getty

“Why didn’t he sit down with her and tell her what it would be like?” she said.

Despite Harry’s clear attacks on his brother and, to a lesser extent, his father, the Sussexes are expected to be invited to the coronation in May next year.

BBC royal correspondent, Sean Coughlan, said the series was unlikely to seriously damage the royals in a way that they might have feared.

“There was no real inside gossip, nobody was named as a racist, the accusations were not catastrophic. These were stones thrown at the palace windows – not a brick put through one,” he said.

“Neither Buckingham Palace nor Kensington Palace are responding to the series, which is a gauge that the series contained nothing so awful that they needed to challenge it.”

The King’s only public statement about his son came on the solemn occasion of his mother’s death in September, when he offered an obvious olive branch to his youngest son in a televised speech.

“I want also to express my love for Harry and Meghan as they continue to build their lives overseas,” he said.

On Thursday, the King and the Prince of Wales put on a show of unity at a Christmas concert at Westminister Abbey. They are not expected to offer any form of public comment or reply to claims.

Spare by Prince Harry

But perhaps we could read between the lines of William’s address to the congregation on Thursday when he spoke of how Jesus “inspired people to commit themselves to the best interests of others” with a mission to “serve, not be served”.

“At Christmas, I am always struck by how the spirit of togetherness lies also at the heart of the Christmas story,” he said, quoting from his late grandmother’s Christmas 2012 speech.

But, like a Shakespearean play, this is only Act I. The second comes in January with the release of Harry’s autobiography, Spare. And there’s no telling yet just when or how the final act will play out.

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