Why Harry and Meghan's New Deal is Their Last Role of The Dice
Why Harry and Meghan's New Deal is Their Last Role of The Dice
This week saw Prince Harry’s title removed from the official Royal family website
By any measure, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex aren’t quite where they hoped to be when they released their bombshell Megxit statement in January 2020.
Having dreamt of carving out “a progressive new role” in which they would “work to become financially independent, while continuing to fully support Her Majesty The Queen”, this week saw Prince Harry’s “His Royal Highness” title removed from the official Royal family website, with the Sussexes’ personal profile pages demoted on the homepage. Harry and Meghan’s pages are now located near the bottom, with the late Queen’s lesser known cousins the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester and Princess Alexandra featuring ahead of them.
Far from the “continued collaboration” they hoped for with the King and the Prince of Wales, the couple have not been invited to join the rest of the Royal family at Balmoral for the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s death, even though they will be in Europe for the Invictus Games in Germany, which starts a day later, on September 9. When the Duchess turned 42 earlier this month, her birthday was conspicuously ignored by all the official royal social media accounts.
The Sussexes have “found their freedom” with lucrative deals to tell their story to Oprah Winfrey, on Netflix and in Harry’s autobiography, Spare – but at considerable cost to their status and reputation. In June, Meghan’s approval rating fell to an all-time low of –47 in the UK, according to YouGov, with Harry on –36.
Meanwhile, the King has jumped from 26 to 32 since the Coronation, while the Prince and Princess of Wales are on 57 and 59 respectively – both up from April’s figure. To rub salt into the wounds, this week Prince William was voted America’s most popular public figure, ahead of Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, in a Gallup survey of public figures.
But now the beleaguered couple appear to have found a new story to tell after Netflix paid a reported £3 million for the film rights to the romantic novel they intend to produce for the streaming service as part of their £80 million deal.
It was initially suggested that Harry and Meghan had personally bought the rights to Carley Fortune’s Meet Me at the Lake, which echoes their personal story and includes a character whose parent dies in a car crash. But it has since emerged that Netflix stumped up the cash for the adaptation under the couple’s Archewell Productions arm.
With Harry, 38, currently in Asia to attend a sports conference in Japan before playing in a charity polo match in Singapore yesterday – leaving his wife and children Archie, four, and Lilibet, two, back in Montecito, California – industry insiders are describing the Meet Me at the Lake project as a “sink or swim” moment.
As PR guru Mark Borkowski pointed out, the Sussexes “have zero track record in drama or producing anything of consequence”. Describing the adaptation as a “playbook” attempt by Harry and Meghan to resurrect their media careers after their Spotify deal was axed and other production ideas were vetoed, he added: “They are so far off the radar. I suspect there is more to this than meets the eye.” Borkowski suggested that Penguin Random House, the publisher of Spare, “probably” helped do the deal, because it also put out Meet Me at the Lake.
Yet it seems the links between Fortune and Meghan run much deeper than that. A self-confessed Meghan fan who binge-watched Suits – the legal drama starring the Duchess as paralegal Rachel Zane – and woke up “teary” at 4am to watch the Royal wedding in 2018, the Canadian author appears to have forged a career out of supporting the Sussexes.
Exposing “an intense and insular group which peddles hatred online”, a lengthy article for Refinery29, which is still online, suggests “a mixed-race foreigner” is a “threat” to the British monarchy, adding: “For Meghan anti-fans, conspiracy theories which confirm her maliciousness might bolster the view that the British monarchy, by contrast, is beyond reproach.” The piece extensively quotes Omid Scobie, who wrote Finding Freedom, a hagiography of the couple, and is due to publish a second book, Endgame, in November, “exposing the chaos, family dysfunction, distrust and draconian practices” threatening the future of the Royal family.
Fortune resigned as executive editor of Refinery29 Canada in October 2021, announcing on Instagram that she was working on a second book following her bestselling debut novel, Every Summer After
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