Harry and Meghan Aren’t Just ‘Embarrassing’ Britain Anymore — They’re ‘Damaging’ It, Expert Says
The Sussexes' Australian tour looks like royal diplomacy, and an expert thinks it's anything but.
Royal experts are no longer amused. What is unfolding on the sun-drenched shores of Australia, according to veteran commentator Paul Baldwin, is no longer the stuff of royal pantomime — it is calculated, and considerably more costly. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, he argues, have built an enterprise on borrowed credibility, one that takes Britain's name, trades on its goodwill, and then sends the institution the bill.
Their Australian tour, an itinerary of hospital visits, children's hugs, and a stop at a women's refuge, has exposed something uglier beneath the performance. Baldwin, writing for the Express, said, This is a 'full-on pseudo royal visit,' one that exists solely because of 'Harry's long-rejected birthright.' And the institution being quietly exploited is the one they made a very public show of walking away from. Baldwin, calling it a circus, added, "They must know they've become some Victorian circus freak show? Like the bearded lady, you know you shouldn't look, but somehow you can't stop yourself."
The hospital visit looked, on the surface, like genuine compassion. But Baldwin wasn't buying it. The cameras were always there. "Seriously, what were they doing there?" he asks. "They were bringing in business, weren't they?" For Baldwin, the discomfort of that image points to something far more serious. "If that juxtaposition of sick kids and brand promotion doesn't incense you quite enough," he warns, adding, "They are now damaging Britain by damaging the Crown."
And then, Markle's Her Best Life retreat at Coogee Beach carries weekend ticket prices of up to a jaw-dropping amount, with the premium package granting attendees a photograph and the chance to put forth a question to the Duchess at a gala dinner in a five-star hotel. Her reported appearance fee is in the region of $250,000. Harry, meanwhile, is the keynote speaker at the InterEdge Summit in Melbourne — focused, with no small irony, on workplace bullying — where tickets range from approximately $660 to $1,580.
Baldwin slams, "You can probably do the maths." None of this would be possible without the titles, the access, and the lingering mystique of a monarchy they have spent years attacking. The royals, when they function well, serve as a form of soft power. When they are weaponized as a cash machine, the effect is precisely the reverse. Baldwin unsparingly put forth his point, saying, "The image of the royals — which is intimately linked with the image of Britain and the British — is in a very delicate balance. And two 'American' freeloaders have just demolished that balance."
What makes the whole affair so difficult to stomach is not simply the commercialism — it is the sequence of events that makes the commercialism possible. Harry and Markle stepped back loudly and publicly, with considerable collateral damage to the family and institution they left behind. And yet, as Baldwin observes, "it is solely that institution which underscores their paycheque," and so they return to it, again and again, like a match held to a bridge they have already set on fire. "It's the shamelessness of it, really," Baldwin writes. "The utter selfishness."
