Harry Realizes the 'One Thing' He Does Well — and It May Not Align With Meghan's Plans, Expert Says
Prince Harry's late realisation over his true calling might have been exactly what he left behind after leaving the monarchy.
When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle left the royal family in 2020, the path they would take was unclear. Speculation suggested that the Duchess of Sussex might not return to acting, and while that has not happened yet, Markle has reinvented some of her older endeavors. Before marrying Harry, she ran a lifestyle blog, The Tig. In many ways, through her lifestyle show ‘With Love, Meghan’ and brand ‘As Ever’, she went down a similar path. However, the Duke of Sussex, who had always known life as a member of the military and then as a working royal, didn’t seem to fit as effortlessly into the jigsaw puzzle of this new life.
Former editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, Tina Brown, recently wrote in her Fresh Hell Substack, “What is genuinely sad is Harry’s belated discovery that the one thing he does really well is what he was born to do – and rejected. Unlike Meghan, he really doesn’t want to be a Hollywood hotshot or an amorphous influencer in designer clothes. As one of his ex-employees told me, ‘he just wants to do public service and be paid for it,’ which, in essence, is the definition of a member of the monarchy.” She further added that the Duke was missing “his rugged army and country-based friends” who were very different from "Montecito’s precious ethos".
However, as per Brown, the royal ship has now sailed from the Sussexes. “Harry doesn’t understand that the family conflict has turned into something more lethal for him than anger — a cold war. Except for his father, who would dearly love to reconcile with his younger son, his relatives have moved on,” she wrote.
When the Sussexes landed in the US, the couple had revealed their grievances with the royal family through an explosive interview with Oprah Winfrey, a controversial Netflix docu-series, and then finally with Harry’s bombshell memoir, Spare. But after the tank of criticisms was emptied, the question emerged once again: what now?
The Duchess turned to entertainment and content streams, but except for a few cameos here and there, Harry was largely missing from the picture. However, he was seemingly still invested in his charitable endeavors and ever so often pulled moves that were a reminder of his days behind the gilded gates. In recent times, the Sussexes’ trip to Australia was reminiscent of royal tours. Harry’s rallying speech in Ukraine days before King Charles’ tour to the US had ruffled some feathers. And now the couple is set to visit the UK with their two kids, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, to mark the 100-day countdown to the 2027 Invictus Games in Birmingham.
The Sussexes’ trip to the UK has been anything but simple. While Harry is still locked in a battle to receive automatic police protection in the UK, there have been concerns about whether the couple would use this visit to monetize it, as Markle had through her partnership with OneOff during their Australia tour. Those doubts, however, won’t be resolved until the family arrives in the UK.
