COMMENT
It’s a plot twist about as likely as Cinderella teaming up with the Ugly Sisters to sell crypto.
But there’s a strange sort of symmetry here because it was the summer of 2016 when this whole wild, messy, Palace-shaking story started: A meeting on Instagram, a set up in an exclusive members club, a third date in Botswana. This couple’s origin story is so heady and romantic that Mother Goose would tear up.
To remember just how giddily lovely the Sussex era started out, look no further than Harry and Meghan: The Great Divide and Meghan Markle: Unforgiven(streaming now on Tubi).
MORE: ‘NDA signed’: Harry, Meg cuts all ties with US
Rewatch the footage of their first official public outing at the Invictus Games in Toronto in September 2017, or their engagement interview only two months later, and their joy is unmistakeable. Having just announced to the world they were aisle-bound, sitting side-by-side on a sofa in ‘Nott Cott’, their Kensington Palace home, and speaking to the BBC, they were giddy. The world was too. (Well, the bigots aside.)
MORE: King’s shock act after Harry eviction fallout
On Harry and Meghan’s wedding day, billions of people tuned in and 100,000 people crammed the streets of Windsor to catch a glimpse, so hungry were they to be a part of this wonderful story and history.
Then came the Sussexes’ early successes: Their tour to Australia where they pitched up, announced they were pregnant, and proceeded to win over the entire nation, not least with a headline-making loaf of banana bread.
What The Great Divide and Unforgiven remind you of is just how happy the Sussexes were – or at least seemed. It’s shockingly infectious stuff.
Rewatching Harry speaking briefly to the press, only hours after the birth of their son Prince Archie, would dissolve even the stoniest of hearts; so too the press conference the new parents gave a few days later at Windsor Castle where they couldn’t stop smiling.
If only the story had kept on that upwards trajectory … Instead, we know what came next – Megxit, the US, Oprah, Netflix, Spare. Anger, tears, finger-pointing.
Today, as the world counts down to the return of Harry and Meghan to the UK, it’s easy to forget now just how good the Sussexes were. Bloody good. Because they were sensational at the public royal game.
Watching extended footage of Meghan in The Great Divide speaking at the launch of her very first royal project, the Together cookbook supporting women who had lost everything in the Grenfell fire, you see a charismatic, charming and articulate woman who could have been the best asset the royal family ever invested in after buying Nvidia early.
Ditto the 2018 and 2019 footage of Harry, bounding onto stages and podiums.
Whatever the personal and family ructions and fallings-out that were going on behind the scenes – no matter the fights over bridesmaid dress tights and who had to pay for their own sofa and why the Waleses got better crown moulding than the Sussexes (really) – from the gimlet-eyed monarchy’s point of view, these two were the A-team they never knew they needed.
The addition of Meghan threatened to make Crown Inc appear shockingly relevant and contemporary, undoing the image of dogged, daggy duty ribbon-cuttings on wet Wednesdays somewhere up the back of Warwickshire. The new duchess was passionate about women’s rights, ripped jeans and started her day hours before the official piper had slipped into his sporran.
Together, she and Harry were represented an opportunity for once-in-a-generation renewal of the royal brand. Instead, Montecito real estate rocketed in value, Oprah got the interview of the century, and we learnt that princes don’t make for natural television producers.
In purely practical terms, the Palace’s loss of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex is their greatest strategic blunder since someone let Richard II babysit his nephews in the Tower. Harry and Meghan’s potential to sell the concept of a hereditary monarchy – of unelected, soft-handed sorts enjoying ancient billion-dollar trust funds and priceless central London real estate in return for occasionally planting a tree – to younger generations was peerless.
They had the potential to give Crown Inc the Cool Britannia treatment and to make all of the nude hose and polite nodding and garden parties somehow seem like relevant and vital work.
That loss is one that will have repercussions that will reverberate down to Prince George’s generation.
In the years since then, since it all skidded off course and the Sussex story veered into raw emotion and cashable cheques and the occasional old Etonian being forced to Google “unconscious bias” (‘I still don’t get it Bunter’), it’s easy to forget how magically it all started.
Sure it’s gooey and naff but re-watch old Harry and Meghan and you remember at the heart of all this, what started it all, was a swoon-worthy love story.
So will the Sussex family’s return to the UK see, somehow, some sort of fairytale third act? Mother Goose hopes so.
(Harry and Meghan: The Great Divide and Meghan Markle: Unforgivenare streaming now on Tubi).
Read related topics:Meghan Markle