Shoo-in next president Hillary Clinton’s campaign had been rocked by the FBI investigating whether she’d been running her own email server from her basement, next to Bill’s old skis and unopened copies of the Starr report.
Mariah Carey had decided that she didn’t want Crown Lager drink rings on her white grand piano and had split from James Packer.
And for the woman then known as Meghan Markle, it was the last day of her life as she knew it.
She had a job, a yoga mat, a rented house in Toronto and an inordinate appetite for ripped jeans. And she also had a new-ish boyfriend, a certain red-headed Brit who came from a family with a helluva lot of baggage and swan forks to their name. October 30 was the final day before the world found out that that-girl-from-that-law-firm-TV-show had won over the white rhino of eligible bachelors.
On October 31 2016, the news would be broken in the Express by Camilla Tominey, who reported that Prince Harry was “besotted” with “a stunning US actress, model and human rights campaigner.” Meghan, Tominey reported, was “confident”, “intelligent”, and an “excellent” cook.
Finally, Harry would get his happily-ever-after!
Errr, record scratch and all that.
This weekend is 10 years since the Harry story took an unexpected dogleg. For years he had been a larky lad who had a knack for tottering out of Mayfair boîtes and Fulham boozers, who could woo over itchy-footed Commonwealth realms, and a taste in chintzy girlfriends who had no interest in trading lunches at The Ivy for grinding Duty and Service and a lifetime of nude hose.
By the time that 2016 rolled around, privately, Harry was suffering. As he writes in Spare, he had “stopped going out” and his life was cottage pies made over by his Pa’s chef ‘eaten over the sink’ and deep loneliness.
What he didn’t know he needed was a woman who could work a UN lectern, enjoyed a well-cut blazer and had never met an Instagram Rumi quote post she didn’t double tap. So thankfully, in July 2016, Harry opened Instagram, saw a video posted by his friend Violet von Westenholz mucking around with an American stunner in town for Wimbledon and a thunderbolt appeared over Kensington Palace.
Their first date involved beers at Soho House and their second came a day later, in a win for symbolism fans, on July 4, US Independence Day. (Foreshadowing much?) Harry writes of that night, “I felt an overwhelming sense of Overture, Prelude, Kettle Drums, Act I. And yet also a sense of ending. A phase of my life – the first half? – was coming to a close.”
Soon they were off adventuring à deux, Botswana, Toronto, the Kensington High Street branch of Tesco: their fairytale story took in great sweeping vistas of the Okavango Delta and the GladWrap aisle. Within 16 months of that first beer, Harry was on bended knee in their London garden surrounded by what looks like a job lot of Temu electric candles and some roses. (Adoring? Yes. Original? Well, he’s got other talents.)
The Beatles tra-la-la-ed “all you need is love” and for Harry and Meghan, that would, for a short while, be true. You don’t need me to tell you what came next and how we got to today, where King Charles’ son and daughter-in-law are living in a billionaire’s British back garden, paying their bills courtesy of jam sales and forlornly waiting for the Highgrove call-up.
It’s truly mind-melting if you take a step back and look at the Duchess of Sussex’s life over the last ten years: Toronto, London, Windsor, Vancouver Island, Los Angeles, Montecito and back again, from Ms to HRH to crying in front of Oprah to the Balenciaga front row to teaching the world how to make decorative ice cubes, from tea with Desmond Tutu to drinking from a baby’s bottle for a bit on Ellen, from a job wearing hats to sit in the second row of Westminster Abbey to soon-to-be judge on Junior MasterChef Australia.
If you time-travelled back to October 30 2016 and showed that paragraph to anyone, they would discreetly start looking for the number for a padded-walled asylum.
Here’s the thing I think I have wondered the most over the last decade. When Harry was on their Nott Cott lawn that night unboxing his battery-powered, boys’ basic guide to proposing, Meghan had only lived in London and seen royal life up close for about six weeks at most. Until then, their whole relationship had been one of criss-crossing the Atlantic and actually flying visits. Could or would things have been different if, when Meghan said yes, she had a far fuller understanding about what the hell she was signing on for?
On paper, Meghan was a far better fit as a modern working royal than Kate, The Princess of Wales prior to her marriage. A passionate advocate for women and girls, a doer, a worker, hungry to make change in the world: by rights Meghan she should have swept into the Palace on day one sipping a venti oat latte and killed it.
Instead Meghan found herself inside a strange institution, in a foreign country, where she was expected to play by rules that she did not seem to grasp she did not know the first thing about. How could she? I come back again and again to this simple detail – six weeks.
By contrast, Kate had nine years to learn every bylaw, subsection and detail of the royal rule book before she stepped onto the Palace gameboard. She might have been “waity” but she also went into her HRH-dom “knowy.”
Meghan could and should have been the best thing to happen to the royal family since they got over their German-cousin-marrying habit. The UK thought so too. Just before Harry and Meghan’s 2018 wedding, 58 per cent of the UK had a positive view of her.
Today, since moving back to the UK in August, Meghan’s net rating is the lowest it’s ever been, according to new polling out on Thursday, with more than two thirds (68 per cent) of Brits having an unfavourable view of her. (It’s probably cold comfort but King Charles’ popularity has also taken a hit in the last few months too.)
On October 30, 2016, having been alerted by Kensington Palace’s then comms head Jason Knauf that Tominey was about to break the news of their relationship, in Toronto, Meghan was slathering herself in black eye make up alongside Princess Eugenie. Euge was in town with her then boyfriend, now husband, Jack Brooksbank, and along with Harry, having borrowed Tom Hardy’s Mad Max costume, were off, as the Duchess of Sussex told Netflix,
“to just have one fun night on the town”. I truly hope it was a belter.
Daniela Elser is an editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with Australia’s leading media titles.
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