What is the true motive behind Harry and Meghan’s return? - David Behrens
Throughout history, England’s monarchy has been riven by family rivalries. We used to know a lot about that in Yorkshire – it’s how the Wars of the Roses started.
There were no communications advisors in those days so hardly anyone knew of all the feuding over heirs and spares. It took 100 years before Shakespeare wrote it down and he made most of it up anyway.
Now, of course, information is instantaneous yet we’re not really any the wiser about the 21st century parallel to that Tudor soap opera. Did our own Duke of Sussex really bring his family back home so that his wife could pick up the threads of her acting career? Or is there something they’re still not telling us?
There have been so many claims and denials from the Sussex publicity machine that it’s hard to take any of them seriously. First we heard the Duchess had been offered a part in a Guy Ritchie drama on Netflix; then it emerged the new series hadn’t even been commissioned yet.
Fortunately for her spin doctors, we deal more leniently with their type than we did in the 15th century, when monarchs could have printers and pamphleteers hanged for treason; the Sussexes merely sack their PR people when they go off-message. Several have needed “long-term therapy” after working for Meghan, according to one report.
The Duchess’s historical counterpart is actually closer to revolutionary France than Tudor England. Meghan is a modern Marie Antoinette, flogging expensive cake sprinkles to poor people.
She does this through her nonsensically-named ‘lifestyle brand’, As Ever. Would you pay 11 quid to sprinkle things on cake? As If!
Like most actors in the world, she is out of work most of the time so nobody can blame her for pretending to look busy. But her story about being available for work in Britain doesn’t really pass the sniff test.
Look at it this way: she and Harry were living within commuting distance of Hollywood. People don’t relocate from there to Britain to find film work. No one has ever said to themselves, “You know what – there’s nothing in Beverly Hills, I’ll try Beverley in Yorkshire.”
That’s not to say there are no acting jobs over here. But can you really see Meghan waiting in a casting room for the chance of a week’s work with Jon Richardson on Waterloo Road? Or going up against Suranne Jones and Vicky McClure for the next Sally Wainwright series?
Unless you’re Judi Dench, the reality of theatrical life is doing voice-overs for commercials or appearing in Old King Cole at the Bradford Alhambra next to Billy Pearce and someone in a horse costume.
Besides, any director who did hire Meghan for a big part would be doing it for the publicity value rather than the nuance of her performance – and that is a dangerous path to tread, as I know from experience.
Forty years ago, when I was running a minor late-night miscellany on ITV called Pick of The Week, I had the idea to book the faded chat show host Simon Dee as a guest presenter. He had been a household name in the swinging Sixties but two decades later he was not so much swinging as unhinged.
But he was forever attempting comebacks and the papers always reported them so I figured his fee would buy us a few column inches.
Those, however, were outweighed by the exasperation of working with a fantasist who couldn’t accept that he was no longer a star turn.
Years of failure stoked by his personal demons and a lingering rancour over his long-ago firing by London Weekend TV had given him a persecution complex which manifested itself when he insisted we had all conspired against him by transmitting the programme at the wrong speed and making him sound like Mickey Mouse.
Now obviously I’m not comparing Simon Dee to the Duchess of Sussex. In many ways they are polar opposites: he was yesterday’s news; she will never escape the front pages. But the streak of the fantasist runs through them both.
And while Meghan can rebrand herself until she’s blue in the face, what neither she nor her husband has grasped is that the biggest lifestyle brand of all is the one they walked away from six years ago.
The only success they enjoyed in America came from leveraging the monarchy by using books and interviews to traduce it. When the interest ran out, so did they.
Perhaps that is the real reason they have returned: they want redemption from Harry’s family. They want their old lives back.
If so, their PR people got the message wrong – because Meghan’s true vocation is not playing a confected part in a Guy Ritchie production, but in playing herself.