Inside Harry and Meghan’s new ‘royal-lite’ strategy ...Middle East

Prince Harry was half a world away thinking about a very different future while his royal relatives were gathering at Sandringham for Christmas.

On the walk to church, the guests at the King’s Norfolk estate put on a customary show of unity for the cameras after the turmoil over Prince Andrew’s enforced exile from the family party following damaging revelations about his business relationship with an alleged Chinese spy.

Harry, 40, and his wife Meghan, 43, may well have reflected with some degree of schadenfreude that they are not the only ones in the doghouse.

But they could also be forgiven for wondering why they were not allowed to be half in and half out of the Firm, making their own money, while supporting the monarch as they wished.

After all, Uncle Andrew was doing private commercial deals and making money on his international Dragon’s Den-style Pitch@Palace project, introducing entrepreneurs to investors while overseas on taxpayer-funded official royal duties, before he was forced to step down due to his friendship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. If he was doing that with the apparent support of British diplomats, why was it not possible for Harry and Meghan to mix commercial enterprises with their royal duties?

What the Duke and Duchess of Sussex may see as a two-tier approach by the Royal Household still rankles, but after venting his spleen about his family in his memoir Spare and in a Netflix series, Harry seems calmer in public these days despite the rift with his father, stepmother, brother and sister-in-law that shows no sign of healing.

Settled in the couple’s £11m home in Montecito, California, the fifth in line to the throne now lists himself as a US resident officially and has thought about applying for US citizenship.

“I very much enjoy living here and bringing up my kids here,” he told the journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times DealBook summit earlier this month. “It’s a part of my life that I never thought that I was going to live.”

He sounded contented, saying therapy had helped him massively and noting that his goal now was “being the best husband and the best dad that I can be”. He said he believed he had more freedom in California. “I feel as though it’s the life that my mum wanted for me,” he said. “To be able to do the things I’m able to do with my kids that I undoubtedly wouldn’t be able to do in the UK – it’s huge.”

There was a time when he and Meghan wanted to be based in Africa, in Cape Town, when they were still official working royals. But America now looks likely to remain their base, even during a second Donald Trump presidency. Trump is no fan of the couple and the feeling is mutual, but in spite of his threats to expel Harry if it transpires that he lied about drug use on his visa application, the incoming president’s son, Eric, has suggested there will be more important things to worry about.

It’s often been suggested that Meghan harboured political ambitions to stand as a Democrat, but is she thick-skinned enough? Any outspoken attacks on Trump might threaten the British government’s efforts to use the Royal Family to bolster ties with the US administration, but the chances of her getting directly involved in politics look slim, despite her and Harry’s decision to give incumbent Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley, $250,000 for a women’s wellness centre in Philadelphia.

The Sussexes, it seems, will have a potential bolthole in Portugal – their office has neither confirmed nor denied reports that the couple are buying a home close to where Princess Eugenie and her husband Jack Brooksbank have a place, which suggests the stories are true. Neighbours at the CostaTerra Golf and Ocean Club are certainly expecting them and think they want to use the house as an investment and as a way of gaining a visa to travel around Europe more easily.

Almost five years after their dramatic decision to quit their official lives, the couple are now working more independently from each other, ostensibly in an effort to maximise their earnings and promote their own causes. But their separate professional paths do not herald a split in their marriage, according to friends who describe reports hinting at divorce as “nonsense”.

Harry and Meghan, they insist, will still do joint public appearances in future and are planning further overseas trips similar to the quasi-royal or “royal lite” visits to Nigeria and Colombia this year.

They are expected to be in Vancouver and Whistler on the west coast of Canada in early February – for the latest version of Harry’s Invictus Games for wounded military personnel – as well as further visits to Africa, where their personal stock is high, are likely.

Invictus and the African youth charity Sentebale, which Harry founded with Lesotho’s Prince Seeiso in 2006 in memory of their mothers, remain central to his work. With Harry no longer based in London, Sentebale is moving its leadership team and decision-making to southern Africa as part of a wider transformation of the charity’s focus. Instead of concentrating on combatting Aids, it is working much broadly on issues of youth health, inequality and climate resilience.

The couple’s luxurious lifestyle has been partly funded by a multi-year deal, said to be worth $100m, to produce content for Netflix. A cookery and gardening show featuring Meghan is understood to be in the works and further projects through their company Archewell Productions are in the pipeline, even though their current Netflix series, Polo, a behind-the-scenes look at the rich people’s sport, has been panned by critics and, perhaps unsurprisingly, failed to make the streaming service’s top 10 viewed shows after its release.

Their biggest problem, according to critics, is that while their tales of mistreatment inside the Royal Family proved compelling commercially and internationally, the public seems less interested in what they film and say about other topics. They no longer represent the British state or monarchy. So for whom now do they speak, apart from themselves?

Mark Borkowski, the PR agent, has some sympathy for the couple and the negativity they have experienced. But he believes they are in danger of exhausting the good will shown to them by their US business partners after failing to secure commercial successes to match Spare and their initial Netflix series about their own lives. “I think they need a Hail Mary. They need to do something,” he said. “They do need a grand plan for 2025.”

Harry, however, seems relaxed about it. Perhaps he does not need the money after inheriting a reported £8m on his 40th birthday from a trust fund set up by his late great-grandmother, the Queen Mother.

The Prince is certainly prepared to blow a large sum on his pursuit through the courts of British newspapers he has accused of obtaining information about him unlawfully. In January 2026 he is due to take dmg media, the publishers of the Daily Mail, to trial but before that his case against the publishers of The Sun is scheduled to start in London next month.

Harry, who is expected to give evidence in the witness box over four days, will likely have to pay both sides’ legal fees, estimated to be between £10m and £15m, after he and the former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson became the last two people among 1,300 original claimants to reject an out-of-court settlement with Rupert Murdoch’s company.

Any damages he wins, even if he is successful, will be dwarfed by the legal bill. “100 times over even if or when we win,” he told the DealBook summit. “I’m still liable for the legal costs of both sides.”

He sounds less angry about the media these days, insisting he avoids reading most things about himself whereas he used to confess to seeing everything and scouring the comments under online articles. His aim, he has said, is accountability, exposing the practices allegedly used to obtain information about him.

Harry and Meghan made the Royals relevant – but the Firm blew it

His legal team will be back in court in April to appeal against the government’s refusal to allow the Sussexes to continue to enjoy guaranteed police protection when in the UK and access to national intelligence. Some in his camp had hoped that a new Labour government might be willing to change tack and reinstate his full police protection instead of the case-by-case assessment he is given every time he comes back to Britain now. But so far there has been no sign of the Starmer government bending.

After his newspaper and police protection battles, Harry has suggested the big tech companies will be next in his sights, as he pushes for regulation of social media to counter misinformation.

Some royal insiders wonder if he is getting financial backing from some of the wealthier claimants who settled their disputes with newspapers.

But the royal biographer Ingrid Seward suggested that the costs will not trouble him. “Harry is a very rich and privileged young man but he still hasn’t really achieved everything he wanted to do,” she said.

The i Paper is part of Harmsworth Media, a sister division of ANL’s owner dmg media, and has complete editorial independence.

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