GUESS WHO’S BACK

Palace’s Nightmare Comes True as Harry and Meghan Return

They’re doing exactly what the Queen refused to countenance.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex arrived at the Community Recording Studio in Nottingham this morning for their first joint public engagement since moving back to Britain in August, and were met by a crowd of media that comfortably outnumbered the members of the public who had turned out to see them.

I was standing outside the studio for half an hour before they arrived. When I got there, the public presence amounted to a handful of people. The press pen, by contrast, held somewhere between 80 and 100 photographers, reporters and camera crews, with a drone overhead. Barriers had been set up along the street. There were no crowds waving Union Jacks.

That is the honest picture from the ground of a visit that was, for all intents and purposes, a joint royal visit, whatever Buckingham Palace says about the couple being private citizens. The format, the itinerary, the barriers, the photographers, and the fact that the journalists of the royal rota (the press pool Harry once dismissed as an extended arm of the royal family) were invited back in to cover the day: every element was borrowed from the old playbook.

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The message the couple wanted to send was clear enough. We are back in Nottingham, where it all began, and we are as royal as we ever were.

The city was chosen for its symbolism. It was here, in December 2017, days after their engagement was announced, that Harry and Meghan did their first official engagement together. Tom Bower’s book on the Sussexes opens with that visit, describing the chaotic scene of photographers yelling, the crowd screaming, and Meghan working the barriers, saying, “Hi, I’m Meghan.” On that day, there were thousands of people in the streets.

Today, when I asked a group of men from the auto repair shop opposite the studio what they thought of the couple, I got a couple of “no comment”s. One of them, the owner of the garage, told me off camera that he didn’t think much of them. He also said he regarded them as members of the royal family, which, as it happens, is exactly the problem.

The real crowd, such as it was, was assembled. A group of adults with special needs from the local disability support center, whose office is next door, was brought round and positioned on the studio side of the street to create a welcoming line for the couple to walk along. A party of school children was then brought in to join them. By the time the couple appeared, I would say the split between media and public was getting close to 50/50, but a good proportion of the public were invited guests of the studio.

The couple was around 10 minutes late. That may not sound like much, but real royals are never late. It is a small but telling indicator of the lack of institutional support behind the operation. Running a royal visit is expensive and requires a great deal of logistical back-up, and without it you end up with what is known in media parlance as a scrum, which is roughly what was developing on the sidewalk. One Sussex staffer stood anxiously checking his phone for updates on when the couple would arrive.

When they did arrive, there was no booing. I want to be absolutely clear about that, because I am certain there will be YouTube commentators this evening who were not there telling you the couple was jeered and humiliated. They were not. The British public are far too polite for that; booing is for soccer crowds. There was some hyena-like ululation from in the crowd, but that was about it.

Harry, in a suit rather than the T-shirt, spent a long time outside, glad-handing, posing for photographs and collecting flowers and balloons. Meghan did the same. They spent noticeably more time with the small group of invited guests at the studio end of the street than in front of the main bank of photographers, which had the effect of ensuring the pictures that went out showed them surrounded by people.

Royals do often stay outside for a long time talking to the public, but usually when there are a thousand people there, not twenty. By the time the couple finally went inside, the few members of the public who had wandered over had already gone home, and my friend at the garage had gone back to work. It was, in the end, highly performative.

The reactions I collected were mixed, and revealing. Two sisters I spoke to were split: one, a big fan of Harry who said she had always wanted to meet him and that he was “very much his mom,” regarded him as a member of the royal family; the other said he had made his choice when he got married.

Another woman told me she considered Harry a royal but had “no thoughts on Meghan,” which I suspect was politeness. A woman who had only come down because she was walking her dog told me that if it had been Prince William and Catherine, “you wouldn’t have got anywhere near” the place. One man told me they “will always be Prince and Princess” and were entitled to do whatever they liked.

One other woman, well informed and clearly following the story, told me firmly that they were private citizens now.

That confusion, between the man who insists they are royal and the woman who knows they are not, is the palace’s nightmare, and it is the entire purpose of Thursday’s exercise: to persuade more people that Harry and Meghan are working members of the royal family, and to get away from the accurate idea that they are private citizens. It is precisely the half-in, half-out arrangement the late Queen refused to countenance. You are either in, or you are out. Thursday showed why: the palace cannot stop this couple from doing what they want. They are not subject to palace discipline, and nobody can tell them not to turn up in Nottingham with a rota pool and a line of barriers.

A broader theme emerged from the people I spoke to: such affection as there was went to Harry, not to Meghan. Several people did not want to say what they thought of her on camera, which tells its own story.

My cab driver on the way in, who was from Birmingham, where Harry’s Invictus Games will be held next year, offered another explanation for the duke’s hardcore of support. Some people like him, he said, because they see him as having stood up to the royal family. It had not occurred to me before, but it may well be that a good chunk of the 30 percent who consistently back Harry in the polls are people who simply dislike the monarchy and feel he has done a good job of tearing it down.

If this had been any other member of the royal family, with a few people standing in the street, nobody would have been interested. The reason the media turned out in force is that the Sussexes are pitching this as their return to service. On the evidence of this morning, the public is not yet turning out with them.

The couple was due to spend around two hours inside the studio with the rota before moving on to two further engagements: a food poverty project where Meghan was to take part in a cooking class, and the youth charity Epic Partners.

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Tom SykesEuropean Editor at Large

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