Are Harry and Meghan really “moving back” to the United Kingdom from California?
Ever since the big royal story of the week was handed to grateful U.K. newspapers last Wednesday, suspicion has been growing that there’s more to it than meets the eye.
It’s now clear that the family is not re-relocating, at least not in the way any normal person understands the words “moving back.”
Sure, they will arrive on a plane at some point in the next week, and they will enroll their kids at a school where pupils wear straw boaters, but now their camp is telling the London Sunday Times that they might only be here for six months, while an official source tells The New York Times they are only here for the fall!
Frankly, this sounds about right. The Royalist would be amazed if Meghan can make it through November in the Cotswolds, let alone February, especially as it now transpires Meghan is no longer needed to act in the third series of Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen for the simple reason that a third series has not been commissioned.
Even Tina Brown, the sainted founding editor-in-chief of the Daily Beast, fell for that one. She touted Meghan’s new job as an exclusive revelation before performing a rapid, classic “reverse ferret,” trumpeting the news that the deal (or the non-deal) had fallen through.
Now the whole thing is unraveling yet further. The London Sunday Times has a source, described as close to Harry, saying they might only be here for six months. The exact quote reads: “It’ll be an extended period of time. It could be six months, it could be a year, it could be more. I don’t think even they know yet. They might suddenly go, ‘Why don’t we try Canada for a while? Why don’t we try Australia?’”
This isn’t a gap year, folks! You’ve got kids! Who puts children into a new school in a new country on the basis that the family “might” be there for six months, or might “try Australia” instead?
For a couple who have made mental health the centerpiece of their public identity, such a lack of focus on childhood stability and consistency is extraordinary. If the children are being put into school in Britain, it would be profoundly unfair to pull them out after six months without giving the thing a proper go.
The only on-the-record line I can find anywhere is a quote given to The New York Times by a rep who said Harry and Meghan have “decided to spend an extended period in the UK this autumn.” The autumn? Is that September, October, November? Is there a legal definition of fall?
Then there is the question of why they left California in such a rush. Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation has suggested in The Daily Mail that it may be connected to Harry’s visa. I don’t know whether that is right.
What is clear is that a great deal of this looks like a massive PR operation designed to distract from a genuinely disastrous year, and specifically from Friday’s excoriating court judgment against Harry, which left his reputation in tatters. It was an absolute humiliation.
Much of my skepticism about all this comes from a conversation I had in March this year with a friend of Harry’s. I had been holding that material back for my book. I have decided to publish it now.
The conversation took place against the backdrop of the stalled U.K. government decision about Harry’s security. The friend told me, with some deliberateness: “If he doesn’t get the security, he will just go house hunting anyway.”
Years after leaving Britain, after selling his departure to the Netflix cameras as a “freedom flight,” after arguing in court, in his memoir and in interviews that he and his family could not live safely in Britain without police protection, Harry was now “utterly determined” to start spending lengthy periods back home. With his children. Without security.
The security question remained his central grievance, the friend explained, but he was no longer prepared to let it veto his plans. If the establishment would not give him the protection he considered his right, he would “put it up” to them. He would buy a house, move into it, and essentially dare the local police force not to protect him.
He had a location in mind: the Cotswolds, close to his father’s home at Highgrove, where Harry was happy as a teenager and young man, where he drank in pubs with William in easier times, where he knows every lane. “He enjoys hiking and outdoor activity,” the friend said, “and is used to that pattern of life in California, where he walks his dog on the beach or hikes in the canyons.”
The friend told me Harry intended to spend “at least” a month in Britain in 2027 around the launch of the Invictus Games (which he hoped the king would open alongside him). The American school summer vacation runs from June to September, and in future he wanted to spend those extended periods in Britain with his children.
I noted all this. Then I asked what seemed to me the obvious question: what about Meghan? Surely London beckoned for her, if the business was to expand to Britain?
The friend shook their head. Harry “definitely did not” want to live in London. Too crowded, too hectic. The countryside was where he wanted to be.
As for Meghan, it was all about the business. If her As Ever brand developed sufficient commercial traction in the U.K., it might make sense for her to divide her time between locations. If it didn’t, the friend acknowledged, there was little “practical reason” for Meghan to be based anywhere other than the United States.
I asked again: so Harry would be in the Cotswolds, and Meghan would be in California, for weeks if not months on end?
The friend shrugged, without any observable discomfort, as though this were simply a practical solution to competing demands rather than a description of a marriage operating at very considerable distance. The following day, The Wall Street Journal published a piece raising, for the first time in a mainstream outlet, the possibility that Harry and Meghan might divorce. The friend dismissed it when I raised it.
That conversation is why I do not believe the story as briefed. The blueprint, as described to me then, was Harry in Britain and Meghan in California.
The idea that Meghan can go and live in the Cotswolds (or Australia, or New Zealand, or Canada) while selling a California lifestyle brand is absurd. As Ever is a Montecito brand based on jam, flowers, sunshine, and the canyons. You cannot front that from a rented farmhouse in Oxfordshire in November.
The Times’ source describes them as an “international couple.” I suspect it may turn out to be more of an international person.
We know Harry wants to come home. He has made it very clear how much he misses Britain, right down to that telling “currently I may live in the United States” in his Remembrance Day essay. He regrets burning his bridges with his father, not because he accepts he did wrong or because he feels guilty about what he inflicted on his family, but because he is running out of time to kiss and make up before the king dies. He has no friends in California to speak of, apart from David Langdown, who is his head of security and therefore an employee.
It is no surprise he is miserable. It is no surprise he is excited about coming home.
This is the Sussex routine in miniature. A great announcement. Everyone gets excited. Then the holes appear. Then everything starts getting walked back, and suddenly it’s only six months, or only the autumn, or only an “extended period.”
We are seeing how chaotic and understaffed they are. We are seeing, again, a willingness to feed the media things that are not true and then decline to correct them in any meaningful way. Anybody who has followed this story for the last six years knows they are prepared to mislead on matters big and small, and we have seen plenty of evidence of it before.
If William and Catherine have any sense, they will stay well away from all of it and allow it to implode, because that is what is going to happen.
It also demonstrates one great truth about the British press: newspapers will run any old rubbish in the middle of August, which is known locally as “the silly season.”
What matters now is what actually happens, rather than what they say is going to happen. The person who told me in March that these two people want very different things and are going to live in very different places is the one I’m most tempted to believe. If the family ends up needing to make some decisions about that, it will not come as a surprise.
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