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Six years later, it was a remarkable full-circle moment: A gigantic, vulgar private jet landing on the tarmac at Birmingham Airport carrying Harry, Meghan, Archie, Lili and their dogs Pula and Mia back to Great Britain to live. (The Royalist has been told this carbon-spewing monster wasn’t booked via Travlayst, the environmentally sustainable travel company that Harry fronts.)
But despite this performative statement of triumphal return, Harry and Meghan are refusing to confirm that they are in the United Kingdom.
The thinking seems to be that it would undermine their own argument about privacy if they briefed about their movements—or maybe they just believe they will have a stronger case to sue newspapers that publish details of where they live or where their kids are going to school if they have never said a word about it?
The level of Kafkaesque absurdity we have now reached is that their relationship with the British media is so toxic, so poisonous, so damaged, that the couple have arrived and are publicly refusing, for legal purposes, to say they have arrived!
Looking at that jet sitting on the tarmac, it felt like a massive middle finger to the royal family and its carefully nurtured traditions of frugality. We all know the reality—the Queen bought and sold racehorses with less introspection than you or I might order takeout—but there was at least a pretense of modesty. The Sussexes have rejected all that fusty old nonsense, along with everything else about the royal model; to them it’s an old bad smell in a church to be spritzed out in time for your wedding.
That jet said: screw the lot of you. We have succeeded. We have won. We are free to make our own money; we’ve made a bucketload of it, we are the independent buccaneers on the great ocean wave of free commerce.
The Royalist has been told by very reliable sources that Harry and Meghan have indeed bought a house near the Cotswolds town of Stow-on-the-Wold for a figure between £12 million ($16.3 million) and £15 million ($20.3 million). Their children will be going to a nearby fashionable school that has something of a “tree-climbing,” let-kids-be-kids vibe.
It will not be long before the specific details of the residence, at least, leak—they are widely known in all of the Cotswold social circles. When massively rich people buy great fat pads in the middle of the country, everybody in the neighborhood talks about it, because a huge number of normal people make their living servicing these estates. That is not a privacy violation. That is the English countryside.
The locals are by turns amused, entertained, appalled, and titillated.
One source said: “A lot of them simply can’t wait to see if Meghan really is as ghastly as everyone makes out.”
They say they are completely private individuals—er, completely private individuals who are lobbying the British taxpayer to cover a £5 million-a-year security bill?
The two positions are unsustainable together, but in the teeth of furious public anger, they are going to get the state-sponsored security: I suspect that within a couple of weeks it will emerge that the family is protected.
There’s always an argument from celebrities desperate to keep everything secret: what we get up to is not in the public interest; it’s just interesting to the public.
But the idea that nobody is allowed to know what country the fifth in line to the British throne is living in, or on what basis, or for how long, or under what terms, is self-evidently absurd. If that’s the way you want it, Harry, renounce your titles.
Even without the security, it is complete fantasy to argue the position is remotely analogous to any other private individual in the land. If they’d spent the last five years living a low-key existence in Montana, nobody would care. Instead, they made a six-part Netflix documentary about themselves (criticizing the widely-beloved institution they are now returning to, no less) and ran a glitzy Instagram account which promotes the stories of the sixth and seventh in line to the throne, Archie and Lilibet.
I suspect their time in the U.K. is going to be very fraught if they insist on being in a state of permanent war with the media and threatening to sue everyone at the drop of a hat, because the purpose of developing a functional relationship with the British media is that it is through them you get a chance to mediate a relationship with their audience, the British people.
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