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As William and Kate made their way happily around the racecourse at Royal Ascot on Tuesday, smiling and cuddling up together and frankly looking closer than they have in years, it was hard to believe that, the following day, in the privacy of Kensington Palace, Harry and William would sit across the table from each other.
Under the watchful eye of the the trustees of the Royal Foundation, they put the finishing touches to a carefully negotiated agreement that will see Meghan and Harry severing their last major tie to William and Kate and walking away from their once-joint philanthropic vehicle.
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It has been dubbed a divorce by the British media, and there are indeed many parallels; perhaps it was the case, as it is with so many divorces, that the actual signing and sealing of the final separation was the easy bit, and has come as a blessed relief to both parties.
Royal communications officers have defiantly insisted to The Daily Beast that the split is all part of a long term strategic plan and is not reflective of any feud (perish the thought) at the heart of the House of Windsor. But few really believe that this is not to do with interpersonal difficulties anymore.
After all, the horse trading that reached its conclusion at the AGM of the Foundation on Wednesday was a far cry from the blaze of glory in which the “fab four”—how tragically ironic that once-popular soubriquet now seems—made their first appearance on behalf of the Foundation, in February last year.
Although Meghan only formally joined the Foundation after her marriage to Harry, the two couples sat together on stage for the launch and this, journalists were told, would be an annual event.
We were briefed that the four of them, driven by a desire to make a difference together and leave behind a royal reputation for ribbon-cutting, felt that teaming up would help them shine a more intense light on the country’s and world’s most important causes.
Meghan made headlines with her feminist pitch: “Women don’t need to find a voice, they have a voice.”
But even then there were signs, for those who cared to read them, of trouble ahead.
Asked whether they ever had family disagreements at work, William a little too swiftly replied, “Oh yes,” while Harry tried to joke his way out of it, saying they “come so thick and fast” he had lost track.
“It’s really good that we’ve got four different personalities,” Harry said. “We’ve all got that same passion to want to make a difference, but different opinions and I think those opinions work really, really well. Working as a family does have its challenges, of course it does—the fact that everyone’s laughing means everyone knows exactly what it’s like. But, look, you know, we’re stuck together for the rest of our lives.”
It now seems those differences were not strength, but a fault line running right through the heart of the young generation of Windsor.
A photograph of that February 2018 get-together remains the banner photo on the Royal Foundation website, because, as well as being the first, it was also the last time they managed to get a photograph of the patrons together at one of their own events.
A Foundation report, published last week and dated June 6, hinted that today’s separation was in the works, saying: “In light of recent changes in the lives of Their Royal Highnesses, including The Duke and Duchess of Sussex setting up their own Household, a review is currently underway to assess the implications these changes may have for The Royal Foundation. It is likely there will be changes to the current structure of The Royal Foundation.”
The change announced Thursday is, effectively, that Harry and Meghan are walking away and will set up their own charitable vehicle later this year. William and Kate will keep the Foundation.
While many divorces get bogged down in rows about air miles, property, or the nice painting that once hung above the fireplace, the internal controversies of this split revolved around what we might term custody; specifically, who retains control of which spheres of influence.
Some of the divisions have been uncontroversial and logical: Harry, of course, will continue to be the royal family’s cheerleader for the capabilities, rights, and plights of wondered and traumatized former and current servicemen. His Invictus Games has surely earned him that right.
Meghan is expected to take on the work currently defined by the Royal Foundation as “empowering communities,” of which her involvement with the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire in London, writing a charity cookbook for the cause last year, has been the most prominent example.
But when it came to their beloved mental health charities, it appears that there was never going to be any way through it other than joint custody.
Kate is likely to have been insistent on not giving the issue up, having made mental health her signature issue since the first days of her marriage. She named the charity Action on Addiction one of her first patronages, and then spearheaded the creation of the umbrella group, Heads Together (of which all four young royals are also patrons).
But for Harry it would have been a massive sacrifice to surrender that beat, given that he broke every boundary of royal protocol to discuss, with a journalist, his own near mental breakdown, which he believes was brought on by his failure to properly deal with the death of his mother.
It was evidently just as hard for courtiers to see a way through the logjam, hence we are now left in a rather odd situation where all four will continue to be patrons of the Heads Together umbrella group for mental health charities, which has left many journalists scratching their heads about how it will work in practice.
There have already been problems with clashing diary commitments, but the failure to deliver mental health to either one party or the other means we could feasibly end up in a situation where each family is pushing different but similar mental health charities on the same day.
The price Harry appears to have had to pay for being allowed to keep a role in mental health is surrendering his beloved wildlife to William.
A press release from the palace said William and Kate would retain control of the United for Wildlife charity, which runs a global task force tackling the illegal wildlife trade.
This is, actually, a big surprise, as most observers had expected that it was Harry and Meghan who would get the conservation and nature gig, in line with the broader division of duties. William and Kate do the boring but more constitutionally important domestic stuff, Harry and Meghan are the jet-set celebs who spread the love (and bring the big bucks in) overseas.
Ultimately, like most divorces, it’s imperfect and a bit of a mess.
It’s also, of course, very sad, but maybe we can allow ourselves to hope that, freed from the necessity of pretending they are in love, the new exes might one day rediscover the joy of friendship.
