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Harry: Meghan and I would love to move to Africa
It’s an extraordinary morning of royal news in the U.K. today, with a welter of stories emerging from a film about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s African tour due to be screened later today (The Daily Beast will be watching, mouth agape, and bringing you an update on the site at around 5/6pm EST).
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Perhaps the most headline-grabbing item to come out so far is that Prince Harry has said that he and his wife Meghan Markle would like to move to Africa. Meanwhile, CNN claimed that the couple will take a break from royal duties towards the end of the year, dividing their time between the U.S. and the UK.
Harry made the bombshell comments in an interview with their friend Tom Bradby, a journalist who made the film about the couple, which is due to be screened tonight.
In an interview in the film, leaked to The Sunday Times this morning, Harry says: “I don’t know where we could live in Africa at the moment. We’ve just come from Cape Town. That would be an amazing place for us to be able to base ourselves.”
The comments come on the heels of longstanding rumors that the Sussexes are looking at quitting the UK, as Harry and Meghan struggle to cope with the pressure of life in the royal goldfish bowl.
Harry does, however, acknowledge that a permanent move to Africa might not be a realistic goal, adding: “With all the problems that are going on there, I just don’t see how we would be able to…I think it would be a very hard place to live when you know what’s going on—but, then again, you’re sort of slightly disconnected from it.”
According to the The Sunday Times report, Harry also says: “The rest of our lives, especially our life’s work, will be predominantly focused on Africa, on conservation . . . there’s a lot of things to be done. There’s a lot of problems here, but there’s huge potential for solutions.”
Bradby admits there is truth in rumors of feuds and fall-outs
In an accompanying piece for The Sunday Times promoting the film today, Bradby describes Harry and Meghan as “a couple who clearly feel under the most extreme pressure and seem, at times, to be buckling beneath it.”
In highly provocative comments, which are unlikely to have been made without Harry and Meghan’s permission, he talks about the “reports of difficulties, splits and tensions within the wider royal family” and says that some of these stories are “untrue or exaggerated, but not all.”
So, yes, the feud is real.
Thunder-stealing
Whatever those tensions were when the film was made, the film itself has probably made them worse.
The way the film has been publicized and promoted has also incurred much ire; William and Kate are said to be seriously pissed that clips of Meghan emotionally declaring that “not many people” have troubled to ask her how she is doing were released while they were on their tour of Pakistan.
The best insight on this comes from Sky News correspondent Rhiannon Mills, who, obsessive royal watchers will recall, was patronized and humiliated by Prince Harry on camera in Africa, and was also on the Pakistan tour.
She wrote, in a pointed piece for Sky News, which may well have been briefed by William and Kate’s press team: “As part of the Royal Family, relationships with other households are just as important. While we were on tour, something peculiar was happening. Buckingham Palace was helping to promote a documentary about Harry and Meghan’s Africa tour releasing clips of Harry criticizing the press and Meghan saying how tough it had been for her as a new mum. A strange thing to do when you consider there is an unwritten rule in the Royal Family, that you don’t do anything too high profile when other members of the family are on tour.”
Seems like that little nicety just went out the window.
Is Harry getting help?
Bradby describes the couple as “bruised, even a little defensive,” and says, “It does not take a genius to work out the basic psychology at play. Harry still believes that the press, or at least the game she was forced to engage in with it, killed his mother. He now fears, in the most deep and atavistic way, that history may repeat itself with his wife.”
Harry says in the film that photographers remind him of the death of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, saying it is a “wound that festers . . . every single time I see a camera, every single time I hear a click, every single time I see a flash.”
Bradby hints that Harry may be receiving professional help to cope with the mental health challenges he faces, saying: “I tiptoed gently into the subject of his mental health, which he has discussed in public in the past, and it was clear from his answer that he is still having to manage the stress and anxiety.”
Bradby says that Meghan describes herself as “existing not living” and says she is “taking it one day at a time.”
Bradby describes Harry as “tired” and “burnt out.” He says that while the emotional statement he released in the final days of the tour, accusing the press of being liars peddling propaganda, “was a shock” it “made sense” in the context of what he had witnessed.
Royal fashion watch
Kate Middleton and Prince William aced every aspect of the fashion of their royal tour of Pakistan, mixing respectful western dress, while also wearing stylish traditional costume, too, with Kate attracting much positive comment for wearing the shalwar kameez and dupatta.
As publications including Business Insider noted, the couple even dressed strikingly in matchy-matchy turquoise; Kate in long dress, and William in a diamond-print sherwani.
Kate also showed she can learn a trick from Meghan, posting a personal message to Instagram for the first time, saluting the work of Pakistan’s SOS Children’s Villages, signed simply, “Catherine.”
This week in royal history
On October 23, 1991, Princess Diana was reunited with her sons William and Harry on board the royal yacht Britannia. The spontaneous joy of the hugs she and her children shared ensured the pictures have remained memorable all these years later.
Unanswered questions
In the previously released clip of her candid interview due to screen in full tonight, Sunday, Meghan Markle talks to Tom Bradby about the “struggle” of her royal life. She thanks Bradby for asking after her physical and mental health, because “not many people have asked if I am OK.”
Well, journalists and the general public are generally not allowed near her to ask her how she is, so who is she referring to? Her friends and loved ones? One would have thought they must ask how she is on a pretty regular basis, particularly knowing how difficult her experience of royal life has been? If not, why not?
