Who will care for Harry and Meghan?

Just how desperate does the House of Windsor want Harry and Meghan to get? The royals and their advisers don’t seem to see the iceberg looming from sunny Montecito. Distracted by Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s catastrophe, the palace remains in a perplexed haze about one of the Andrew scandal’s less discussed lessons: the perils to the monarchy when peripheral royals hang out with the uber-rich and start to consider themselves, by comparison, broke.

Not that there is anything about Harry and Meghan’s cacophony of blown opportunities that resembles the disgraced Andrew’s cascade of dissolute transgressions or Sarah Ferguson’s heinous grovelling to their paedo pal Epstein. But look in the crystal ball, people. It’s bad enough that Spotify bailed and Netflix failed to renew its 2020 $100m deal with the Sussexes. Now that the TV streamer has put a fork in Meghan’s basted turkey, With Love, Meghan, and cut loose her domestic-goddess home products spin-off line, As Ever, after only 11 months (leaving a $10m pile-up of tea, baking mix and raspberry jam), the Sussexes’ revenue streams are starting to dry up.

They will soon be heading for that hinterland of freebie hell that draws them further and further into cheesy commercial gigs, or worse, dubious, transactional acquaintances willing to underwrite their faux-royal lifestyle and estimated $2m in annual security costs. Meghan’s impending trip to Australia to be the up-close star attraction at a paid “girls’ weekend”, hosted by the podcast Her Best Life in the ballroom of the InterContinental hotel at Sydney’s Coogee Beach, has the whiff of Fergie’s post-divorce money-making schemes, such as the rogue redhead’s early 00s contract with Wedgwood to flog fancy table settings under the fluorescent lights of mid-market American shopping malls.

Potential reputational hazards to the Sussexes are already making themselves plain in the dreaded moral pitfall of wanting to fly privately. On their 2024 DIY royal tour of Nigeria to promote Harry’s Invictus Games, Meghan’s refusal to fly by military transport meant the couple availed themselves of a small plane supplied by the Nigerian big shot businessman Allen Onyema. Without palace advisers to brief them, Harry and Meghan seemed unaware that Onyema was wanted in the US on charges of money laundering. Sounds like just the kind of dodgy dude Andrew would have invited to a “straightforward shooting weekend”.

This piquant revelation comes from the British investigative journalist Tom Bower’s latest biographical hit job, Betrayal: Power, Deceit and the Fight for the Future of the Royal Family, a 400-page forced march through the Sussexes’ post-Megxit fuck-ups. It’s what you would expect from Bower, a dour scandal detective, whose more than 25 previous tomes are a bomb site of reputations, from Robert Maxwell to David Beckham. He’s always been good at turning up unforgettably damning details, such as the one from Rebel Prince, his 2018 biography of Prince Charles, which revealed that among a convoy of personal effects the prince brought to his friends’ country houses was his bespoke lavatory seat. (I am told that, as recently as two years ago, in a private discussion about press malfeasance, the king was still exasperated by “that damned lavatory seat nonsense”.)

A Bower news bomb is always something of a publishing event. The best nuggets in Betrayal are Meghan’s doomed efforts to project authenticity. In one Instagram promotion of the “love language” of her jam, the duchess posted an image of her daughter Lilibet’s hand “nearing a bubbling pot in her own kitchen that supposedly contained her homemade spread. ‘Beautiful,’ says her daughter, although As Ever jam was apparently manufactured 2,000 miles away in Illinois.”

For Meghan’s much-covered 2021 visit to a Harlem school to read the students her platitudinous picture book The Bench, her press aide arranged to have the classroom walls painted and the lighting improved to make it look “more appealing”. Meghan is portrayed as a deluded diva with an infallible belief in her own star-powered, misunderstood specialness.

Bower’s Harry is a dazed, distraught figure who stumbles around in a state of explosive chagrin. He is outraged when Sophie Chandauka, the assertive chair of Sentebale, the Lesotho charity co-founded by Harry in 2006, presents him with a “brand audit” in 2024, informing him that 50 organisations and donors believe he is now toxic to Sentebale’s fundraising efforts. “People don’t want to be associated with your Netflix shows, and especially not with Meghan,” she told him with a brutal candour that must have been a first for the grandson of the queen. Harry was stunned. Johnny Depp, he replied wonderingly, still attracts a lot of money, despite the courtroom battles with his ex Amber Heard.

Harry could not accept that the implosion of Sentebale was largely the fault of his own distraction. According to Bower, Harry had not even visited Lesotho since 2019. Chandauka is usually depicted as a shrill saboteur who weaponised her race and gender to drive Harry out. Here, she comes across as a pragmatic businesswoman, vexed by the charity’s financial haemorrhaging and determined to reposition Sentebale for potential donors who “don’t want your victimhood … It can’t be Africans with a begging bowl.” Pity that Chandauka didn’t run the rest of Harry’s life.

Juicy stuff if true. The Sussexes have blasted the book as “deranged conspiracy”. Missing from Bower’s litany of the couple’s failures is any empathy for the larger quandary of Harry and Meghan’s predicament, which haunts, in varying degrees, all the “minor” royals expected to dutifully circulate around the crown.

The Windsor B-list is accustomed to a luxury and deference that everyone resents, but without the wherewithal or expertise to pursue successful lives beyond the palace. If they try to do so, they are accused of exploiting their royal status. But what else do they have to sell? As one veteran courtier put it to me when I was writing The Palace Papers, Harry “is a deeply caring person who wants to make a positive difference. What he doesn’t understand is that the reason he’s getting to do that is because he’s a royal prince.” If Meghan fantasises that she’s a global lifestyle guru with the following of a millennial Martha Stewart, it’s because of the sheer size of the Netflix and Spotify cheques that, once upon a time, confirmed it.

I am told that the heir to the throne, Prince William, is preoccupied with the built-in risk of primogeniture’s cruelty. He is determined that his second and third-born children, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, are well prepared and well financed for independent lives, and will not fall into the same cycle of thwarted freedom. But what about William’s traitorous brother? The rupture with Harry is bigger than a sibling feud.

Before the Sussexes crash and burn, the House of Windsor needs to put aside schadenfreude and deal with the problem. Give Harry and Meghan a limited international role. Cough up a turnkey pied-à-terre for them in Buckingham Palace, where none of the rest of the family wants to live anyway. Pay their damn UK security bill. (It won’t be a good look if Harry, a veteran of two tours of Afghanistan, is taken out by a nutjob.) In return, the Sussexes must put a sock in it.

As for the press’s obsession with brotherly reconciliation and forgiveness, forget it. For 70 years, Queen Elizabeth II spent her reign smiling tightly at people she couldn’t stand.

Betrayal: Power, Deceit and the Fight for the Future of the Royal Family by Tom Bower is published by Blink Publishing (£25). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £22.50. Delivery charges may apply

Tina Brown is an editor and author, and writes the weekly Substack newsletter Fresh Hell

Photograph by Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images