Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex attend the One Young World 2022 Manchester Summit at Bridgewater Hall, Manchester. Photo / AP
OPINION:
It's always an exciting day when we get a royal first. Sure, the royal in question never hit the two-year mark of her tenure as a working HRH, now lives 8750km away from Buckingham Palace and has done more to destabilise the monarchy than the Roundheads during the Civil War, but hey … here we are.
Meghan, Duchess of Sussex has, prepare yourself … taken a train. A regular train with other paying passengers, not a private compartment in sight.
In a surprising turn up for the books, and for the first time in the four years since the Queen took her along for an overnight jaunt on the Her Majesty's own choo-choo in 2018, the Duchess chose this unusually plebeian form of transport to get to Manchester for the first stop on her and husband Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex's DIY pseudo-royal Euro tour.
(As we all know, the Sussexes have displayed the enduring penchant for luxury, private travel, despite the Duke's regular denunciations about the climate crisis. Fly as I say, not as I do?)
Anyhow, the Duchess was in the northern city to deliver the keynote speech at the One Young World summit, an organisation she has been associated with since 2014, her first speech back in Britain since their final round of official engagements in 2020.
If the royal family had been fretting that the lightning rod Sussexes would hit the UK with a bang then they must be breathing a big sigh of relief right now and reaching for another Jaffa cake in quiet celebration.
One event down and the Great Sussex Return Tour has gotten off to a damp squiz of a start.
Look no further than a 23-second video shared by Chris Ship, ITV's royal editor, taken outside Manchester's Bridgewater Hall where the summit was held, for proof.
"Lots of support for Meghan and Harry as they left after her speech at @OneYoungWorld," Ship posted, however having watched the video numerous times, his definition of "lots" is a tad strange.
Lots of support for Meghan and Harry as they left after her speech at @OneYoungWorld pic.twitter.com/eTqs3D20VO
— Chris Ship (@chrisshipitv) September 5, 2022
The clip shows what looks like a couple of dozen people at most, including a number cheering and yelling "We love you Meghan!" and some members of the press. There are no barricades controlling crowds and the group is not pressed together or really craning that hard to see. We are not talking about any sort of real outpouring of public support.
(Elsewhere, The Times reported that "in the hours before the event a couple of royal fans were outside the venue" which might be the new working definition of "underwhelming".)
Contrast all of this with the scenes that greeted Harry and Meghan back in the "before" times when the kohl-eyed Duchess had not become a meme and "guess the royal racist" had yet to become a fun dinner party game.
On January 7, 2020, the couple visited Canada House to randomly thank the country for having hosted them for a six-week holiday, even though they had been there in a private capacity.
Take a look at images taken outside and it's a completely different story, with a large crowd of easily more than 100 people of all ages pressed up against metal barriers and perched up on a monument waiting to catch a glimpse of the star couple. (They would set off the nuclear bomb that was Megxit only hours later.)
Then, they returned in March of that year. Again, large numbers of smartphone-wielding fans waited – and in the rain to boot – to see the couple just briefly as they entered the Endeavour Awards. Two days later and shots of them arriving at the Mountbatten Music Festival show barricaded crowds and a wall of cameras.
But today? Hardly. Clearly, the Sussexes do have a devoted fan base, especially among younger Brits who are much more sympathetic to their cause, but long gone are the excited hordes eager to even briefly spy the formerly star couple.
If the couple had hoped their return would be greeted with a groundswell, or even any sort of moderate swell, of public support then this first event would have left them sorely disappointed.
When Meghan took to the podium to deliver her keynote address, done up to the nines in a red Valentino shirt and trousers, her opening line of, "Well good evening everyone, it is …. very nice to be back in the UK" failed to get any sort of reaction from the audience.
(Later when she mentioned becoming a mother in 2019, she did finally get some hooting and hollering.)
Somewhere between the costume change and all the overly-contrived pause-smize-pause delivery of Meghan's speech this engagement just tipped over into the ridiculous.
She wore one outfit, consisting of a caramel $1297 cashmere-silk Brandon Maxwell polo shirt, co-ordinating $1610 Altuzarra pants, along with a pair of beige suede Manolo Blahniks heels ($1707) to make the just under three-hour trip from their Windsor home to Euston station before at some stage changing into her second expensive look of the day.
(I have spent too much time thinking about this: Who was carrying her second outfit? Where did she get changed? And why? For the love of god, why? The only photos of her in the caramel ensemble were some indistinct paparazzi shots of her entering a station side door.)
Then for her actual speech, Meghan chose a $2080 red Valentino blouse and co-ordinating $2268 trousers from the famed Italian house and another pair of heels. She accessorised both looks with a pair of chunky gold earrings from Sophie Buhai.
The combined cost of the clothes that Meghan wore? (Assuming her second set of shoes were of a similar standard to her Manolos, and factoring in the average cost of earrings by Buhai) The figure is somewhere around the $9400 mark.
Outside Bridgewater Hall, the surrounding area was set to be cleared 90 minutes before they arrived "[to eject] any unauthorised bystanders," according to The Telegraph and reportedly there was a "ring of steel" put in place by private security. (The Manchester Police confirmed they were not involved.)
The whole thing was stage-managed to such an over-produced degree it would have done Kris Jenner proud.
If only – if bloody only – as much thought and hard-work would go into Meghan's words as her sensational wardrobe. (No matter what you might think of the 41-year-old, she is – to my mind – the most unimpeachably chic member of the House of Windsor since Diana, Princess of Wales.)
While the MC introduced Meghan before her speech calling her "an incredibly powerful voice for gender equality," that hype hardly matches the reality. The Duchess' speech, like her recent foray into podcasting, included plenty of anecdotes about Meghan.
"There I was, the girl from Suits," she said of her first One Young World appearance in 2014.
"I was so overwhelmed by this experience, I think I even saved my little paper place-marker with my name on it.
"Just proof: proof that I was there, proof that I belonged, because the truth was, I wasn't sure that I belonged."
What is so infuriating is that the world needs – so very badly needs – the sort of feminist superhero that Meghan wants to cast herself as.
Women and girls in countries from Afghanistan to Ukraine and beyond are suffering unspeakable horrors, to say nothing of the terrifying changes taking place in the US following the overturning of Roe vs Wade abortion protections.
We need a loud, passionate voice who can rally the masses, bring politicians to heel and make the world pay attention, something that is eminently achievable for a person with the sort of global fame that Meghan has by virtue of her royal ties.
But the Duchess' activism is a veneer-level, superficial sort of feminism-lite, a sound bite-heavy version that seems to consist of chatting to celebrity chums and occasionally making a few phone calls to big names in Washington.
There is a whole lot of posturing and posing and speaking to Vogue going on but very little, if none, of the boring doing required for a sustained campaign that can affect real change.
Look at any movement that has profoundly remade society for the better – civil rights, the suffragists, marriage equality – and they all took decades of concerted, committed hard graft by people who were not looking to be feted for their work and who did more than just give speeches in outfits that cost the same as sending dozens of girls to school.
(That $9400-odd clothes price tag? That could have paid for 60 girls to school via World Vision. You can do exactly that right here.)
I suppose what it comes down to is that it feels like the Duchess of Sussex's feminism is inherently performative rather than in any way substantive. Big speeches and the occasional cheque are not going to ring in a glorious new age of equality; years and years of plugging away at repetitive, nitty-gritty work will.
As Tanya Gold recently wrote in a piece for The Telegraph entitled, "Meghan can never be a genuine feminist," the former actress and her royal plus-one "are taking up valuable space for serious political discourse by more serious people, and that is the worst of all worlds."
The whole thing is such a shame because Meghan clearly cares deeply about gender equality but she seems to care even more about Meghan and being hailed as Gloria Steinem 2.0. (Steinem just happens to live near the couple in California, interestingly.)
But, we are only one event (and two outfits) down on the Sussexes' whirlwind Euro trip with their next appearance set for Tuesday (UK time) with them jetting off to Dusseldorf to mark the one-year countdown to the next Invictus Games. As their Netflix bosses might say, stay tuned …
• Daniela Elser is a royal expert and a writer with more than 15 years' experience working with a number of Australia's leading media titles.
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