OPINION:
Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex stares down the camera lens with the pinched look of a man filming a proof of life video in a Cartagena basement. It’s March 11, 2020 and he is in Heathrow’s Windsor Suites. The emotion and strain are clear, which likely has nothing to do with the $5000 bill (on top of a business or first class ticket) that comes with ensconcing oneself inside the private lounge.
“We’ve just finished … Our final push, our last stint of royal engagements,” he tells the camera. “It’s really hard to look back on it now and go, ‘What on earth happened?’ Like, ‘How did we end up here?’”
That footage is part of the more than 15 hours of recordings that he and wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, filmed themselves in the early months that same year, footage that captures the couple as they absconded from the royal family like a Bonnie and Clyde pairing for the TikTok generation.
These videos, along with a deluge of never-seen-before, behind-the-scenes photos, are littered throughout their eponymous six-part Netflix series, coming so thick and fast that it’s hard to keep up. (Was that Harry varnishing wood? Eating corn on the cob in a garden?)
All these digital keepsakes are problematic.
(And not just because an irony-free Meghan says at one point, “We’ve been really conscious of protecting our kids” in the middle of nearly six hours of them being exposed to Netflix’s 223 million subscribers. Righto then.)
No, the sticky wicket with the photos and the videos is the question of timing because they beg the question - quite exactly, when did Harry and Meghan start planning their own Great Escape and when did they plan to tell the story to, presumably, the highest bidder?
Harry says in the first episode that “a friend of ours actually suggested that we document ourselves through this period of time”, a decision that would ultimately prove highly fortuitous given their transition from working members of the royal family to professional malcontents.
So handy then that when they signed their reported $190 million deal with Netflix in September 2020 they already had all those hours of footage just tucked away in their iCloud.
With the full series now out, we are left with more questions than answers when it comes to the chronology of things.
Take the seemingly professional photos showing the loved-up duo in their kitchen at Frogmore Cottage, which would appear to have been taken after one of their final official engagements in early March 2020. Why would anyone have an experienced snapper in their most private of spaces, late at night (they are in formal attire) capturing such a tender moment if not for the purposes of one day showing it to the world?
So too the images we see taken inside Buckingham Palace during that same trip. (Earlier this month the Telegraph reported the snapper’s presence had not been okayed by the late Queen.) What was the purpose of capturing these moments in high definition if not with a possible view that they would wind up in the public domain?
And yet, in Harry & Meghan, the duke says it was only later that month they found out that their taxpayer-funded protection was being revoked and that he would therefore have to find the dosh to pay for their hulking protectors. (Funny that the British Government didn’t want to keep footing the bill given they no longer had any official status and had moved to another country entirely.)
As he told Oprah last year, it was out of financial necessity that they considered getting into bed with a streamer, saying, “All I needed was enough money to be able to pay for security to keep my family safe.”
But … those photos of Harry and Meghan, taken in their kitchen, would seem to have been taken on March 7, based on what they are wearing. So why were they being photographed, possibly by a professional, before they had found out the bad news about their bodyguards?
Previous reporting has also called into question the Sussexes’ assertion that they only “thought” about going down the TV path once they had left the UK.
Last year it was reported by the Telegraph that Meghan had been in talks with the streaming giant in 2018 for an animated children’s series and then later, in a second report, it emerged that the Sussexes had had talks with the now-shuttered Quibi (vale all those billions of venture capital) from early 2019 until January 2020.
Then there is the broader question of the chronology of Megxit.
Harry says that at the “beginning of 2019, we discussed the whole concept of us moving to South Africa”, a plan that was scuppered when the press found out.
Then, “at the end of December [2019], the beginning of January, I’ve been on the phone to my father, saying, ‘We’ve got a plan.’ What if we move to Canada?” he explained.
So how the dickens does that tally with him also saying, “By the time I was speaking to my father from Canada, the family and their people knew that we were trying to find a different way of working for a minimum of two years.”
Two years?
That would date Harry and Meghan having conversations about “working differently” stretching back to before their May 2018 wedding, ie before the royal family and the UK Government spent millions on staging a wonderfully exuberant celebration.
And, it would predate the precipitous souring of relations between the Sussexes and the British press that started in late 2018.
My head is spinning – yours too?
In Harry & Meghan our stars Harry and Meghan piously inform viewers they are about to set the record straight. But after having sat through the whole series, we are left scratching our heads.
The Sussexes, back in 2017, told the world in their engagement interview that he popped the question while they were in the kitchen roasting a chicken; now we know he got down on bended in their garden surrounded by tacky battery-powered candles.
Similarly, Harry told the BBC’s Mishal Husain of their meeting, “It was definitely a set-up — it was a blind date.” Now, in this series, the Sussexes tell us they actually met on Instagram.
The whole situation is just wildly disorienting and confusing.
In light of all this, what do we make of those 15 hours of footage they were capturing in the “early months”, according to the New York Times, of 2020 – months when they were still officially working members of the royal family and representatives of the late Queen?
We see them meditating and at another point they talk about journaling while the duchess was pregnant, so maybe them talking about themselves ad nauseam into the blinking red light of a front-facing camera makes perfect sense.
Or, is there a chance that someone, somewhere knew that the inside scoop on one of the biggest crises in modern royal history could be worth a literal fortune? (Number one on the crisis list will always and forever more be the convicted sex offender-adjacent Prince Andrew.)
At one point Harry self-righteously tells the camera, “We know the full truth.”
But, after watching Harry & Meghan, are the rest of us that much clearer on what that might be?
Daniela Elser is a royal expert and freelance writer with 15 years of experience who has written for some of Australia’s best print and digital media brands.
Washington Post: Sweatpants? No. But elastic waistbands? Absolutely.