Harry and Meghan are box office.
There. I said it.
And perhaps we should stop pretending otherwise.
You don’t have to like Prince Harry. You don’t have to like Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. You don’t have to buy the jam, watch the television programmes, read the books or approve of a single decision they have made since leaving royal life.
But apparently, you do have to talk about them. You do have to keep up with what they are doing. Indeed, keeping up with Harry and Meghan has become a fulltime job for tens of thousands of people who chronicle their every move on a daily basis. It’s like a movie that nobody wants to miss even the shortest scene. They would rather pause and run to the rest room, than miss out.
Six years after Harry and Meghan stepped away from their positions as working royals, something rather extraordinary has happened: they still have the ability to commandeer the conversation. It’s to the point that the palace has to issue communiques reminding everyone that Harry and Meghan are not royals and should not be treated as such. They are private citizens and should be given the courtesies of commoners. Yet, nobody listened. This did not increase the rate of attention people paid to the so called working royals and decrease the attention given to Harry and Meghan. If anything, the opposite happened.
That is what I mean by box office.
You Cannot Manufacture This Kind of Attention
Harry and Meghan’s return to Britain has demonstrated beautifully that they are box office.
Harry makes an appearance. Headlines.
Meghan is spotted in the Cotswolds. Headlines.
Their children start school. Headlines.
Someone wonders what Meghan is wearing. Headlines.
Meghan goes to Soho House. Headlines.
Meghan has lunch is Ellen and Portia. Headlines.
Someone else wonders where they’re living. More headlines.
Reuters recently examined precisely this phenomenon, speaking to branding and media experts about the extraordinary attention surrounding the Sussexes. Entertainment journalist Caroline Frost put it rather neatly:
“You can’t buy this kind of publicity.”
PR adviser Mark Borkowski made essentially the same point: Harry and Meghan generate visibility. They generate an audience.
That is box office.
And in an attention economy, attention is currency.
The Palace Has an Interesting Problem
Which brings us to Buckingham Palace.
The official position is perfectly clear: Harry and Meghan are not working royals. They do not represent the Crown.
Fair enough.
But separating Harry and Meghan institutionally from the monarchy does not magically separate them culturally from the monarchy.
Harry is still the King’s son.
He is still Diana’s son.
Meghan is still the Duchess of Sussex.
Archie and Lilibet are still the King’s grandchildren.
Their wedding was still a royal event.
And millions of people around the world remain interested in what this particular branch of the Windsor family is doing.
That creates an unusual problem for the institution.
The monarchy needs its working royals to be the principal characters in the royal story.
Yet Harry and Meghan have demonstrated repeatedly that they do not need a palace balcony to attract an audience.
They simply need to exist.
When the Supporting Characters Steal the Scene
Something particularly interesting happened this month.
Reuters reported that the working royals were finding their official work overshadowed by the enormous media interest surrounding other royal stories.
One royal commentator described the working royals as being “overshadowed.”
Think about that word. Because it gets surprisingly close to the heart of the Sussex problem.
The problem is that royal hierarchy works beautifully, but only on paper. Yes, the King is the Sovereign. William is the heir. Catherine is the Princess of Wales. Harry and Meghan are “private citizens” who no longer undertake official duties on behalf of the Crown. But this matters little to a public fascinated by somebody else.
Celebrity does not observe constitutional hierarchy. Nor does fame. The King can’t force the public to look at him or Camilla or Kate or William unless the public is interested in these subjects. The public looks where it wants to look. And the press follows. Because that is where the money is, and the press follows the money trail.
Can the Palace Make Harry and Meghan Smaller?
This is where I think the story becomes fascinating. I am not suggesting that Buckingham Palace sits around a mahogany conference table every Monday morning asking how to destroy Harry and Meghan’s popularity. Some people would argue that we have evidence of that. I will leave that to the reader to decide what they think about whether intentional destruction is the goal. Institutions protect themselves and obviously the British Monarchy has an interest in protecting itself and not being “overshadowed” by private citizens. And the monarchy has an obvious institutional interest in making the distinction between the people who represent the Crown and the people who do not, as a threshold matter. That explains why words such as private, non-working and non-representative matter so much.
The problem is that language only establishes the hierarchy. Unfortunately, language alone cannot determine star power. You can tell the world that Harry and Meghan are private citizens. You can tell them that Harry and Meghan are irrelevant. You can even say that Harry and Meghan are a side show. But you cannot order the world to find Harry and Meghan uninteresting.
Meghan Is Particularly Complicated
Meghan presents a separate problem entirely. She possesses something the Royal Family cannot confer and therefore cannot withdraw: an independent identity. She was American before Harry. She had a career before Harry. She does not need to be a princess to achieve self actualization. She understands cameras, clothes, celebrity, proper lighting and American popular culture.
Meghan knows how to self propagate and reinvent herself. She has described herself as a seed. After nearly a decade of royal adjacency, she has something even more valuable: a story to tell.
And whatever you think of Meghan personally, the reinvention her fascinating.
Royal girlfriend.
Duchess.
Working royal.
California mother.
Entrepreneur.
And now an American woman navigating England again, but this time on entirely different terms.
That is a narrative!
And narratives are box office.
Harry Has It Too
Harry’s attraction is different. His is emotional. People watched him grow up. They remember the little redheaded boy walking behind his mother’s coffin. They remember the soldier. They remember the cheeky prince. They watched him fall in love, marry and become a father. Now they are watching the next act.
That history cannot be replicated by public relations. It cannot be transferred to another royal. And it cannot simply be switched off because Harry no longer carries out engagements on behalf of the Sovereign.
Harry remains Harry.
Perhaps That Is the Real Power Shift
For years, the discussion around Harry and Meghan has concentrated on what they lost.
The HRH styling.
Potentially their titles.
The taxpayer-funded security arrangements.
Frogmore Cottage.
The royal platform.
The ceremonial position.
The hand waving from the balcony.
But perhaps we haven’t spent enough time considering what they discovered.
They learned that some of their power travelled with them. Not all of it. But their fame has. The way they fascinate a crowd has. Look at their visit to Australia earlier this year. Crowds still gathered to see Harry and Meghan. In Melbourne, families packed the foyer of the Royal Children’s Hospital awaiting their arrival. In Sydney, a large crowd gathered outside the Opera House simply to catch a glimpse of them.
Certainly, their commercial projects have had mixed results, and enormous public attention does not automatically translate into successful television programmes, products or businesses. Everyone knows that. But attention itself? They still have plenty of that. And perhaps this is why the Sussex story refuses to end.
The Palace can determine who stands on the balcony.
It can determine who undertakes engagements.
Who keep their titles.
It can determine who officially represents the Crown.
But it cannot determine whom the public finds fascinating.
That belongs to the audience.
And right now, love them or loathe them, Harry and Meghan are still box office