Opinion: Harry and Meghan’s Shock Move Has One Big Loser

BRENDAN MCDERMID / REUTERS Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are coming home.

Archie and Lilibet have been enrolled in British schools.

A private residence is being readied for their arrival in a matter of mere days.

A friend of Harry’s told me back in March that their house search has been focused on the Cotswolds, specifically the countryside around Highgrove where Harry grew up, where he knows the people, the roads and even the more discreet footpaths, so let’s wait and see, but I suspect he won’t be far from Pa.

The return of the Sussexes is being presented in some quarters as a humiliation for the couple.

I’ve no doubt that the money is flowing less freely than before, but if your definition of failure is banking somewhere north of $100 million from Netflix and Spotify over six years for a vanishingly small amount of actual work and then returning to the English countryside with your royal titles and place in the line of succession intact with no official duties, being subject to no collective discipline and with a clean run past HMRC’s temporary non-residence rules, meaning that all those lovely gains realized while abroad, then it’s the sort of calamity I could easily live with.

This is a tremendous victory for Harry and Meghan, won at the expense of the dignity and credibility of the monarchy and the Prince and Princess of Wales, who must be feeling as if they have been kicked in the groin by the King.

It aligns with everything I have written on this Substack for the past year: that Charles prefers Harry over William, as a man is ruled by his heart rather than his head and as a monarch puts personal desires before the wellbeing of the institution he was entrusted to protect.

The Sussex return is a ghastly rerun of a film we have seen before.

For three years Charles doggedly tried to rehabilitate his brother.

Andrew, excluded by his mother, was waved into the Christmas church walk at Sandringham.

He was at Easter services at Windsor.

He was granted a special dispensation to wear military uniform at the vigil for his mother when he was no longer entitled to it.

Sarah Ferguson was back at Sandringham and at the Coronation concert.