A publisher acquaintance of mine has a long-standing bet that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex will announce their separation before the end of 2025. While he has no concrete evidence for this speculation, he believes – as many others do – that the marriage of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry is one largely based on PR opportunities and self-promotion, on at least one side. If the chance to further one’s career meant sacrificing one’s spouse, then that is a price worth paying in the grand scheme of things.
This might sound breathtakingly cynical – even by the standards of someone who has recently made a Hollywood comeback playing herself – but a new interview that Meghan has given to Harper’s Bazaar will do little to quell suspicion that she is planning to ditch Brand Sussex and embark upon solo ventures. Even the headline and standfirst boldly declare that ‘Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex meets her moment’, and that ‘after years of being subsumed by other people’s narratives, she’s ready to author her own next chapter’.
The idea of ruthless self-preservation lies at the heart of Project Meghan
Naturally, there is nothing in the interview itself that is especially revelatory, although I did find my jaw drop at the detail, thrown in casually at the end, that Meghan was off to have lunch with the feminist and social activist Gloria Steinem. (Oh to be a fly on the wall for that particular conversation!) The article, written by Kaitlyn Greenidge, is as soft-focus and airbrushed as the various glossy pictures of the Duchess that accompany it. Meghan is portrayed as an approachable, accessible figure, proudly boasting about her 90-day streak learning French on Duolingo and suggesting that she was ‘such a little nerd’ as a child. Various well-known friends of hers testify to how funny, approachable, kind, etc., she is. In other words, it’s With Love, Meghan but in print form, and as glossily unrevealing as that mendacious show was.
Granted, you would not expect in-depth, hard-hitting questions from Harper’s Bazaar about why, say, the Sussexes seem unable to retain members of their personal staff, who resign after months and have now formed an impressive roster of the presumably NDA-bearing dispossessed: a hostile biographer’s dream. Instead, Meghan is allowed to suggest that ‘there’s no such thing as perfect. I, too, get to make mistakes.’
While the reader digests this shocking fact, the Duchess goes on to suggest, ‘There’s also not a lot of fun in trying to be perfect. So why try to do that if you want to have fun?’ ‘Fun’, by this metric, is mimosas with famous chums like Serena Williams and the surreal detail that when the Duchess is brought an unsolicited, free cappuccino at a restaurant she has been dining at, it comes complete with a photorealistic image of Meghan, to which she says blithely, ‘Oh, I recognise this picture. That’s from our [2019] trip to South Africa.’
As ever, she portrays herself as the most loving and uxorious of wives to ‘H’, as he is referred to. ‘He loves me so boldly, fully, and he also has a different perspective because he sees media that I wouldn’t. No one in the world loves me more than him, so I know he’s always going to make sure that he has my back.’ Reading between the lines, this is rather revealing about the dynamic between the two. She is able to swan around interviewing people for her Archetypes podcast and Netflix shows, and her husband has the grimmer job of scrolling through social media seeing what people are saying about the pair of them.
None of this, of course, is so much as hinted at in the piece, but she remarks, ‘I think my boundaries became stronger once I came into the public eye…you find different ways to protect yourself, whether that’s self-preservation or it’s just growing up.’ The idea of ruthless self-preservation lies at the heart of Project Meghan, whatever its next steps will be. And while the man whose ‘childlike wonder and playfulness’ she praises – admittedly, qualities perhaps not seen at their best in the various legal cases Harry has doggedly and at times painfully pursued – may be a key aspect of Project Meghan at the moment, one can only wonder precisely how essential he is to the next chapter of that particular story. My publisher chum may lose his bet, but vindication in the longer term may yet await him.
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