In 2016, actor Philip Griffiths made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for having spent more than 25 years in the same West End production of The Phantom of the Opera. Imagine: The same lines, the same costumes, the same smiling, the same mournful commiserating, the same, the same, again and again, year after year.
Who knew the theatre had so much in common with being a working member of the royal family? And who would want the latter, really? A job that requires enduring decades of soul-crushing repetitiveness and tedium, of small talk, of endlessly making the politest of platitude-filled chitchat, a ceaseless, endless Sisyphean task of having to endlessly perform?
Turns out we know the names of two people who seem to still want a slice of exactly that – Prince Harry and Meghan the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
This week it was announced that the duke and duchess are off to Nigeria this month, having accepted an invitation to visit in conjunction with the Invictus Games, where they will meet with military personnel and attend an “array of cultural activities”.
All of which feels … royal.
How is it that today, more than four years after the Sussexes trundled off to do trust falls with Netflix’s head of HR, that the couple are still undertaking outings that look like they could have been ripped directly from the pages of Buckingham Palace’s circa 1985 leather-bound program?
Harry and Meghan have long since embraced their freedom and the generosity of their private jet-owning pals but much of their charitable work continues to look like it is stuck in pre-2020 aspic. Think school appearances, military base visits, ribbon-cutting, meetings with ambassadors, mayors and health NGO bosses, the occasional attempt at a stirring speech on their key issues (the environment for Harry and gender equality for Meghan) and talking about mental health.
Let the record show, they deserve top marks and gold stars all around. The Sussexes are under no obligation to give a fig about those less fortunate and about anyone who has never stayed awake at night worrying about whether they should add in a second tennis court.
However, it’s not the ‘what’ they are doing but the ‘how’. The duke and duchess are plugging away with their good works following a model that can best be described as ersatz royal.
In 2021, when the late Queen officially withdrew the couple’s patronages and the duke’s honorary military titles, the couple put out a statement tinged with churlishness in which they asserted, “service is universal”.
And indeed it is but the Sussexes’ model of service looks more and more like them skirting Her late Majesty’s diktat that they could not be half-in and half-out of Crown Inc.
If you can’t quite remember the dim, dark, distant events of January 2020 let me give you a quick refresher. On January 8, the Sussexes took to Instagram to announce they were done with the status quo, becoming the first people in history to publicly suggest they would be ‘collaborating’ with the sovereign and to not then find themselves banged up in the Tower for their effrontery.
Buckingham Palace, Clarence House and Kensington Palace were caught on the hop, myriad morning cups of Earl Grey caught halfway between saucer and mouth as Insta alerts furiously pinged, with no formal, written plans for the couple’s seceding having been hashed out.
What the Sussexes’ were proposing was a novel one-foot-in, one-foot-out model of royaling, where they could continue to officially represent Her late Majesty on occasion but also “work to become financially independent” i.e. earn some lovely cash.
Five days later, on 13 January, Her late Majesty, now King Charles and Prince William met with Harry at Sandringham, while outside the estate the UK and the world’s media had to stand in the rain, forcing them to question every professional decision that had led to this point. (More than one live TV cross was conducted from a field.)
The duke, in his memoir Spare, says of that Sandringham meeting, “the fix was in”. That is, the mooted possibility of them all working out some sort of hybrid model for the Sussexes, a true compromise, had never really been on the table. Queen Elizabeth’s stance seems to have been that, like being a little big pregnant or a little bit the Pope, this was a binary choice. A or B. Up or down. Harry and Meghan could be in or out.
Quite what went down and who ate all the crustless chicken sandwiches, only those in the room will ever really know, however, the upshot was, the duke and duchess were o-u-t.
We all know what followed, not least whoever pays Tyler Perry’s private jet’s fuel bill for him.
The future for Harry and Meghan, the two most in-demand people in the world at the time, seemed dazzlingly, sunglasses-required bright. So what did our lead players do? They told their story again and again for years on end like they had a sort of palace-related version of Tourettes and continued to do a lot of ‘royal’ charity outings.
For example, in September 2021 when they private jetted to New York to roll around the city in a convoy of bulky black SUVs where they visited a school, met with the World Health Organisation and with the US ambassador to the UN to discuss racial justice.
Or in November 2021 when they visited Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey to mark Veterans’ Day. (In the UK and Australia it is Remembrance Day.)
Or in November 2023 when they went to the ribbon cutting for the Navy SEAL Foundation’s Warrior Fitness Program West Coast facility in San Diego.
Again, all of this reflects an ongoing commitment on the Sussexes’ part that is truly commendable. However they don’t seem to have quite worked out how to truly divorce their new philanthropic careers where they can be as bold and creative as they fancy and instead seem to routinely fall back on the old palace playbook, albeit under the Sussex banner.
What the last four years also reflects is their willingness to continue to ‘royal’ away at things despite the late Queen attempting to have put her foot down about separating the commercial and the quasi-official.
Maybe the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are devotees of Rear Admiral Grace Hopper who is routinely credited with having come up with the axiom, “it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission”.
At the end of the day, there is one thing that is painfully clear: The loss of Harry and Meghan to Crown Inc was, and will continue to be, immeasurable. They were and are supremely good at charming, at smiling, at working crowds and at taking to the same ‘stage’ day after day and looking like they are enjoying every damn minute of it.
So, in London, not that far at all from the West End, the royal show has gone on, lesser, smaller than it could have been and in Montecito, the Sussexes continue to try to get their new show off the ground.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.