THENEWYORKER,APRIL20, 2020 29
desire to streamline the institution if, as
expected, he becomes king; more junior
family members would be shuffled off
the public stage. He may have been think-
ing of the predicament of Prince An-
drew, his younger brother, who recently
stepped back from royal duties after a
disastrous interview with the BBC about
his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the
late sex offender. Prince Andrew, like
Prince Harry, had a distinguished mil-
itary career, but he was less admired in
his subsequent role as a business envoy
for Britain. He had a predilection for
expenses-paid travel that earned him the
tabloid sobriquet Airmiles Andy.
A distinguished British historian told
me, “In the old days, before the First
World War, what you did with the sec-
ondary royals was marry them off into
other royal families, and that gave them
something to do. In the days of the Em-
pire, you could send them off to go and
be governor-general, or to have a full-
time military job. These days, being
royal, but not being either the heir to
the throne or the monarch—it’s very
hard to carve out a job.” At the same
time, the historian added, “it’s quite diffi-
cult ceasing to be royal.” The Queen’s
daughter, Anne, the Princess Royal, first
found purpose in equestrian pursuits—
she represented Britain in the 1976
Olympics; she has since become a stal-
wart representative of the Crown, and
is involved with more than three hun-
dred charities and other organizations.
Prince Edward went into the entertain-
ment industry; among his ventures was
a television spectacle in which he, Prince
Andrew, and Princess Anne dressed up
in knightly regalia and participated in
a mock chivalric tournament. Edward’s
production company closed down in
2009, and since then he, too, has become
a full-time representative of his mother.
A life of cutting ribbons at hospital
openings and chatting with dignitaries
is not everyone’s idea of fulfillment. Nor
is the job as easy as it looks, as Markle
discovered during one of her first offi-
cial engagements, at a garden party in
Dublin; she endured a brief scandal after
it emerged on Twitter that she’d told an
attendee she approved of Ireland’s re-
cent decision to legalize abortion. Be-
fore Harry met Meghan, he had been
in a couple of long-term relationships,
but had expressed doubt about finding
someone who was willing to be his part-
ner. “You ain’t ever going to find some-
one who’s going to jump into the posi-
tion that it would hold—simple as that,”
he said, glumly, in a 2013 televised in-
terview conducted from his military
posting in Afghanistan, after he had
been photographed larking about, naked,
in Las Vegas with female companions
who had been willing to jump into other
positions. In a televised interview that
he and Markle gave in 2017,
upon their engagement,
Harry expressed gratitude
for having found not just
a wife but “another team
player.” He added, with a
nervous laugh, “The fact
that I know she’ll be really,
unbelievably good at the
job part of it as well is,
obviously, a huge relief to
me.” In a public appearance
soon afterward, during which they met a
group of Welsh schoolchildren, the plea-
sure Harry took in his new partner was
evident. “Everyone give Meghan a group
hug!” he told the kids, who mobbed her.
As the Duke and Duchess of Sus-
sex carried out their final round of en-
gagements in the U.K., even the most
obdurate anti-monarchist had to con-
cede that something was being lost with
their departure. When Markle visited a
secondary school in East London, she
warmly greeted a sixteen-year-old stu-
dent named Aker Okoye in front of an
assembly hall filled with his peers.
Okoye’s cheeky response—“She really
is beautiful, innit?”—aptly summed up
the Duchess’s charisma and her gift for
connecting, as did her wagging finger
of amusement. Markle’s initial projects
as a working royal indicated that she
planned to use her renown as a fashion
and life-style tastemaker to draw at-
tention to worthy causes. She quietly
volunteered at the Hubb Community
Kitchen, founded by survivors of the
Grenfell Tower fire, then contributed a
foreword to a cookbook benefitting the
group. In 2019, in collaboration with
several British retailers, she helped cre-
ate a line of clothes for Smart Works,
an organization that helps unemployed
women dress for job interviews. When
she announced the project, she spoke
of wanting to provide clothes that
couldn’t be mistaken for last season’s re-jects—like the forty lilac-colored blaz-
ers she had found in the Smart Works
warehouse. At a launch event, Markle
said, to approving laughter, “Now, don’t
get me wrong—it’s a great blazer, and
I’m sure, for someone, it’s exactly what
she wants to be wearing.” She was re-
ally good at the job part of it.
It was also hard not to appreciate how
deftly the couple bid Britain goodbye.
Two nights after the Endeavour Fund
Awards, Harry and Meg-
han appeared at the Royal
Albert Hall, for the Mount-
batten Festival of Music.
Harry reminded Britons of
his military service by wear-
ing a scarlet mess jacket
bedecked with medals, in-
cluding one from his ser-
vice as a helicopter gunner.
Markle’s choice of dress—a
crimson floor-length gown
with cape shoulders, by the London-
based atelier Safiyaa—perfectly matched
Harry’s uniform. Walt Disney himself
could not have dreamed them up. (In-
deed, Markle recently recorded the voice-
over for a Disney documentary about
elephant migration in the Kalahari,
which is now available for streaming.)
The Royal Albert Hall event was
likely the last time that Harry would be
seen in that particular uniform, which
indicated his position as the Captain
General of the Royal Marines—a role
inherited from his grandfather, Prince
Philip. Harry is scheduled to step down
from this position, and from all other
official appointments, by the end of a
yearlong transition period instituted by
the Palace. At that point, the mystery
of royalty will be displaced by the more
mundane sheen of celebrity.N
ot long ago, I met with Camilla
Tominey, an editor at the Daily
Telegraph, the conservative broadsheet.
Tominey has covered the Royal Fam-
ily, at various publications, for more
than fifteen years; in 2016, she broke
the story that Prince Harry was dating
an American TV actress. On the morn-
ing we met, in the lobby of Portcullis
House, an office building that serves
the Houses of Parliament, Tominey was
sleekly put-together—she was about to
appear on TV, to comment on her other
beat, Westminster—and she spoke with