While Prince Harry, 40, and Meghan Markle, 43, claim to be content with their lives in California, Tina Brown believes they’re still secretly struggling to adapt to a life without always having an extra set of hands around.
Chatting with The Washington Post to give the scoop on her new book, The Palace Papers, the author declared, “I think they both completely underestimated what it was going to be like without the Palace platform.”
“However much the hated — and I think they really did, the constraints and the pettiness of the Palace — try doing it without the Palace advisors,” began the journalist. “Because what the Palace does, of course, it has an amazing convening power, there’s no one who won’t take a phone call from Buckingham Palace or Kensington Palace, they’ve got a huge convening power.”
“Every invitation in the world comes through that conduit and private secretaries can just sift and say what about appearing this, or why don’t you do this? All of that is now gone and they have to have PRs do that for them, and their judgement is not necessarily the best judgement,” continued Brown. “They are trying to leverage the royal brand and there is no PR who really knows how to do that better than Buckingham Palace or Kensington Palace.”
The author then circled back on the Sussexes’ 2020 departure from the royal family, revealing, “I really think Harry wanted out, himself,” but it wasn’t until he met his wife that he had “the tools” to do so.
“She understood the world of agents and deals. I mean this wasn’t Harry’s world, but suddenly he had in Meghan a very worldly strategist who he decided to trust above all the other advisors,” Brown pointed out. “They wanted to be able to have a commercial arm to their activities. Meghan certainly saw deals that were there to be made that they had to leave on the table because they were royals. It was as if Meghan couldn’t resist everything that was on offer on the celebrity buffet.