Meghan & Harry are more unpopular than ever Down Under: Royal commentator

(NewsNation) — Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are heading to Australia next week for what their team is billing as a mix of business and charity, but royal watchers say the couple could not have picked a worse moment to touch down, given their popularity in the country has cratered since their celebrated 2018 tour.

Shauna Kay, an Australian royal commentator and host of The Vintage Read Show, said the announcement itself got off to a stumbling start.

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“It was announced as if it were some sort of pseudo-royal tour,” Kay said. “They quickly walked it back because of the public backlash and pretty much very quickly put out a statement that it was purely a private visit and also for their commercial ventures.”

The pivot in messaging, Kay said, reflects a broader problem: Australians have simply soured on the couple. “The public mood is on a scale of disdain to disinterest, honestly, there’s not a lot in between, because people are really sort of quite jaded about them now.”

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Much of that jadedness traces back to what happened behind the scenes during their 2018 visit, when stories began leaking from the tour about staff mistreatment. Kay said reports from reputable royal journalists painted an ugly picture.

​”There were stories from really reputable journalists — cups of tea being thrown in frustration… a payment made to a member of staff at Admiralty House that was actually injured by that cup of tea that went flying through the air.”

Those accounts eventually triggered a formal palace review.

“It was the reports from the Australian tour that prompted the palace to conduct that review into the alleged bullying of staff by Meghan and, on the periphery, Harry,” Kay said. “And of course that review was buried. We never got to see that. It’s in a locked safe somewhere in the palace.”

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On this trip, Harry is set to speak at the InterEdge Psychosocial Summit on mental health in the workplace in Melbourne, a booking that has raised eyebrows.

Kay didn’t mince words. “Harry is actually a keynote on mental health in the workplace because he has never held a conventional job. I think the only experience he has is probably trauma, his own trauma, and how to monetize that trauma. Now, if there was a keynote on how to monetize trauma, I think he’d be absolutely excellent.”

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There have also been social media jokes, Kay noted, about Harry’s unique qualifications on the subject of workplace bullying. “A few funny comments have been going about on social media about the fact that, well, he’s quite familiar with bullying in the workplace because he works with Meghan.”

Beyond the jokes, Kay said there is something deeper driving Australian skepticism. “Harry is not an admired figure in Australia because he’s seen as betraying his family. And that’s actually a trait that not many people admire here.”

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