The best entertainment to be had this fortnight has been the courtroom sketches coming out of London’s Rolls Building.
Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex looks like a Scouser plumber named Ronald up on a dust bins breach notice; Liz Hurley a famously beautiful woman like a vinegary fishwife; and her some Damian like a librarian who runs a secret saucy Jane Austen sub Reddit.
Thank god for those sketches, because what has been happening in the witness box in the court, and what has been happening 8,500km away in the fragrant perma-Nirvana of Montecito, is far, far lark-able.
We’ve had tears, or at least near tears, a prince on the war path, and a duchess whose multimillion dollar project has monumentally bombed.
If there is one thing we can say, it is that even after all this time, Harry still Does Not Get It and still does not fully understand the concept of irony.
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His week began inside the Victorian gothic wedding cake of the UK High Court, as the curtain rose on his $76 million battle against the publisher of the Daily Mail, Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL).
The duke is one of seven co-claimants, including Sir Elton John and Hurley, who allege that ANL committed “grave breaches of privacy” over a 20-year period; ANL is vigorously defending the case.
Last week, a resolute-looking Harry took the stand and out came his greatest hit grievances.
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The royal family? He wasted no time getting in a jab, saying he had not been able to speak out about the press because of Crown Inc’s “never-complain, never-explain” approach.
Back then, he had been “forced to perform” for the media, he argued, despite “how they have commercialised my private life”.
Addressing the judge he said, his voice reportedly cracking, “They have made my wife’s life an absolute misery, My Lord”.
Erm, far be it from me to point out the obvious aside from the fact that I am paid to do just that but what has Harry spent the last five years doing but complaining and explaining?
Of being forcibly commercialised by the press …. What has he done but leverage other people (See: Family, Royal) against their will for his own profit?
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And could we not characterise what he has done to everyone from King Charles down to the Jack Russells lives as making their lives “an absolute misery” at times?
You have to wonder how Queen Camilla, who he has said left “bodies left in the street” in her quest to be like by the public, and Kate, The Princess of Wales, who, in his Spare telling, icily failed to welcome Meghan with sisterly tenderness and the offer to borrow her GHD, might feel about the duke having a healthy rail about their family travails being milked for monetary gain?
Let me say here, this is not to deny the severity of what Harry is alleging in court nor that he has clearly suffered over the years.
What’s harder to swallow is him attempting to summit the moral high ground without anything much like a rearview mirror glance about how his actions and choices have affected those left behind in Hobnob Nation.
Nor does it suggest much awareness of what he and Meghan are doing now. Their 2022 Netflix series was chock-o-block with photos and videos of their children Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet who have become staples on the duchess’ Instagram feed.
Sure, they are never shown front on or with their faces clearly visible but the sweet, cutesy pie shots of them playing, swimming, cooking, hugging, and being adorable mites clearly go a helluva long way to helping bolster Meghan ™ as she continues to try and pull off her rebranding as a plaid-apron, cooking-baking, Little House Momma who one day be so lucky to get her own Target line.
The good news this week is that, thanks to what was happening in the High Court in London, as the duke was doing his darndest to try to hold the UK press’ feet to the fire, he inadvertently provided perfect cover for what would have been a much bigger story – that Meghan’s foray into Martha/Ina/Gwyneth-Land had gone as well as Napoleon’s march on Moscow. (Less frostbite, I suppose.)
Her Netflix series With Love, Meghan will reportedly not be returning for a third season, meaning that we will have to bravely fend for ourselves should we require instruction in how to colour co-ordinate crudites or ever find ourselves in dire need of decorative ice cubes.
Netflix’s latest What We Watched data dump showed that the second season of With Love was just the 1,217th most watched show in the second half of last year, with, per Deadline, fewer than 1.1 million people having tuned in the first two days.
December’s With Love holiday special fared only a tad better, making it to 1,015th place with 2.4 million views.
Both Harry and Meghan now face the pressing existential question of, what next?
For Harry, if the judge Mr Justice Nicklin finds for him and the other claimants or whether they fail to quite get it across the line and they are staring down a costs bill about the same as Tuvalus’s GDP, he cannot truly win here.
For years the Duke of Sussex has been battling, battling, battling the UK press, waging a passionate campaign to hold the sections of the British Fourth Estate to account, regularly citing his mother Diana, Princess of Wales’ hounding and the wringer that Meghan was often put through.
Taking on the media, he has said, is “the fight of his life”.
But what happens when that fight is over? This ANL case is the last, and reportedly final, round in his years-long slog against parts of the media.
So what does or will or can the duke do once this “fight of his life” is done and dusted?
He has no independent commercial projects on the books and the only indications about what he might now do with his time are that he has taken up surfing and taken up giving speeches at places like a Toronto real estate conference and Los Angeles business lunch.
Meanwhile, currently on the shared Archewell Productions slate are adaptations of rom-com bestsellers Meet Me At The Lake and The Wedding Date for Netflix, neither of which seem like natural passion projects for a former army captain who can probably chug a pint in near record time and is never publicly known to have read a book.
At least Meghan’s As ever range seems to be selling energetically, stocks running out of her latest addition, a bookmark, in hours.
There have also been reports that she might be putting out a cookbook this year, which would probably go like gangbusters.
On the philanthropic front, things are not exactly going swimmingly for the Sussexes either.
After the departure of their longtime aide James Holt, the Sussexes’ Archewell (formerly ‘Foundation’, now ‘Philanthropies’) is now, according to Page Six, being run by just one longtime staffer who is working on a “consultant” basis.
Meanwhile Harry and his African AIDS charity Sentebale’s co-founder, Lesotho’s Prince Seeiso, have reportedly given up all hope of ever being involved with the non-profit again after a bust-up between the entire board and the chairman Dr. Sophie Chandauka.
Earlier this month, Newsweek’s Jack Royston revealed that the Parents Network, a major project Harry and Meghan launched with in 2024, has been “handed over” to another organisation to run.
In May last year, after an investigation by Cherie Blair’s law firm, the group African Parks, which Harry has been involved with since 2016, acknowledged that “human rights abuses have occurred”.
(It had previously been alleged that rangers working for the organisation had raped and tortured people in indigenous communities in the Republic of Congo.)
For the duke, the one major saving grace is that his Invictus Games continues to go from strength to strength, next year returning to the UK for the first time in more than a decade.
The shame in all of this is, Harry and Meghan, if they could just find the right way to channel their talents and energy and vim and vigour and time, could be a real force.
For now though, this weekend the Duke of Sussex is likely back in California or at least making his way home and that the courtroom sketch artist has put away their orange pencil. They only have another eight weeks of this case to go.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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