Harry, Meghan and the mess that's left behind.

Listen to this story being read by Holly Wainwright, here.

This is what I heard when, on Saturday, King Charles sat down in his black suit and made his first big speech since ascending the throne.

I’m going to be very busy.

Yes, I am paraphrasing the monarch. Bear with me.

I won’t have time to do loads of the things I was doing before. You know, for the charities I’m the boss of and whatnot. 

Lucky for me I have an ace wife. She’s going to help me with lots of the things. 

Lucky for me I also have an ace son, William. I’m giving him and his wife, Catherine, a promotion, and they are going to take on loads more of the things. 

I also have a son called Harry. I love him and his wife Meghan and wish them jolly good luck as they build their own lives in America. They’re not doing any of the things.

Okay, that’s not how a King speaks.

Image: NBC News. 

He made it sound a lot more formal than that. A lot better. He’d been practising a while.

But that’s what’s happening. King Charles had an heir and a spare, in the cruel parlance of the royal-watchers, and the spare has buggered off to write a book and make a TV show or two for Netflix and he’s left a whole lot of, well, spare jobs to be done.

Hours after Charles made that speech, his sons and their impressive wives were photographed together for the first time in years. Walking the line of flowers left in tribute to their late granny, the Queen of England, and doing what royals do best - shaking hands and looking interested in other people's babies, balloons and cuddly toys. Making the ordinary people feel good at an upsetting time. Employing the game face about which Meghan once said, “I really tried to adopt this British sensibility of a ‘stiff upper lip’... but I think that what that does internally is probably really damaging.”

Lips were stiff all round.

What must the new Prince and Princess of Wales have been thinking, as the cameras snap-snapped away at a sight the crowd would likely pay money to see - two estranged brothers playing an icey kind of nice? Were William and Kate mentally counting all the money they’d just made in their promotion - William’s raised rank to the Duke of Cornwall comes with a meaty £21 million annual income. Were they thinking about all the change that’s about to come their way - literally, their new roles mean moving house, moving the kids’ schools, moving into more senior work, more of it, more of the time?

Were they thinking it must be nice to live in a mansion surrounded by palm trees in California’s Montecito, having brunch with your billionaire friends, feeding chickens, making content?

Were they thinking - You lucky bastard, Harry, good on you. You got out.

Because what we’ve seen, beneath all this talk of duty left in the wake of Queen Elizabeth II, the most sacrificial and dutiful royal of all the royals, what we can glimpse under all the pomp and ceremony and strange parades and scrolls and ye olde worlde outfits, is that there’s plenty to it, this royal business, if you’re on the inside.

The monarchy is a big, lumbering outdated beast whose current purpose is unclear and whose motives are questionable ("Remember the good old days, when we owned everything, and everyone?") and it swallows all before it. Its great purpose is survival. What we’ll be seeing over these next two weeks is a ceremony of intricate moving parts that has been years, decades, in the planning. Every cog turn a deliberate move, a brick in the wall that shores up the status quo.

It’s a lot, holding up a crumbling institution. And Harry, now, even as he walks the remembrance line with his brother, is not really doing his bit with the trowel anymore. He’s a visitor. An outsider, a tourist at the circus.

And it must be brutally painful for him to be that this week, so close, so far, so sad. 

What Harry knew to be true was that if you don’t let that tide of tradition and expectation and politics and drama sweep you along, if you try to swim against it, you will drown.

It’s been over two years since, faced with the much-lauded, stifling embrace of a lifetime of Duty before all else, Harry made his very modern choice - he saved himself.

Honest about what such a limited, cloistered (and yes, privileged and spoiled) life was doing to his sense of purpose and his mental health, Harry put his own oxygen mask on first. And that of his wife and his son.

The pay-off for that has been a kind of freedom, certainly. A West Coast mansion. A portfolio career. Millions of dollars earned. Causes he cares about. A woman he loves. Two little children he doesn’t have to share with a baying press pack.

But what he’s lost is the ability to ease any of this dutiful burden from the people he grew up with and alongside. His father, his cousins and of course, his brother. The only other people on earth who truly know what it is to be born public property with a job description that both lifts you to exalted heights and weighs you down like a yoke.

We admire that kind of smart self-preservation in 2022. Most of us, at least. Cut yourself loose from toxic situations that no longer serve you, we say. Live your truth, we say. Follow your dream.

We could really do with a hand though, says Prince William. Could you start by coming and helping us cuddle some babies? 

When this detente is over, and the Queen is laid to rest, King Charles still has two less senior employees to send out as envoys and avatars around his decidedly on-the-nose empire. Two fewer PR spin machines to whir and whiz for the camera line. Two fewer ribbon-cutters, speech givers, medal-pinners, bridge openers. 

That’s the thing about duty. If you don’t do yours, someone else has to. 

And you just have to live with it. 

Maybe under a palm tree, in California.

Holly Wainwright is the author of the novel The Couple Upstairs. You can buy it,  here. 

Feature Image: Getty.

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