First day sales for Prince Harry's tell-all memoir 'Spare' topped 1.4 million copies according to publisher Penguin Random House. Video / AP
OPINION:
To understand how the audacious, history-shaking project of Megxit is going, you only have to look at two numbers.
The first is $1.63 million (US$1m), the amount of money that newly emancipated Prince Harry was rumoured to have been paid almost exactly three years ago, in February 2020, to speak to a crowd of overpaid, overhyped and over there-by-the-bar bankers at an investment summit in Miami. The royal was only weeks on from having blown up his royal career in favour of “freedom” in North America and this first, reportedly paid, outing looked like the state of things to come – exclusive events, a rarefied guest list and suitably hefty cheques.
The second is $37.4 (£19.12) (or, for viewers in New Zealand, the higher price of $67) which is how much it will cost anyone in the UK with an internet connection and a NatWest savers account to hear Harry speak this weekend at a virtual event. (Well, that and having no other plans for 5pm on a Saturday. Organisers do know the pubs are open in the UK then right?)
The 38-year-old will be joined in conversation with Dr Gabor Maté to discuss “living with loss and the importance of personal healing,” according to the website, and that entry fee includes a copy of Spare.
In case anyone doesn’t have their pocket calculator to hand, that’s a $1,629,962.6 drop in how much it costs to hear from the horsey HRH’s mouth in only 36 months. If ever there was a way of illustrating just how much things have changed since those heady first weeks, post-Megxit, when it looked like Harry and wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex had the world at their feet and the royal family on the ropes, then this is it.
If there is one thing that Harry has proven this year it is that familiarity breeds both contempt and low price points.
Prince Harry's book Spare on his life as a member of the royal family has become a best-seller. Photo / AP
The Sussexes have signed three major content deals reportedly worth, and in order, Netflix, for $160 million and Spotify for $29.2 million in 2020 and then with Penguin Random House in 2021 at what works out at a reported $10.8 million per title for three books.
All of these are astronomical sums, but the trend line only seems to go in one direction.
The Catch-22 for the Duke and Duchess is that they only have one valuable commodity to sell – their willingness to throw open the doors on royal life and to dish the dirt with glee abandon – however the more they do exactly that, the less fascinating it is to hear them yammer on about family fallings out, and therefore the less their revelations are worth.
Harry and Meghan are trapped in a world of diminishing returns, at their own hands.
In February 2020 when Harry took to that Florida stage, the novelty of a real life “doook” appearing in the flesh was off-the-charts.
Today, Harry and Meghan are just part of the celebrity furniture of West Coast life, popping up on screens to plug their latest commercial projects, like a titled version of the Kardashian-Jenner industrial complex.
What made the Sussexes so special and so exquisitely rare – their royal status – has largely evaporated as find themselves stuck in the furthermost reaches of the royal family.
While for years now they have been about as popular in the UK as dental hygiene or tripe for tea, in the US they have been held up as heroes; brave souls who had stood up to a powerful institution which epitomised privilege and which was whiter than a Napisan commercial ‘after’ picture.
But Harry and Meghan’s fortunes have turned on a dime, with them going from comfortably positive net approval ratings in December, according to Newsweek, to well into negative territory in February, with them both hitting all-time lows. In less than three months, the Duke has plummeted a remarkable 48 points in that time and the Duchess 40 points.
What has become apparent is the US (and the world) seems to be at a total Sussex saturation point and that their Whingers ‘R Us business model is looking about as good a bet right now as Enron stock or buying crypto.
Unfortunately, the bad numbers don’t stop there for the Sussexes.
Harry and Meghan in their Netflix series. Photo / Netflix
In March 2021, when Oprah Winfrey interviewed the Sussexes with all the hard-nosed journalistic instinct of a Totally Wild host, a made for meme-dom exercise in mutually assured brand benefits, just shy of 18 million Americans tuned in to watch.
Less than two years later, when Harry appeared on the US 60 Minutes in January, that number only just scraped over the 11 million mark.
Elsewhere, polling done by Variety in January found that 30 per cent of respondents had watched Oprah, 20 per cent their Netflix show and only 10 per cent had listened to Meghan’s Archetypes podcast.
How and why did things change so far and so fast for Harry and Meghan?
Are people just bored with them? They have made themselves so culturally omnipresent that South Park took a break from fart jokes this month to spend an entire episode poking fun at them.
Or are they turned off by the fact that they are willing to expend so much time, energy and celebrity capital to take repeated potshots at Buckingham Palace? Sure, they might be a slightly useless bunch in the eyes of many Americans, hangovers of an imperial age who have about as much to offer society as VHS technology, but … do they really deserve to be targeted by one of their own, over and over again?
In many ways, Harry and Meghan are like two people who have joined CrossFit or Scientology or have just given up gluten, operating under the mistaken assumption that we are all as fascinated with their cause as they are. Soz.
Or maybe this all comes down to respect. What have the Sussexes done to earn the esteem of Americans?
For a while, them giving the monarchy a bit of a kicking stood them in excellent stead with the US population, a people who have enjoyed having a go at the Limeys since George III still had his wits about him in the 18th century.
But the problem is, that remains their defining feature, having failed to do much more on the philanthropic front than your garden variety wealthy person with their own charity. Good stuff, absolutely, but tinkering around the edges.
In hindsight, Harry and Meghan have spent the last three years working on content, occasionally emerging from their cashmere cocoon to bang on about their cause du jour, before receding into the background, overall having made all the impact of a marshmallow on a brick wall.
They have not taken on anything that controversial, aside from putting out a video in October 2020 that seemed to support Joe Biden’s presidential bid, or anything even vaguely in the same daring ballpark as his mother Diana, Princess of Wales’ work with Aids patients or landmines.
In the pre-Megxit years, imagine what a charity could have charged attendees to hear Harry address a crowd and to take questions. He would have attracted people with pockets so deep a small child could get lost in there.
And today? Just $37.4, if you are in the UK, gets you the chance to listen to him talk.
Contrast that with when Diana came to Sydney in 1996 to help fundraise for the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute. The event raised, in 2022 dollars, the equivalent of A$1.9 million and involved 800 guests, which works out at A$2375-per-person in today’s money.
If anyone in the UK doesn’t want to fork out to listen to Harry share his keen insights into, ironically, healing – something he has famously failed to do with his family or homeland – then they could spend the same amount of money on a tube of the Elizabeth Arden cream Aitch famously used on his “todger”, or pick up 11 packets of chocolate Hobnobs. I know what I would prefer …
Daniela Elser is a writer and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
