Harry and Meghan Are Returning to the U.K. The Timing Couldn’t Be Darker.
Slate · L · trust 54/100
The prodigal son returns. This week, six years after they upped sticks and relocated their young family to California—with much bridge-burning with the royal family in between—Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, have announced that they’re moving back to the U.K. They’ll be arriving in the country within a matter of weeks and living somewhere undisclosed outside London. They will continue not to perform royal duties and, it seems, will not be rubbing shoulders with William and Kate, as the two brothers remain unreconciled.
Why are they returning? I don’t know. As ever, little verifiable information is made public about this sort of thing. It’s probably normal reasons to do with their stage of life. Their kids are of school age, and the sorts of private schools they’re likely to want to send their children to are well reputed in the U.K. Harry’s father is getting old. Still, it is somewhat surprising, given that only a year ago Harry stated that he “can’t see a world” in which he would move his family back to his home country. And it is all a bit odd that reports are saying that the king was informed only earlier this week that his son and his family would be moving back to the U.K. in time for their daughter Lilibet to start school in September, and they were just here visiting him last month, but there it is. It also may not be permanent: The family will apparently keep a home in Montecito, California, and can afford to go back and forth as much as they want.
The legal home address of Harry and Meghan is of limited interest, except to the U.K.’s professional royal reporters, who now have their next year’s work planned out concocting nonsense about how Kate Middleton’s choice of handbag is a coded middle finger up to Meghan or whatever.
How will Harry and Meghan deal with this nightmare? For that, I suggest we look to another story that has taken over U.K. media in the past few weeks. It concerns a man named Jason Arday.
Arday came to media attention in 2023, after he was appointed to a professorship at Cambridge University, making him, at 37, the youngest Black person to ever receive that honor. Earlier this summer, he was accused of plagiarism, and the university opened an investigation into these claims, after which Arday resigned from his post.
The media storm around this story in the U.K. has been ugly. Over the summer, reams and reams of newspaper articles were published here digging into not only his academic work but claims he made about his personal life (some of which, it is fair to say, stretch the imagination). Much of that coverage was beyond what could be called justified in the public interest, and some of it was vitriolically racist in slant. And I really do mean naked, out-and-out racism. Leading the charge against Arday was an academic called Nathan Cofnas, who styles himself a “race realist” (for which, read: “racist”). Cofnas has offered charming opinions in the past, such as that under a true meritocracy, Black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” Tragically, Arday killed himself last weekend, and it appears he did so because of the unbearable weight of the media scrutiny. Reckoning with all this is one of the main stories in the U.K. press at the moment.
This is familiar ground for Harry, whose stated position is that the death of his mother, Diana, can be laid squarely at the doors of the media. She was escaping the paparazzi when her car crashed in 1997. Harry of course left the U.K. in large part because of anger about media intrusion into his life and Meghan’s, and racism against his wife in the British press.
But maybe the question is not “How will Harry and Meghan deal?” but, perhaps optimistically, “Could it be possible that they don’t have to deal with as much this time?” The tabloid monsters of Fleet Street are not known for their introspection, but this is a moment, more than any other in recent memory, when at least some soul-searching must be going on about how media hounding can have devastating consequences. Dots may get connected in the brains of newspaper bosses between Arday’s fate and what Harry and Meghan want to attempt to protect their family from. Will it stop them from trying to invade the couple’s privacy from the moment they set foot on our pavements? Probably not. But it ought to.
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