A few vanishing Instagram posts and a bogus “consent form” expose, in perfect miniature, how the Sussexes continue to misread the celebrity attention economy they’re trying to dominate. In a week when they were also accused of fibbing to the palace, this sorry saga of fiascos is an abject parable in brand mismanagement.
The Sussexes lurch so effortlessly from one unforced error to the next that singling out one particular branding or PR disaster is difficult.
But a week when they have been revealed to be lying to the press, lying to the palace, gaslighting the public, annoying the Kardashians, and shamelessly sucking up to Jeff Bezos—and doing it all very, very badly, probably qualifies.
This is the full story—which has been unfolding in real time on The Royalist Substack all this week—of how a few deleted Instagram pictures, a phantom “consent form,” and some wickedly effective and mendacious meddling by the men in grey suits have reopened the central question that has stalked the Sussexes since they left the royal fold: can people believe what they say?
The week starts well
This time last week, Harry and Meghan were, one assumes, celebrating a straightforward celebrity win over their Sunday breakfast smoothies after scoring a coveted invite to Kris Jenner’s Bond-themed 70th at Jeff Bezos’ Los Angeles mansion.
True, there was some criticism in the U.K. papers that contrasted images of the couple gliding into the Bezos/Jenner megabash with pictures of Kate, William, and their kids marking Remembrance Sunday the next day in the U.K., but plenty of people around the world went out the night before.
No one would argue that the millions of people who have sacrificed their lives for their countries over the past 110 years did so in order that later generations might be miserable.
For the Sussexes, the symbolism of being at the party was obvious and useful. Here they were at the epicenter of American celebrity power—Kardashians, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Oprah, Snoop. For Meghan, now professionally entangled with Amazon via her cameo in a new film, it was a clean, shiny rebuttal to the claim that Hollywood is “over” them.
Things take a turn for the worse…
Then, on Tuesday, the story twisted. People noticed that some images from inside the party posted by Kim Kardashian and Kris Jenner had vanished from their Instagram feeds.
Trouble was, the digital toothpaste was already out of the tube. Predictably screenshots of the photos (which showed Meghan looking “on” and Harry looking bleary-eyed and unaware that he was entering a semiotic battlefield), which up to that point had been largely ignored by everyone except the most devoted Redditors, now spread like wildfire.
Pretty soon, briefings from the Sussex camp began wafting into journalists’ inboxes. The couple, it was said, had been presented with consent forms before the party and had ticked the “no social media” box. The implication was that someone on Kim and Kris’s social team had made a mistake posting the images, and had now simply honored their clearly stated wishes and removed them.
The Sussexes’ shambolic operation had underestimated how ruthlessly efficient the Kardashians’ one is. Reps for the family flatly told anyone who asked that no such forms existed. There were no consent forms, they said. None. Why the rapid rebuttal? Because their team understands that when people lie about teeny-tiny things, the mind naturally wanders to what they might do when the stakes are higher.
“The Sussexes’ shambolic operation had underestimated how ruthlessly efficient the Kardashians’ one is. ”
When reporters went back to the Sussex camp to clarify how this squared with the previous narrative, the shutters came down. The talkative sources abruptly stopped talking. There would be no further comment on this ridiculous little flap.
On one level, it was all delightfully trivial. On another, as the week rolled on, it began to look like the purest distillation yet of the Sussex problem: a couple who have made “truth” their brand appearing to bend reality over something as petty as party optics.
Because whatever did or did not happen with paperwork, one fact is beyond dispute: Harry and Meghan asked for the pictures to be taken down.
The interesting question is why their camp then felt compelled to erect such a brittle justification, one that could be knocked down in a single phone call to a Kardashian publicist. Why not just say nothing? Why produce a story that could be disproved?
To answer that, you have to understand the world in which they now live. Attending Kris Jenner’s birthday at Jeff Bezos’ house is not, for this set, a “social occasion” in the way normal people understand the term. It is a luxury trade fair in which the product is one’s own image, a networking symposium disguised as a soirée. Every photograph is a marketing data point.
Meghan understands this instinctively, which is why, if she truly never wanted to see those images online, she could have arrived via the discreet private entrance used by some guests and politely declined to pose with Kim Kardashian. She did neither. Meghan needed the upside: proof of continued relevance, a rejoinder to whispering about their exile from the A-list.
So why take the pictures down? A former colleague at the Invictus Games told me that Harry was right to fear the downside, saying that being seen to “hobnob with the Kardashians” in Remembrance week was dangerous for his position at the charity, which, some say, is under threat.
This raises the fascinating possibility that Harry—who told us just last week that social media was run by evil men trying to steal our children’s minds—was also told they had ticked “no” on consent forms to get him to go to a party attended by Mark Zuckerberg.
By the end of the working week, with the Kardashians having effectively accused them of fabricating stories, the Sussexes’ relationship with the truth was under fresh scrutiny. The phantom consent form neatly plugged into existing doubts: the Oprah claim that they were secretly married three days before their Windsor wedding, later refuted by the Archbishop of Canterbury; the late queen’s coldly devastating response to their racism allegations—“recollections may vary.”
There was some terrific analysis of the whole situation by Bethenny Frankel who told The Toast podcast that the Kardashian kerfuffle was not an isolated fiasco but the latest misstep in a badly managed brand.
She described Harry and Meghan as people who “have been riding between two worlds for a long time,” and suggested that if they’d been properly handled—if they’d played chess instead of Instagram—“it would’ve been such a different outcome.” They tried to cram “50 pounds of sh-t in a five-pound bag,” she said, attempting to sell victimhood, triumph, glamour, exile, privacy, and exposure all at once.
But the killer line came from Meghan’s past. Years ago, Bethenny had known Meghan’s ex-husband, Trevor Engelson, well enough to swap flirtations and work gossip. When she first saw Meghan and Harry together in Us Weekly, she texted Trevor: “Do you think she’ll close?”
His reply was instant: “Oh, she’ll close.” Bethenny declined to elaborate, but the phrase now nags in the air, a cynical koan that, for many, explains more of the Sussex saga than any palace briefing ever has.
Bethenny then coolly mapped where the couple now sit in the celeb hierarchy. The Obamas “should have been their people,” she said; George and Amal Clooney came to their wedding—where were they now?
Those sets have drifted away, and Harry and Meghan find themselves chasing relevance at Kardashian parties they don’t want anyone to see them at.
Lauren Sánchez, Bethenny said, is, “Meghan Markle with no rules,” a “honey badger” who doesn’t give a damn and doesn’t pretend not to love the money and the flash. Meghan is trying to be all things at once and, Bethenny suggested, as a result, we don’t know who she is.
All of this would have been bad enough as a self-inflicted Montecito drama.
…and then they twist again
But on Saturday, the palace joined in.
The Times of London reported that Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace officials—aka the men in gray suits—were “baffled” by claims from Harry’s team that they had been briefed “as a courtesy” about his trip to Toronto the week before. Here, Harry met soldiers from regiments connected to the king and queen in the very week that William began a major five-day tour of Brazil.
Staff in both households told The Times they’d had no advance warning at all. When The Royalist asked Harry’s office precisely when this alleged courtesy call had been made, to whom, and in what form, there was no answer.
The story might, in different circumstances, have been dismissed as the usual turf war between dueling private offices. But coming at the end of a week in which the Kardashians had already effectively accused the Sussexes of making up a story, the Times piece landed with peculiar force. Once again, the refrain in royal circles was familiar: recollections may vary.
Wisely, I think, Harry’s office chose not to produce anything—email, message, note—that might prove their version true.
The Toronto row and the Kardashian fiasco both unfolded around Remembrance Sunday, a period that, for all concerned, is supposed to be sacrosanct. Yet recent royal history is littered with Remembrance-week fallouts.
Add it all together and you get something closer to an X-ray of the failure of the Sussex project than an unfortunate bad-press cycle.
Their appeal, post-Megxit, was supposed to rest on two pillars: authenticity and escape. They would purge their trauma by telling the truth about what it was like inside the House of Windsor; they would then build a freer, more honest existence outside it.
Yet here they are, being publicly contradicted on matters of fact by the Kardashians on one flank and the palace on the other. They look less like liberated truth-tellers than people who, finding themselves trapped in a hyper-managed hall of mirrors, have resorted to fiddling with the angles.
The smarter play is obvious in retrospect. Arrive at the Bezos/Jenner bash quietly via the private entrance; accept that some images would get out; and let the story be a simple one: they’re still in the Hollywood mix. Make the Toronto trip, issue a worthy statement about veterans and sport, and say nothing at all about who was or wasn’t warned in advance.
Instead, the couple have an incredible knack of presenting their asses for a good kicking, while reinforcing the harshest critiques of them: brittle sensitivity, chronic over-calculation, and a self-sabotaging, dishonest relationship with the truth in the service of their own myth-making.
Harry and Meghan’s nightmare seven days did not just give their enemies fresh material; it exposed how fragile the central premise of their post-royal lives has become.
Of course, the elevator can always keep going down. Things got even worse on Saturday when the Daily Beast’s founding editor, Tina Brown, gave an interview to the New York Times in which she absolutely nailed the couple to the floor.
Brown said, “I have never seen anybody in professional life make as many mistakes as Meghan has. And unfortunately, Harry is not the brightest bulb, either. So he thought that Meghan would be his great sort of guide in the big, wide world beyond Buckingham Palace, as it were.
“And it turns out that Meghan makes one terrible professional decision after another. And now they are sort of pariahs everywhere, it seems, which is a very difficult situation for them because America was supposed to be the place which paid the bills.”
Bethenny Frankel’s throwaway text with Trevor Engelson feels like a verdict hanging over the whole enterprise.
Unless the Sussexes can find a more honest, less tortured way of engaging with the worlds they insist on straddling—royal and celebrity, duty and cash, podium and party—the thing that gets closed may not be the deal, but the audience’s willingness to believe a word they say.
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The post Inside Harry and Meghan’s Kardashian Week From Hell appeared first on The Daily Beast.
