King Charles loves himself a bit of eastern mysticism so here comes the 2024 yin to 2021’s yang. Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have done a joint TV interview touching on the Duchess’ mental health and words have come out of her mouth that would have to qualify as Buckingham Palace conniption-worthy.
No, don’t adjust your set or twiddle any knobs – we have not been transported back three years only to find loo paper still being minglily rationed by supermarkets.
Harry and Meghan, more than three years after the royal interview to end all royal interviews, have done a fresh’un, shot in the same soft-focus, just-a-tad-more-vaseline-on-the-lens style, thus handily ensuring that their critics back in the UK have something fresh to carp on about.
Speaking to CBS Sunday Morning host Jane Pauley, the Duchess told the cameras she hasn’t “really scraped the surface” of talking about the mental health struggles she experienced during her royal career.
The duchess opened up about her mental health struggles. Picture: CBS Sunday Morning
It was a direction Meghan herself told Pauley she had not “expected” the interview to go, with the Duke and Duchess there to launch an online “global community” called the Parents’ Network, set up by their Archewell Foundation, which will support “parents whose children have suffered from the harmful effects of social media”.
If the TV sit-down was meant to be all about the Parents’ Network and Archewell’s largest scale project to date, it’s those three words – “scraped the surface” – that have promptly sucked up all the oxygen.
And understandably so.
After the Sussexes’ Oprah Winfrey turn, after six hours of Harry & Meghan and Spare, it had appeared that a sort of all ‘all clear’ siren was sounding from the direction of Montecito. The couple was done excavating their painful royal lives and brighter futures, broad horizons and jam empires beckoned.
Only, not quite it might seem.
Specifically, asked by Pauley about her own experience of having suffered suicidal ideation, the Duchess said: “When you’ve been through any level of pain or trauma, I believe part of our healing journey, certainly part of mine, is being able to be really open about it. And you know, I haven’t really scraped the surface of my experience. But I do think that I would never want someone else to feel that way …
“If me voicing what I have overcome will save someone, or encourage someone in their life to really genuinely check in on them and not assume that the appearance is good, so everything’s okay, then that’s worth it,” she said.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle sat down with CBS Sunday Morning. Picture: CBS Sunday Morning
“I’ll take a hit for that.”
While this new interview is hardly in the same league here as the Sussexes’ marmalade-dropper of a 2021 interview – nine minutes versus two hours – still.
The duchess ‘voicing what she has overcome’? Surely that would have to factor, up there with Jeremy Corbyn sweeping into power and nationalising Buckingham Palace’s back lawn for a community veggie garden, as one of those niggling fears that might keep the King awake at 3am. (Imagine all those retirees tromping over the palace lawn tugging up raggedy swedes …)
Ever since it was revealed, also in 2021, that Harry was writing a memoir, so too have there been reports and claims Meghan would one day pen an autobiography of her own.
Heaven knows there would have to be material enough for a three volume set and given that the Duke’s Spare bust records and hurtled up bestseller lists, publishers would have to be queuing up.
Even though there is nothing to indicate that Meghan might ever want to apply her manicured fingers to a MacBook keyboard for a lengthy, painful trip down memory lane, the very fact she could would have to be quite the Sword of Damocles for His Majesty.
You’d have to think if there is one thing guaranteed to put a King off of enjoying his brisk ‘summer’ strolls in the Scottish Highlands, his kilt snagging on brambles as the crisp air really airs his nether regions, it’s even the remote possibility that his daughter-in-law might decide to properly ‘scrape’ deep beneath the surface of her royal travails.
The pair were recently in Nigeria. Picture: Emmanuel Osodi/Anadolu via Getty Images
On another note, the timing of this week’s Harry and Meghan outing is a curious business.
In short, why now?
This week’s interview and Parents’ Network launch follows a pattern that has emerged over the last few years – around the same time the royal family all collectively have their out-of-offices on and are up in Scotland watching Princess Anne work Prince Philip’s favourite barbecue tongs by the side of some frigid loch the Duke and Duchess of Sussex pop up.
In August 2020, the Sussexes undertook their first live post-royal engagement by joining a charity to hand out back to school supplies, taking a personal photographer with them.
Less than two weeks later, on September 2, they commemorated the anniversary of Diana, Princess of Wales’ death planting flowers at LA Preschool, later releasing photos of the visit.
In August 2021, Meghan marked her 40th birthday with a video with Melissa McCarthy launching her 40×40 mentoring initiative, a project that has long since disappeared into the never never.
Come August 2022, and New York magazine’s The Cut ran the Duchess’ first print interview in years. (Curiously she said something not dissimilar back then, telling the interviewer “It’s interesting, I’ve never had to sign anything that restricts me from talking. I can talk about my whole experience and make a choice not to.”)
The Duchess spoke candidly in the interview. Picture: SUZANNE CORDEIRO / AFP
Then in August last year, Harry flew to Tokyo to take part in a conference to declare his “life is charity”, his first in-person public engagement in months, posed for selfies with pal Nacho Figueras and then the two of them playing in a charity polo tournament in Singapore.
Might Meghan talk? That remains to be seen. However, I hope she does some day speak out about her mental health – even if that’s a prospect which might cause Charles to rue the day he switched to a crystal deodorant stick.
The Duchess willingly shared her own pain to help others when in December 2020 she wrote a deeply moving piece for the New York Times about suffering a miscarriage in a bid to destigmatise the conversation around this sort of loss. Should she go down this sort of path again and open up then, brava! It would be a courageous and powerful thing for her to do.
So while we wait and see whatever the Duchess’ next move might be, here’s a suggestion: Camilla should use this time to considering upgrading Charles’ antiperspirant options.
