The Sussexes are ‘wildly unhappy,’ Prince Harry wants to live in Montana!

I’m not any kind of monarchist or royal-defender, but I do give credit where it’s due: I actually thought King Charles’ US state visit went well. I was looking for reasons to criticize him, but the state visit was mostly a chaotic neutral – Charles’ speeches went well, he didn’t face massive protests, he was popular with the MAGA/DC crowd and unpopular in New York. That’s about it. What’s fascinating about the “Charles was fine” storyline is that monarchists and royal-defenders did not STFU about Prince Harry and Meghan the entire time Charles was in the US. The royal reporters traveling with Charles and Camilla couldn’t shut up about the Sussexes. The MAGAt commentators were posting photos of Harry and Meghan and trying to argue that they were “jealous” (the Sussexes live rent-free in MAGA peabrains as well). Harry and Meghan were a lot quieter than Prince William and Kate last week, so why were royalists so insistent on dragging the Sussexes into every conversation about the state visit? Is it because *the royalists* thought the state visit didn’t go well? Is it because the Sussexes are the “royals” everyone wants to gossip about?

Speaking of, Tom Sykes was part of the traveling royal press corps too (of course he was) and he spent all of last week talking about… Harry and Meghan, of course. Not just in his Substack, but also in lunches with American magazine editors. Behold, Sykes’ big exclusive, “Miserable Meghan and Unhappy Harry’s Desperation and Despair Related to Me Over Lunch in New York.”

I did promise that, alongside the TV hits and podcast appearances, before I left, I’d also be working on a few other things. And one of them was a very interesting lunch with Dan Wakeford. Wakeford, a former editor of Us Weekly and People — and once a key ally of Harry and Meghan — sat down with me for a delicious late lunch at Pastis in the West Village and spilled everything JUST HOURS AGO.

Dan, as you’ll know has been close to the Sussex operation at various times in his career. Both magazines he edited ran stories that were sympathetic to the Sussexes when he was editor.

One was the famous People story, built around five friends defending Meghan against allegations that she was mean, and then when he moved to Us Weekly there was a similar kind of piece when she was accused of being a workplace bully, with interviews from former and current staff members saying she was a good boss, et cetera.

Dan now runs an independent newsletter on Beehiiv, Celebrity Intelligence, and if you’re interested in brainy celebrity news, it is well worth the humble $7 monthly subscription. Anyway, as I mentioned I was going to earlier in the week, I had lunch with Dan before I left, and he told me ALL the gossip, some of which he wasn’t able to put in the story. Which is not to say that there is not still PLENTY to feast on in the story.

The most explosive line, I think, comes from a quote from a source in their “orbit” saying they are “wildly unhappy.”

There is also forensic detail about what is going wrong commercially for the couple, and some of the markers of it.

Wakeford reports that the Sussex operation has been gutted. Staff have apparently been reduced from 16 full-time employees to five. So now they have a chief of staff each, a charity consultant, two TV executives, a U.K. press representative, and in the U.S. a press agency, Sunshine Sachs.

Wakeford also says Meghan is much more careful about minding the pennies, having been raised in a world where she was used to having to fend for herself, whereas Harry, he says, lacks “basic awareness of what things cost,” as the legacy of having been brought up in the palace and never having to pay a bill himself.

He says they want completely different things, and has some very interesting detail in there, with which I would totally concur, about Harry being unhappy with the life he has right now. He misses his family, his friends and his former existence in the U.K.

Dan says he would, in an ideal world, move to Montana, live modestly, and pursue work on his own terms. It’s the first time I have heard the word Montana in connection with Harry, but I have been told that he is not remotely enamoured with the prospect of spending the rest of his life in California, and that he certainly does not want things to continue as they are.

Then there is some interesting material about what Meghan wants, and what she doesn’t want.

Wait for this as well: Dan has an interesting line saying that her departure from the royal family was catalyzed by the realization that they would ultimately be paid by Prince William. His source says that when she realized William was going to be in charge of how much cash they would be getting, she wanted out. A source in the Sussex camp denied that allegation.

[From The Royalist Substack]

“Meghan didn’t want to be tied financially to her brother-in-law” sounds like the most accurate piece of gossip in this piece. The thought being that when QEII passed, William would become Prince of Wales and then HE would determine how the Sussexes and their office was financed. The problem with that is… in 2019, Harry and Meghan already got halfway out of that particular system. They finally got their own office, in Buckingham Palace, and I believe they were funded partially by QEII and then-Prince Charles. But here’s the thing – when Charles was PoW, he didn’t fund HIS siblings. His siblings were funded by QEII, which is what would have happened with the Sussexes if they had stayed – King Charles would have “funded” their separate office. Or at least that’s how it would have been organized traditionally. I don’t doubt that William had his own ideas about controlling Harry and Meghan financially though. God, I’m so glad H&M noped out of there.

As for the other stuff… Montana! Gutted operations! Wildly unhappy! This is why I brought up Charles’ state visit in the beginning of this story – if royal reporters were convinced that Charles, Camilla, William and Kate were getting the job done, they would not be spinning deranger fan-fic in the middle of the state visit. They can’t even make up their mind – is Harry desperate to return to the UK, or is desperate to live in a Unabomber-shed in Montana? Which is it?

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.