The Royal Commentariat Has Gone Mad Over Harry and Meghan’s Australia Visit

As Prince Harry and Meghan Sussex moved through Australia, meeting veterans, speaking to young people, visiting Bondi, drawing crowds in Sydney and generating the kind of easy public interest the monarchy likes to pretend belongs to it alone, Britain’s royal commentariat began to wobble. Robert Jobson’s media rants were the clearest example. He complained the Sussexes were muddying the waters for the working royals. He worried aloud about titles and fumed about security costs. Jobson even started talking as though a private visit to Australia was somehow destabilising the Crown itself.

That is when the mask slipped for those who have not been paying attention. Because this was never really about one trip. It was about a class of commentators who have spent six years recycling the same anti-Sussex script and are now furious that it is no longer landing with the same force. Harry and Meghan are meant to be over. They are meant to be embarrassing. They are meant to be desperate, unwanted, commercially vulgar and publicly diminished. Instead, they went to Australia and once again reminded everyone that they still generate attention without palace approval, taxpayer funding or institutional choreography. That is what sent the British commentariat into another crash-out.

The same tired talking points, dragged out for another spin

First off, one must appreciate the sheer repetitiveness of the palace-adjacent playbook. It has been six years since Harry and Meghan left royal life, and the commentariat is still copy-pasting the same complaints as if no time has passed at all.

Taxpayer money. Cameron Walker on GB News was practically salivating over crowd control costs, as though the Australian government paying for policing at a public event was a constitutional crisis rather than basic civic administration. The couple have paid for their own security. They are not using the Sovereign Grant. And yet the line persists because it is all they have.

Quasi-royal accusations. This one is doing heavy lifting across every platform. The Times panel asked whether Australians receive them as “senior members of the royal family” or “something in between.” The answer appears to be: they receive them warmly, with enthusiasm, and without the ritualised grovelling that seems to be the monarchy’s only remaining export. This is apparently a problem.

Commercialism. Charlotte Griffiths on GB News branded it the “misery tour” because Meghan had the audacity to acknowledge she has been the most trolled person in the world. Jacob Rees-Mogg and Camilla Tominey fretted about the “commercialisation” of Meghan’s wardrobe, as though selling out clothes is a crime when Meghan does it but a masterstroke when Kate Middleton does it. The inconsistency would be amusing if it were not so transparent.

Titles. The Times panel agonised over what to call them. Jacob Rees-Mogg insisted Harry “cannot wake up in the morning and fire himself from being royal.” And yet Andrew still remains a royal. So the issue is plainly not whether the institution can draw lines. It is who this commentariat wants those lines drawn against.

Do you notice a pattern? Every complaint circles back to the same thing: Harry and Meghan are doing what the official royals do, but better, and without the taxpayer subsidy. And that makes the palace class furious.

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Why the Commentariat is really so angry

The problem is not the trip. The problem is that Harry and Meghan keep making the institution look weak. Consider what else is happening right now. King Charles and Queen Camilla are preparing a state visit to the United States. Prince William and Kate Middleton have not mounted a significant joint overseas tour since 2022. The Palace has been carefully managing expectations, rolling out engagements at a measured pace, trying to project stability and continuity.

And then Harry and Meghan land in Sydney and the entire energy shifts. The Channel 7 coverage was almost shockingly warm. Meghan cuddling babies at Bondi. Harry on a sailing boat with Invictus veterans. Crowds three and four deep just to catch a glimpse. A woman named Michelle Haywood got a hug from Harry because her late mother Daphne had met him three times. The report described “three cheers for the royals on a day when too much of these two was never enough.”

The contrast with the official monarchy could not be starker. Charles and Camilla do solemn walkabouts with carefully managed photo opportunities. William and Kate deliver speeches that have been workshopped within an inch of their lives. Everything is expensive. Everything is controlled and feels like a product.

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Harry and Meghan, by contrast, looked like they were having a genuinely nice time. They were relaxed. They were informal. Meghan told people to call her Meg. Harry made jokes about being back in Sydney. There was no stiff upper lip or rigid protocol. There was just two people doing good work and seeming to enjoy each other’s company.

That is what the commentariat cannot forgive. Not the titles, security costs or their commercial ventures. The ease of it. The way Harry and Meghan make the official royals look joyless and overproduced by simply existing in the same hemisphere.

Jobson admitted it himself, though he did not seem to realise it. When the presenter asked what the problem was, he said: “This sort of thing does muddy the waters because you’ve got a lot of people talking about… if they’re private citizens, why are we paying for it?”

The subtext, of course, is that people are also talking about why the monarchy needs to exist at all if two private citizens can do the job better without the palaces and the titles and the £132.1 million Sovereign Grant. That is the real fear. That is why Jobson was hyperventilating. Not because Harry and Meghan broke the rules, but because they are exposing how little the rules actually matter.

The Royal Commentariat Created This Problem and Now Resents It

For six years, the British press has written about Harry and Meghan obsessively. Front pages. Books. Panel shows. Podcasts. Documentaries. The couple have been a non-stop content factory for an industry that claims to want them gone.

Now they’re in Australia doing charitable work, and the same people are furious that… they’re generating headlines? You cannot have it both ways. Either they’re irrelevant – stop writing about them. Or they’re relevant – stop acting shocked.

Every outlet covered this trip like a royal tour. Robert Jobson was booked on multiple programmes. The coordinated talking points about “quasi-royal” tours landed in every inbox simultaneously. The media made Harry and Meghan central by refusing to look away. Now they’re angry the couple won’t fade – and even angrier that the public actually adores them.

And here’s what Jobson, Piers Morgan, and the rest keep lying about: the 2020 Sandringham Summit agreement explicitly states that Harry and Meghan would become “privately funded members of the Royal Family with permission to earn their own income and pursue their own private charitable interests.“ They are not breaking rules. They are following the exact deal the Palace signed. The commentariat’s complaint about money is not a principle. It’s a bad faith argument from people who never read the agreement or hope you didn’t.

What Meghan is really being punished for

When Bryony Gordon appeared on This Morning this week and said something that made the studio go very quiet. When asked why Meghan attracts such intense hatred, Gordon said, “I think it’s called misogynoir. Misogyny and racism.“

The reaction was instructive. The other panellist, Gyles Brandreth, immediately tried to redirect. He talked about his own experience with trolling and suggested Meghan could simply choose not to look. He minimised, deflected, and performed the very gaslighting that Gordon was describing.

Here is the truth: Meghan Sussex is being punished for marrying a prince and refusing to go along with their ritualistic humiliation that seems to be par for the course for women entering into the royal institution. She was supposed to be quiet like Kate Middleton. She was supposed to curtsy, produce heirs, and accept her place in the hierarchy and become a scapegoat for all their sins. Instead, she left. She spoke and built a life on her own terms. And she is still here, still successful, still popular, still impossible to ignore.

That is unforgivable to a certain kind of commentator. Not because of anything Meghan actually did, but because her existence refutes everything they believe about how the world should work. She was not supposed to win. And yet here she is, winning, while they scream into cameras about security costs and crowd control and the proper use of a ducal title.

Piers Morgan spent an entire segment this week trying to place Harry in the same bracket as Andrew, as though Andrew’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and the allegations against him were remotely comparable to anything Harry has ever been accused of. But Morgan will not stop. None of them will stop. Because if they stop, they have to admit that the last six years have been a campaign of coordinated cruelty against a woman whose only crime was marrying into a family that could not handle her brightness.

Final thoughts

Here is where we land. Robert Jobson’s rant was not a defence of principle. It was a tantrum over competition. The commentariat cannot cope with Harry and Meghan doing publicly, warmly, and at their own expense what the official royals do stiffly, expensively, and with diminishing public excitement.

The more successful the trip looks, the more hysterical the commentary becomes. The bigger the crowds, the louder the complaints about security costs. The warmer the coverage, the more frantic the accusations of quasi-royal impropriety. Every piece of good news for the Sussexes is treated like a constitutional crisis because it exposes how fragile the institution really is.

If the monarchy is so strong, why is it threatened by two people in California? If the royal family is so popular, why does the commentariat need to attack anyone who generates positive attention elsewhere? And lastly, if Harry and Meghan are truly irrelevant, why is Robert Jobson still talking about them?

The commentariat has gone mad because Harry and Meghan keep exposing the gap between royal mythology and real life. The institution still has palaces, titles and taxpayer-funded grandeur. But the Sussexes still have the one thing this media class cannot bear to see in unsanctioned hands: public attention that feels natural, warm and alive. No wonder Robert Jobson sounded like his blood pressure was doing cartwheels.