Harry and Meghan’s new $23m disaster

An entire island in the Caribbean. A lesser Picasso. 10.4 million packets of Tim Tams.

If you wanted to blow through $23.49 million like a hot knife through Jersey butter and with all the profligacy of an early aughties Paris Hilton then there are plenty of ways to do it.

Or in the case of Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex and proud new owner of a Bank of America Saver keycard, you could put out an Instagram post pre-emptively announcing you had it up to here with royal life and were off find himself in the land of the vanilla oat latte.

Turns out that freedom is not free at all.

More than 40 months on from Megxit, from the statements and the TV-tearing up; after the tell-all book, the podcast, the Netflix ‘docuseries’ and as many magazine and TV interviews as a recently divorced Real Housewife with a line of vitamin gummies to sell, the full cost of Harry and wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex’s flight from Blighty has come into focus.

Now, based on figures reported by the Daily Mail and Newsweek, the combined cost – so far – of the Sussexes’ US move plus his various legal showdowns in London looks to be about $23.49 million. That figure, mind you, is based on Harry triumphing in court. Should he lose all of them, that total figure could be more than $50 million.

So, two Picassos then.

If you thought you were suffering through interest rises and inflation then hold onto your hats. Harry and Meghan might pitch their California dream as oh-just-so-normal – kids on bikes, hiking and beach walks with the dogs – but this normalcy comes with a price tag that is anything but. According to figures from the Mail and from 2020, even then, the Sussexes’ costs, including their mortgage, security, staff, travel, clothing and food would be about $AUD6.7 million annually. (That works out to $18,331-a-day. Holy smokes.)

When the Sussexes ditched London in 2020 they did not seem to have considered the financial ramifications. The fact that the couple would have to pay their own bills seems to have come as a shock to Harry who complained to Oprah in 2021 that “my family literally cut me off financially” and they only got “short notice” that they wouldn’t get to keep receiving taxpayer-funded protection. (Up until then, Charles had been forking out more than $8 million annually to support both the Sussexes and the Prince and Princess of Wales’ families and specialist UK police had provided their security as they played house in a borrowed mega-mansion an entire ocean and a continent away.)

While the duke is currently taking the Home Office to court in the UK over that security decision, that case only covers their British security. No matter the outcome, they are likely to still have to pick up the tab for their Stateside bodyguards.

And large men in suits who seem to lack necks and the ability to smile don’t come cheap, with estimates for the cost of their security having been put at just over the $5 million-a-year mark by the Mail.

Then there is their mortgage, a concept that I’m assuming Meghan had to explain to Harry using several pieces of paper, a Sharpie and a few flashcards. In June 2020, they snapped up their faux-Tuscan monster of a Californian estate, replete with nearly twice as many loos as remaining working members of the royal family. (Seriously.)

The Mail has previously pegged their repayments as potentially costing them about $730,000-a-year, a reality which must have come as a rude shock for a man who until the age of 35 whose housing had always been taken care of by his Pa or Granny.

These, mind you, were numbers calculated back when the couple first bought their estate in 2020 and simply having a title doesn’t make a duke immune to the vagaries of inflation.

Recently Richard Eden reported their property tax, the equivalent of council rates, has skyrocketed up to $222,519 annually.

Next are Harry’s ever-increasing, ever-mounting legal fees back in London. The 38-year-old is currently waging three separate court cases against Fleet Street publishers over alleged historical phone hacking along with that separate legal stoush with the Home Office over the loss of the family’s official security.

The best case scenario, if Harry triumphs in all instances, is that he will still end up having spent about $3.4 million, according to UK lawyer Mark Stephens speaking to Newsweek.

Stpehens has said that “whether [the duke] wins some or all of these cases he’s going to come out net down because you never recover, even if you win, 100 percent of your costs.”

Of the upcoming Mirror case alone, Stephens commented: “So he’s going to be down £200,000 [around $AUD380,0000] a week over six weeks even if he wins. That’s another Netflix deal, isn’t it? He’s basically taken the Netflix money and put it all on red.”

Now this is the point that the ‘buts’ start – but they have all of those big deals! But they have tens if not hundreds of millions flowing into their bank accounts faster than a duchess can spend it on more diamond pinky rings! (She already has one that was created using gifted diamonds that came from the Middle East.)

But …

The devil is in the details – and details that have never been established, like how much of the estimated $150 million their Netflix deal is supposedly worth would they have actually collected?

Previously it has been reported by the Times that these sorts of arrangements between big names and big streamers come with a much-smaller annual retainer (with a typical figure for this being between $1.5 million and $3 million) with more cheques following based on their subsequent output.

So far, they have only made one six-parter for the entertainment giant. (There was the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Live To Lead too but given it was shot in 2019, does it really count?)

The only other confirmed project they have on the go with Netflix is a doco about Harry’s Invictus Games, with no release date known. (The next Games are in September so subsequent to that would make sense.)

On Thursday this week the Sun reported that they will no longer appear in front of the cameras to tell tales of the palace about their sad-face royal lives. Rather, an insider has said: “That period of their life is over — as there is nothing left to say.”

However, will anyone be that interested in watching, listening or reading what they have to say if they just earnestly banging on about saving African deltas or using the word empowerment too much? ‘Harry and Meghan Talk About Charity And Hug NGO Workers’ is not exactly the sort of viewing most of us fancy streaming when sprawled on the sofa with a glass of wine of an evening.

In May it was revealed that Meghan is mega-agency WME’s newest client and speculation has swirled for months that the duchess might be looking to get back into blogging. I would bet good money that the former actress has plenty of entrepreneurial fingers-in-pies already and has more Smythson notebooks filled with ideas than their Bond Street keeps in stock; that is to say, we are only in the lull here before Meghan’s Next Big Thing is unveiled.

But what the dickens is Harry going to do? Maybe he will go down the Tony Blair and Bill Clitnon route and try to earn megabucks giving six and seven-figure paid speeches. The sticking point there is … they were former leaders of the free world versus he is a man who was in the military and then worked for Gan-Gan. Will the Deutsche Banks and UBS’ of the world be that interested in paying good money to hear him talk about his mental health travails? That one time his meanie older brother broke his necklace? How unfair it is that he doesn’t get to have a go on the Buckingham Palace balcony too?

The $6.7 million question is, between Harry and Meghan, can they keep pulling in the sort of dosh they need to, even once they have run out of, or decide to stop peddling, royal material?

The Sussexes are far from unalloyed US hits either. The big news out of the latest polling was that Meghan has re-entered net positive territory for the first time in six months. King Charles, Queen Camilla and William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales all have much stronger American numbers than the Montecito Two.

Now might be the time for the Sussexes’ to indulge in a consoling Tim Tam or 47. And now might be the time for their housekeeper to start buying them in bulk.

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.