BREAKING NEWS: Meghan Markle just tried to do something ordinary – and it immediately blew up in her face
Meghan Markle’s latest move proves that she can be her own worst enemy. She needs a reality check, writes Eleanor Burleigh.
The Duchess of Sussex reportedly leaked her own number this week (Image: Getty)
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have made concerns for their family a conerstone of their public image in recent years. But the Duchess of Sussex’s latest move proves that she can be her own worst enemy. Meghan is reported to have shared her own phone number after joining a school parents’ WhatsApp group, following Archie, seven, and Lilibet, five, starting at British schools this term.
A screenshot circulating online shows her thanking fellow “moms” for their “warm welcome”. “So happy to be part of this community xx”, she added. It’s a small, almost sweet gesture. It’s also a perfect distillation of the bind Meghan and Harry have built for themselves. They cannot simultaneously demand to be treated as high-value security targets and behave like any other parent looking to make friends in the group chat.
That contradiction has been visible for years, but it crystallised most clearly in their fight with King Charles over status – their insistence on being classed not as “private citizens” but “public figures” in their first open clash with the Firm since moving back to Britain.
Harry and Meghan made a shock return to the UK in August (Image: Getty)
You cannot claim the threat profile of a public figure while asking, in practice, to be left alone like a private one. Meghan’s WhatsApp blunder, reportedly followed by heightened security concerns in the Sussex camp and by Archie and Lilibet’s school being changed, is what the contradiction looks like in real life.
None of this happened in a vacuum. If Harry and Meghan had wanted a quiet life, away from royal duties and the press, nobody would have stopped them. That was precisely the late Queen’s reasoning when she refused to let them adopt a “half in, half out” arrangement.
If the demands of being senior royals were too much, she wasn’t going to let them keep the commercial upside of proximity to the Palace while shedding the obligations.
Instead, they chose the opposite path. The Oprah interview, their Netflix series and Harry’s memoir Spare didn’t just air family disputes, they set the tone for the Sussexes’ post-royal identity, one of attention, entirely on their own terms.
That choice brought them a wider reach, but it also means every subsequent claim to privacy has to be weighed against it.
The couple haven’t explained why they returned to Britain at such short notice in August. It may simply be that Harry wanted to be near his father during his cancer treatment, and to give King Charles more time with his grandchildren, a reasonable and human motive.
But the timing inevitably invites scrutiny, arriving as it did alongside a run of setbacks in their US ventures – Netflix and Spotify deals ending and a string of PR missteps.
Whether or not the return was calculated, it lands at a moment when renewed closeness to the Windsors – and renewed public interest – would serve them well.
While this is strictly speculation, it seems naive for Meghan and Harry to attempt to build an ordinary life in Britain while still relying on the extraordinary publicity machine they built after leaving it.
Settling into a new country can mean making friends, joining group chats and being an unremarkable “mom” at school pick-up. But the terms on which the Sussexes left in 2020, and the very public roles they’ve occupied since, make that kind of ordinariness much harder to credibly claim.
Every small slip like this one ends up undercutting the safety argument they’ve spent years trying to make. It’s harder to make a case for your protection when your own instinct, the moment you get the chance, is to hand out your number and say how happy you are to belong.
