Vanity Fair’s February cover story is all about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, their marriage, their business, their successes and their failures. I’ve felt for some time now that some people in the American media have their knives out for the Sussexes, and this VF story really shows it. You cannot say that all of this is coming from the salty royalists in Britain, even if there are certainly chunks of this VF story which read like quotes from “palace sources” and “sources close to Prince William.” But the fact that VF put the story together in this way and timed it to drop at this specific moment, speaks to a larger, transatlantic agenda to kneecap, vilify and undermine Harry and Meghan. While the cover story is aimed more at Meghan, there’s certainly an unflattering portrait of Harry included too. They paint him as a unintelligent yet well-mannered man-child who is being “reparented” by Meghan. Some Harry-specific excerpts from VF:

Harry hopes to have a better relationship with his family: At an event in 2023, someone privately asked Harry if he’d heard from his family. He said he hadn’t. This person asked Harry if he thought he was going to, and he said he hoped so. “That’s sort of what made me so sad,” the source says. “His hope seemed very genuine. And I was just kind of like, ‘Oh, no.’ ” The source believed Harry hadn’t absorbed the gravity of what it would mean to sell millions of copies of a tell-all book about a famously insular and circumspect family in the middle of a years-long public relations crisis. “The power of the written word, and the power of the narrative…” this person went on. “I don’t know if that’s something he understood while he was doing it.”

The Sussexes’ security: There are clear dangers to the family’s safety—a person who worked closely with them says strangers take Lyfts to their house, and in 2023 the couple was involved in what a spokesperson called a “near catastrophic car chase” with paparazzi. (There were no injuries, collisions, or charges filed.) The person who interacted with Harry in 2023 also described a “very scary paparazzi situation” after employees at the hotel where Harry was staying allegedly tipped off photographers to his presence.

Harry has no friends: By one telling, the person who interacted professionally with Meghan says he’s socially marooned beyond his nuclear family. “She was up-front about the fact that Harry hadn’t made many friends yet,” the source says of Meghan’s assessment of her husband. The person who worked in media projects with the couple also has a guess. “I think Harry doesn’t know what he wants because he grew up in a fishbowl, and so he doesn’t know what real life really is,” they say. “I think he probably wants to be left alone and be able to go kiss babies every once in a while but not have to worry about money. I don’t think he wants to be famous the way Meghan wants to be famous.”

The Sussexes are deeply in love. “They are so hot for each other,” the person who worked closely with them said. “Like, you know how you meet those couples where you’re like, the way they’re looking at each other, I should probably not be here right now?” When Harry is solo, the person inside the couple’s circle says, “he’s very personable, he’s very at ease with people, quite like Diana… he just has this way of, like, making people feel very comfortable.” When he’s in public with Meghan, “there is a circus,” the source says. “He’s so protective of her because people are so nasty to her…. It’s a whole different experience.”

Meghan’s role in their dynamic is caregiver and facilitator. She’s the one who makes things happen. “Pre-Meghan,” says the person familiar with the couple, “Harry would just pop in [to the palace press office], ask a few questions, and leave, like he was a little bored but also very keen.” It’s almost impossible to imagine today’s Harry willingly engaging with the media in search of purpose. The source who worked with Harry and Meghan says, “I can picture him meeting Meghan and being just a deep breath of, like, ‘I’ve been so exhausted, and you make everything so easy.’… I don’t want to be like, oh, it’s an Oedipus thing or whatever, but it kind of feels like she’s reparenting him in a way.”

Meghan’s claim that she didn’t research the Windsors when she met Harry: A royals reporter believes that Meghan assumed her husband’s vision rather than researching the job of being a royal, and the reporter has a more positive view of the folie. “Oh, that’s such a good idea for a successful marriage,” the reporter says. “It’s a terrible idea for a job, but…if you’re joining this big network of people, you’ve got to see this through your husband’s eyes, be your husband’s advocate in it. And it’s no wonder this relationship works, even if the family business part of it fell apart.”

Harry doesn’t know himself: That instinct to do things as Harry and Meghan believed they should be done, rather than how they are typically accomplished, was exacerbated during their time as senior working royals. It led to conflict with Harry’s family and palace staff, the reporter says, because Harry “doesn’t understand himself. He doesn’t understand a monarchy. His family didn’t do a very good job of inculcating him into the family legend partially because he didn’t care; partially because he was just kind of abandoned at the age of eight.”

[From Vanity Fair]

“He doesn’t understand a monarchy. His family didn’t do a very good job of inculcating him into the family legend partially because he didn’t care; partially because he was just kind of abandoned at the age of eight.” This seems a particularly harsh way of describing a situation with a few nuggets of truth. One, Harry was abandoned and neglected for a huge part of his childhood. Two, Harry never really felt like he was fully part of the institution. As Harry and Meghan have told their stories and Meghan has insisted that Harry was the one preparing her for royal life, I’ve always sort of thought… wow, Harry really bungled it, or he was completely unprepared for what Meghan would face, and he didn’t fully appreciate what the royal institution was going to do to Meghan. There was a naivete to how Harry operated within the monarchy, and he handed that naivete to Meghan.

Basically though, this is all just another version of a million other stories about Harry being bored/dumb and indifferent to his new California life. The people speaking about him to VF are not the people who have actually spent time with him as an adult – they remember a somewhat aimless, anxious young man and they’ve imprinted those qualities on who they think Harry is now. It’s a version of: British sources insist that “the old Harry would have hated living in a California mansion with a hot wife and two children, he must be desperate to get back to the UK so William can boss him around!”

Photos courtesy of Cover Images. Cover courtesy of Vanity Fair.