6 min readThey’re back, baby. Six years after stepping aside as “working royals” and moving to the sunny hills of Montecito, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are returning to the U.K. According to reports, Harry and Meghan’s children—Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet—are enrolling in British schools in September, suggesting that the couple intends to relocate to the country where they famously tied the knot in May 2018.
To say this is a surprising move would be an understatement of royal proportions. It’s no secret that, since leaving for America in 2020, the couple has been estranged from the royal family. And their upcoming move is particularly unexpected considering the way the British press has historically treated Meghan, hounding her with negative coverage since she and Harry started dating. As the pair return to the U.K. following a string of high-profile court cases against the country’s most-read newspapers, the most pressing question is: Are Britain’s media ready for them?
To quote the late Princess Diana’s most iconic phrase, since the very beginning of the Sussexes’ relationship, there have been three of them in this marriage: Harry, Meghan, and the British press. In November 2016, just months after their romance was first revealed, Harry made a public statement condemning the media’s intrusive coverage of his then-girlfriend. After the Daily Mail published an article with the headline “Harry’s girl is (almost) straight outta Compton,” the prince’s communications team said the Suits actress had been subjected to a “wave of abuse and harassment” with racist and misogynistic undertones.
The prince’s statement was divisive in the U.K., and it was the first time the commentary surrounding the couple became political, with those on the Left broadly supporting them while the Right criticized Harry for attempting to silence the press. Crucially, his statement marked a departure in approach from an institution that is known for working with the press, whose media strategy is: “Never complain, never explain.”
The couple’s relationship with the press deteriorated further as the two married and Meghan fell pregnant with their first child. In 2019, when Prince Archie was born, they chose not to participate in the traditional photo call outside the hospital, angering journalists who complained that the Sussexes were refusing to show off their offspring to the subjects who funded them. It was around this time that the rumors of a feud between the Sussexes and the Cambridges—William and Kate, now the Prince and Princess of Wales—became louder and harder to ignore. Later that year, in interviews for a TV documentary, Harry said that he and his brother were on “different paths,” while Meghan teared up when asked whether she was coping with the pressure of royal life.
This is the sequence of events that led to the great split of 2020, when the couple announced that they would be stepping back as “working royals.” That spring, the Sussexes sent letters to four British tabloids, saying that they would not be cooperating with them in any capacity. This was the moment when the couple’s relationship with the press became even harder to define. Now freed from the royal institution, they demanded privacy while simultaneously sharing their story in very public forums, including a bombshell 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey. During the sit-down, the couple accused the royal family of making racially charged remarks about their son’s skin tone, and colluding with the press to smear them.
As they settled in California and focused on their American audience, Harry and Meghan found themselves on the wrong side of two unwritten rules that are deeply embedded in “stiff-upper-lip” British culture. First, that family is something to be endured at all costs—over Christmases, birthdays, christenings, and weddings—no matter how difficult. And second, that it is undignified to air your dirty laundry in public. Against this backdrop, sympathy toward them started to waver—even among those who believe that they have been treated terribly by the British media and the royal institution. Sensing this shift, the press intensified the obsessive coverage of them.
Six years on from “Megxit,” the couple’s return to the U.K. comes at a fascinating time. It follows an in-person reunion with King Charles, who has been undergoing treatment for cancer since 2024. In July, the king and queen hosted the Sussex family, including Archie and Lilibet, at Highgrove House—a major development in a relationship that was widely considered to be unsalvageable. That same month, Harry also lost his most high-profile court case against The Daily Mail, drawing a line under years of legal action. And although her Netflix show, With Love, Meghan, was canceled after two seasons, the Emmy-nominated series was the couple’s most successful venture outside of rehashing their royal feud, cementing the duchess as a player in the lifestyle space.
It’s also noteworthy that the news of their return was announced by The Telegraph newspaper. The conservative-leaning paper has a notoriously reciprocal relationship with the royals, and has therefore contributed toward negative coverage of the Sussexes. Except this time, the paper’s headline was more triumphant in tone: “Harry’s coming home.” Even The Daily Mail described the story as a “royal sensation,” devoting its first seven pages to the news.
This olive branch might come down to timing. This past week, the British press has been engaged in a wider debate about institutional racism following the sudden death of Jason Arday, a former professor at the University of Cambridge. Earlier this month, Arday—who was the youngest Black professor at the prestigious university—faced allegations that he had embellished parts of his personal backstory and plagiarized previous academic work. He was subjected to what can only be described as a hailstorm of coverage—over 250 articles in 22 days, even after he resigned from his post, saying that he had “reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure.” A week later, he was found dead.
In the aftermath of this distressing story, the veracity of the various allegations against Arday is still being disputed. But regardless of the truth, there is a deeper discussion about the role that racism played in the outsized, relentless nature of the press coverage, which characterized Arday as “Cambridge’s DEI darling.” Following his death, the university’s chancellor called out the “racist feeding frenzy” around the story, while Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the U.K.’s National Education Union, said Arday had experienced “a public and brutal takedown that unleashed a tirade of racism.” He said that there is “a profound difference between scrutiny and a sustained public campaign that turns an individual into a symbol of everything the right believes is wrong with DEI.” So far, almost 150,000 people have signed a petition calling for an inquiry into the media’s coverage of the story.
There are obvious comparisons here with the treatment of Markle. She was the first woman of color to enter a white institution with deep colonial ties. And from the outset, she was immediately characterized as the embodiment of so-called “woke culture”—a trope that the Right has similarly exploited to fuel the online culture wars. Everything from the way she smiled to how she held her baby bump while pregnant was viewed through the lens of tabloid ragebait. (At one point, she was even accused of “fueling drought and murder” for eating avocado on toast.) Prominent British media figures such as Piers Morgan continued to escalate their criticisms of her even after she publicly shared that she had contemplated suicide.
Following Arday’s death, the Sussexes have been afforded a momentary reprieve. Time will tell if it lasts, but earlier this year on a tour of Australia, the duchess was defiant. “I was the most trolled person in the entire world,” she said: “But I’m still here.” The British press hasn’t disappeared, either—and it’s just as capable of turning anyone into a target.