Before they made their big leap to North American life, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, pitched an ambitious plan. Harassment by the tabloid press having become too much for the couple to bear, they proposed a sort of hybrid working model under which they would live outside the United Kingdom, continuing to support and represent the crown on their own dime rather than the British taxpayers’. The queen, reportedly reasoning that Harry and Meghan would wind up leveraging their titles for financial gain, sensed a looming conflict of interest and said no. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex stepped down as working royals, decamped to Montecito, California, and became estranged from the family. Rather than embarking on the philanthropy circuit they initially appeared to envision, they quickly pivoted to media, inking multimillion-dollar deals with Spotify (RIP), Netflix, and Penguin Random House.
But over the past couple of months, the couple seems to be returning to a more familiar format. First came their professional rebrand, over at the palace-coded Sussex.com, and then came the business trips: Multiday visits to different countries punctuated by official events highlighting some of their chief causes. These little jaunts — with their carefully orchestrated, press-heavy itineraries — look a lot like royal tours, a resemblance that has inflamed certain segments of the U.K. media. As the couple sets off on a four-day trip through Colombia, you may be wondering: What are they doing there, why are they doing it, and how is that going over with the haters?
What are Harry and Meghan doing in Colombia?
The Sussexes arrived in Bogotá on Thursday morning and evidently went straight to Vice-President Francia Márquez’s house for coffee and Colombian cheese bread, People reports. I feel I should stress that Márquez (who is also the minister of equality and equity) invited the couple to visit her country. She announced the impending trip in a statement earlier this month, explaining that in November, Colombia will be hosting the Global Ministerial Conference on Ending Violence Against Children, part of which will deal with “creating safer physical and digital spaces, tackling issues such as cyberbullying, online exploitation, and the mental-health impacts of these threats.” Because these are topics that also interest Harry and Meghan, the vice-president offered them “the exceptional opportunity to engage with leaders, youth, and women who embody the aspirations and voices of Colombians committed to progress.”
To facilitate all that engaging, the couple will stop off at a local school for an “Insight Session,” followed by a summit on building healthier digital spaces. On Friday, they’ll meet with more students — “to highlight emotional well-being in education,” per People — before going to a luncheon that Márquez planned and meeting Colombia’s entrants into Harry’s Invictus Games. On Saturday and Sunday, they’re expected to visit Cartagena and Cali. The available details on all of this are aspecific, but Harper’s Bazaar says it “can confirm the duke and duchess will also get a taste of the arts and true culture of Colombia,” probably via music, theater, and dance performances.
And people are upset about this … why?
Again, the format of the trip is basically the same as a royal tour, in which senior members of the royal family visit a country — either at the U.K. government’s request or the host country’s invitation — and complete a whirlwind series of stops that are usually engineered to highlight a few key local issues. The royals will meet important people, sample the national cuisine, and generally try to wrangle some goodwill toward the monarchy while getting aggressively papped. (They have varying degrees of success; see: Prince William and Kate Middleton’s disastrous Caribbean tour in 2022.) This is the part of the job Meghan and Harry wanted to keep doing but were told they couldn’t, so the idea that they might now be having their cake and eating it, too, has stirred up some of their critics and (if you believe the tabloids) maybe even Harry’s family members. After the couple undertook a three-day visit to Nigeria — a country formerly under Britain’s colonial rule — in May, the Mirror reported that William was “absolutely furious,” while King Charles was “said to be angrier than anyone has ever seen him.”
Harry and Meghan went to Nigeria, too?
Correct. Between May 10 and 13, at the invitation of the country’s Chief of Defense Staff, the couple went to a school in Abuja to talk mental health; Harry then visited a military hospital, while Meghan spoke at a women’s leadership summit. They gave speeches, they attended a charity volleyball match, they hit various receptions, and they even appeared at a “polo fundraiser,” according to People. Royal reporter Simon Perry, who covered the couple’s trip, observed “all the hallmarks of an official visit, despite not being officially labeled as such.”
“Having covered numerous royal tours,” Perry assured readers, “every aspect mirrored the essence of royal engagements.”
Harry and Meghan subsequently said the trip had special meaning for them. Meghan, having discovered from a genealogy test that she’s 43 percent Nigerian, called the country “my country” while addressing her fellow women in leadership. “These trips are about us being able to go out and go and focus on the things that mean so much to us,” Harry told People. “And being able to be on the ground, to us, is what it’s all about.” But that’s precisely the attitude that had royal watchers seething. “For Charles and William, it’s as if Meghan and Harry are saying, ‘We don’t need your permission to be working royals — we will do it on our own terms whenever and wherever we like,’” author Tom Quinn told the Mirror. Speaking to the Daily Mail, former BBC journalist and royal correspondent Michael Cole said the couple “exploited their royal status to the very limit and in every way, trying to give the impression that it was the real thing.” Still, the reviews weren’t all bad. Tina Brown, journalist and royal biographer, told the BBC that the visit illuminated for her a “Harry-shaped hole in the monarchy.”
“I felt this is what could have been, these two — who are enormously appealing to the public, and who are very good at it — were out there in Nigeria looking very attractive and being appealing people,” she said. “And what a pity it is they’ve gone.”
So, it’s just the royal positioning that people are mad about?
Mostly, but with regards to Colombia, critics have lodged a few other, more specific complaints. Royal author Angela Levin has called Harry a hypocrite for voluntarily visiting a “dangerous” country after making such a big issue about personal security in Britain. (The U.S. and U.K. governments deem certain parts of Colombia a tourism risk because of a potential for terrorism and kidnapping, though their areas of concern don’t feature on the Sussex itinerary.) Others have suggested that the country is using the couple’s “star power,” to quote the Telegraph, to burnish its own reputation against recent scandal and unrest. “There is a danger of their celebrity and willingness to help underprivileged people is being undermined by a certain naïveté,” Cole said, this time speaking to the Telegraph. But if you ask me, it’s the doing-official-royal-things-without-using-official-royal-channels aspect that’s really getting to the critics. The quasi-royal tours are basically the Sussex royal reboot come to life.
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