Harry and Meghan Return to Britain — But the Culture War Around Them Never Left

The Sussexes’ lives have moved on. The narrative around them has not.

One of the strangest things about covering a story for years is watching the narrative around it outlive the moment that created it.

Harry and Meghan’s return to Britain may become one of the most significant chapters in their lives. There are still major questions ahead: what role Harry might take on in public life, whether relationships within the Royal Family can soften, and what this next phase will actually look like. But before any of those can be answered, the meaning of their return appears to have already been decided.

Credit: William J Connolly / Getty Images

Headlines and commentary have been strikingly familiar: the King was blindsided; they failed in America; they’re broke; how dare they! Six years may have passed, but the characters in this story remain frozen in the roles they were assigned long before the Sussexes even arrived in California.

But Harry and Meghan themselves are not the same people who left. They are older, raising two children, building businesses and careers independent of royal life, and relate to Britain differently than they once did. While carrying out research for a book in 2023, I was told that California was not intended to be their only base. It was the right home for that chapter of their lives, but their children’s education and evolving priorities would shape what came next — including where they chose to live, and for how long. The reality was always more complicated than the simple idea that leaving meant rejecting Britain, and returning meant admitting defeat.

I know something about how consuming the media cycle can become because, for a long time, I was inside it too. I spent thirteen years covering the royals, but the Sussexes quickly changed the nature of that work. From their wedding onward, the couple became a focal point for debates that often had little to do with what was actually happening.

That made things complicated for me fast. I had extraordinary access to a subject many journalists were competing to cover in an intensely competitive space. And my approach to the beat also brought its own challenges. I treated the Royal Family as I would any other powerful public body: with scrutiny, context, and a willingness to question the way it was being covered. That meant reporting details others didn’t have, presenting missing perspectives, challenging inaccurate headlines and — in the case of the first biracial duchess — questioning racially charged commentary and articles.

Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan at the Dodger Stadium in 2025 / Credit: MLB Photos via Getty Images

Over time, the focus shifted from what I reported to what people believed my reporting represented: that I was anti-monarchy, acting on behalf of the Sussexes, or part of a wider agenda. My professional credentials and private life were picked apart, leading to years of harassment from many of the same outlets and commentators covering them. At the time, some of Harry and Meghan’s aides — and, on occasion, the couple themselves — were among the few people I spoke to who understood that experience.

It was a bizarre place for a journalist to be, in an environment where the facts seemed secondary to the meaning others forced onto them. At a certain point, defending myself and doing my job stopped feeling like completely separate things.

The problem with a story that has become a symbol is that the people involved are eventually inseparable from what they are perceived to represent. By the time they left royal life, the Sussexes had become useful shorthand for much larger arguments about race, class, feminism, diversity, tradition, national identity and more. Parts of the press and the online ecosystem surrounding them had influenced the narrative from the beginning; over time, the line between reporting on the story and shaping it through commentary became increasingly blurred. What the couple actually did came to matter less than the ideas people attached to them.

No matter what happens, Meghan can still be made to represent identity politics, progressive America, victimhood or “wokeness,” depending on who is behind the opinion piece. Harry can still be cast as the prince who abandoned duty, family, and country — often through the lens of his relationship with her. They can be brave truth-tellers or irredeemable narcissists; victims of an institution or architects of their own downfall. The sides were largely chosen years ago, and every new development is simply written into the story people already believe.

If I had one piece of advice for the couple as they begin this new chapter in England, it would be to resist the urge to respond to every inaccuracy this time around. When a narrative has already been established across the media ecosystem, new information is rarely enough to change it. You cannot fact-check your way out of a culture war.

And that challenge will be even greater because the British media landscape they are returning to is not quite the one they left in 2020. Political and cultural divisions have become more entrenched, while a diminished newspaper industry has become increasingly reliant on opinion, personality and provocation in a world where basic news is available everywhere for free. Commentary no longer reacts to the news cycle; it creates one.

For two people who have already become extraordinarily useful (and lucrative) as culture-war symbols, the incentives to keep the old arguments and grievances alive are arguably greater than ever. The smallest development in Harry and Meghan’s world still eclipses coverage of other senior royals and generates days of outrage, analysis, and reaction. The machine remains well fed.

After the release of my book Endgame at the end of 2023, it felt like the right moment to step back from the beat. I had told the story I wanted to tell and didn’t want to spend years revisiting the same debates. My own move from London to California gave me the space to pursue things I’d always wanted to do, including writing my first novel and developing scripted television. Creating that distance wasn’t conceding the argument; it was deciding I no longer needed to spend my energy fighting it.

Nor did moving abroad mean turning my back on Britain. America was never meant to replace my home — but it gave me a different perspective and the freedom to explore a different part of my life. It’s one reason I’m wary of seeing Harry’s return as proof that leaving was somehow a mistake.

Leaving somewhere and returning to it later are not contradictory acts. Sometimes distance is what reshapes the relationship. The place you come from can mean something different in your forties or fifties than it did in your twenties or thirties, after years away and as priorities shift.

Fixed narratives don’t resist change because they’re accurate. They resist it because they’re useful — to newspaper editors, commentators, and a cottage industry that has built years of content around a particular caricature of who Harry and Meghan are.

The old scripts are already written. They leave little room for the possibility that people grow, relationships soften, and the place you once needed distance from can become somewhere you want in your life again.

What comes next will be fascinating in its own right. But just as revealing will be the distance between the lives Harry and Meghan are actually living and the version of them that the culture around them remains invested in preserving — and whether, this time, the story being told about them will finally be allowed to catch up.