Daniela Elser: Prince Charles separates Meghan and Harry from royal family wealth

OPINION:

Here’s a sweet piece of palace trivia to start the week: the royal family receives hundreds of thousands of pieces of mail each year. In this day and age, there is something quite moving: a veritable army that spans the world still goes to the real trouble of writing some kind of letter, finding a stamp, and putting it in a mailbox. (The Queen alone receives around 110,000 pieces of mail each year.)

And responding to all that post? That requires the kind of military operation in which the royal family excels. (Yes, they actually send official reply cards to most letters and usually show a nice, smiling, boring photo of the SARs in question. If you want the Queen to send you a card, and she will, you can find out how here.)

Today, Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, are about to find out just how involved this process is with the news that Prince Charles has decided that his Clarence House team will no longer handle postal mail for the couple, leaving them to find their own official UK address (in case they want one) and figure out how to handle their mail.

Look, so far the Charles Clarence House press team has taken care of this boring but necessary role, namely the four-person Correspondence Section team, which takes care of both him and his wife, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall’s courier and the Sussex’s. (Question: What do ardent fans send Camilla? Gordon’s gin boxes and dog-breeding commercials?)

While, according to The Telegraph, “the volume of letters reaching the Sussexes is believed to have decreased since they moved abroad” (not a huge ego boost), great life events do occur, like birthdays or red letter announcements. in “notable peaks”.

News of the postal decision comes nearly two weeks after it was announced that a second Sussex bub is expected later this year, an event that could see an astronomical leap in supporters flooding Clarence House with cards and gifts.

While the price of this crack mail kit is unlikely to come close to saying Charles’s pocket square budget or how much he and Camilla spend on Jack Russell’s toilet (I guess), it’s still nothing to sniff with. the cost of staff, stationery, stamps and operating expenses is reported to be “tens of thousands of pounds”.

Given that Harry and Meghan have signed deals worth an estimated $ 192 million in the past six months alone, it seems unlikely they are trembling at the prospect of taking on the financial burden of dealing with their own mail. (Archie’s artisan fair trade play dough probably costs them more per year.)

However, this Clarence House / mail development raises the question of whether the Sussexes’ wealthy and independent new life could actually be some kind of double-edged sword.

When the Duke and Duchess released the explosive news last January that they were resigning as high-ranking members of the royal family, they said they wanted to “work to become financially independent” while “continuing to fully support Her Majesty the Queen”.

(Until then, according to the Sussexes, “5 percent of the funding for their official office” came from the Sovereign Grant and the rest came from an appropriation from Charles, also known as Bank of Dad. Charles raises about $ 42 million a year from his ownership of the Duchy of Cornwall, of which prior to Megxit, about $ 9.6 million was shared between the Sussexes and the Cambridges).

This proposed vision was a kind of improvisation of both official duties and paid jobs, which apparently fell with the Queen and proposed that she give up her daily ration of sandwiches and Jammy Dodgers.

The result, of course, was Megxit, with Harry and Meghan setting out at dusk to make their fortune in California and leaving the royal family suddenly without their two most charismatic crowd-attractors.

But cutting the threads of the parents’ wallet and standing up for themselves brings with it a whole new set of problems.

Of course, no longer depending on dad or the Sovereign Grant to pay an allowance takes a favorite club with which the British press has roundly beaten Harry and Meghan.

Now, their financial emancipation gives them the glorious freedom to travel (one day at least) and spend however they want. A gold-plated kombucha dispenser? Why not? A series of huge donations to your cause for the day? Get the check book. Private jets to and fro? Why of course!

However, the flip side of that coin is that they have entered the financial desert.

By settling on such a luxurious, high-profile existence early on, his nine-bedroom Montecito home, packed with a home theater and two saunas, seems like a much more opulent billet than the four-bedroom Frogmore that happens to be dangerously close. from Heathrow airport, they are also saddled with dazzling bills.

Your new lifestyle may be really great, but it’s also far from cheap. Last year, the Daily Mail estimated that they faced an annual bill of $ 8.45 million.

While the couple may earn more in a year or two than you and I will earn in a lifetime, neither do we have an entourage of lawyers, advisers, and managers eager for a cut or do we have to fork out the personal staff necessary to maintain all the show on the road.

By establishing their bright and exciting new life, they have also prepared themselves for a life of high bills and the knowledge they will have to find a way to cover them, year after year. While your ability to make money right now is in the stratosphere, fame and celebrity are fickle things. What if, one day, they are no longer the flavor of the month? What happens when Hollywood and Silicon Valley are not so desperate to woo the couple?

What if one day the torrent of megabucks deals evaporates at just a trickle? What if the novelty value to a broadcast giant or corporate titan of having a real-life Duke and Duchess on their books fades?

The couple’s ability to earn money in the long run is far from set in stone and all their protests about “financial independence” leave them without any safety net.

And, when normal life returns and they start traveling from one side of the UK to the other (beyond family ties, they both still have personal charitable roles in London), their financial independence could create a new and different headache.

By making it such an important part of their new life, there seems little chance that Fleet Street will allow them to forget their promise.

So, for example, who will pay for the electricity in Frogmore? The gardeners and cleaners? When they land at Heathrow, who will pay for the chauffeured cars to pick them up? And what about the staff who would likely travel with them?

Beyond all that, the symbolism of Charles’s postal decree is undeniable.

Faced with the recent confirmation from the Sussexes, at the end of the 12-month Megxit review period, that they had no intention of returning to real life, Charles has shown that professionally speaking, he is willing to cut them off and do whatever it takes. . needs to be done.

(Now that they are private citizens, he may well have caused quite an uproar if it turned out that he was using his official staff to run his post.)

Who knows where that kind of ruthless but necessary attitude for the royalist might lead in the future?

Over the weekend it was reported that Prince Andrew would not be on the balcony of Buckingham Palace for this year’s Trooping the Color.

While the event is technically a family event and therefore the scandalized prince is technically entitled to be there, his non-appearance would show that the palace is willing to do whatever it takes to protect the Crown.

Also this weekend saw the third anniversary of the first and only official outing of the so-called “Fab Four” which are Harry, Meghan and William and Kate, Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. When the quartet took the stage, the future of the royal family burned bright and strong: here was the charismatic, photogenic and unified future of the monarchy.

Charles’s mail decision is the final extinguishing of that flame.

It is tragic that such an impressive promise has never been fulfilled, in part thanks to the palace’s spectacular mismanagement and failure of the Sussexes.

In 2021, the palace’s approach to Harry and Meghan is simple: return to sender.

• Daniela Elser is a real expert and writer with over 15 years of experience working with several of Australia’s leading media titles.