Prince Harry is in Northern Ireland for his first official visit today. As usual, he was great with the crowds, at one point joking with school children that they should have been in class instead of waiting around for him. While Harry’s at work over in the UK, production on Suits is resuming next week so Meghan Markle will be back in Toronto. He’ll be in Toronto soon too for the Invictus Games. And, perhaps, their first official appearance together. At least that’s what her Vanity Fair interview seemed to be building towards. But there’s supposedly been some backlash. That’s what The Sun is calling it. In fact, they’re saying it’s “furious” backlash:

MEGHAN Markle faced a furious backlash after gushing to a glossy mag about her love for Prince Harry.
The US actress was advised to “zip her lip a bit” by experts who said she had made Harry’s appeal for privacy look “ridiculous”.

Meghan, 36, invited Vanity Fair into her Toronto home and told them in a candid chat: “We’re a couple. We’re in love.”

But Majesty magazine editor Ingrid Seward said: “For her this probably seemed a perfectly normal thing to do. But it will not have gone down well at the palace.Maybe someone like Meghan would be good for the monarchy but I think she’s going to have to zip her lip a bit.”

Suits star Meghan told the magazine she doesn’t “read any press” despite Harry, 32,last year claiming stories about her had been damaging and appealing for her privacy.

Ms Seward went on: “It makes a nonsense out of Harry’s plea.”

Biographer Penny Junor said royals in the most successful relationships stay silent.
She warned: “The less said publicly the ¬better. It may bite her in the backside.”

I’m kinda missing the “fury” in “furious backlash” there but maybe it’s because I’m not English and their expression of “furious” takes the form of dramatic pauses and pursed lips. How would it not have gone down well with the palace, though? As I noted the other day, Meghan has shut down her website and gone silent on social media. It’s clear that her public presentation over the last few months has been in consultation with Harry’s people – at the palace. So this Vanity Fair interview? It would never have happened without the endorsement of Harry and his team.

This, though, is the kind of commentary that Harry’s been trying to criticise about the British press since launching his Love Shield 10 months ago. And likely why, instead of doing an interview with a British outlet, they agreed to one with an American magazine, for a more sympathetic audience. I wonder too if that’s what this “furious backlash” might be about, a little. That the British are feeling left out of the relationship. If you recall, it was American outlets breaking exclusives about Meghan and Harry last fall and winter and not the British ones, after several British tabloids were called out for their racially insensitive coverage of Meghan. Like the Daily Mail last November, with their gross headline:

Harry's girl is (almost) straight outta Compton: Gang-scarred home of her mother revealed - so will he be dropping by for tea?

Did you watch Diana, 7 Days last week, the documentary commemorating the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death and chronicling the week that followed? Both William and Harry shared memories from those 7 days and while William was, as usual, more guarded and cautious, speaking rather neutrally so as not to give much away, it was Harry who, perhaps inadvertently, provided through his own words more insight into his life and mind than he intended to – at least that’s how I saw it. Especially when he talked about crying. Did you catch that?

He didn’t just bring it up once – he brought it up three or four times: about how he didn’t cry in public when his mother died, about how he not only didn’t cry, he REFUSED to cry, he was almost obsessive about not crying, about not letting anyone – us, the public – see him get emotional, see him weeping. This is what stood out. He was so specific about the crying thing it made me pay attention to and wonder about the crying thing. It came up even when he was recounting the funeral and Elton John singing Candle In The Wind; Harry starts off remembering how moving it was to hear Elton’s dedication and then the story ends up being about how close he came to crying but was ultimately successful in NOT crying and not allowing anyone to take his tears. That was the sense I got from his insistence – that he felt obliged to mourn his mother in the most public of ways, to share his intimate grief with the world, when it was not ours to share, and so, in the only act of defiance he could manage, he decided that that was the line, that we’d already asked for too much and f-ck you, he wasn’t here for us to have it all. Those tears belonged to him and him only, and we already took too much. It was 20 years ago but the way he talked about it, that resentment feels just as potent today.

Is this the impulse that was behind the Love Shield and the anger with which he chastised the British media for the coverage of his new relationship? If so, it’s also what makes Harry so popular. That he is much less guarded with his emotions than other members of the family. That he has shown that he will act on his feelings – which is what that Love Shield letter was all about. And so, to go back to that “furious backlash” to Meghan’s Vanity Fair interview, and how she might want to consider “zipping her lips”, that’s actually precisely why she and Harry seem to fit together. Kate Middleton matches William’s reserve (and boringness). This is why they work. Meghan, it would seem, matches Harry’s spontaneity and, maybe, that’s why they work too.

Also attached - Prince Harry and Prince William at the Support4Grenfell Community Hub the other day in London.