It was by all accounts a picture perfect royal tour when Prince Harry and Meghan Markle wowed the world during their visit to Australia in 2018.
Two years before ‘Megxit’, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were the new, youthful face of the Royal Family.
And that excitement and buzz around the couple helped make their trip to Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific a resounding success.
Meghan had just revealed her pregnancy with her and Harry’s first child, sparking widespread fascination that became known as ‘Meghan-mania’.
The Press were equally positive in their coverage of the trip as they fawned over the newly minted royals on their first major royal tour.
According to the Daily Mail, Harry and Meghan were portrayed as a ‘beaming couple’, representing the ‘epitome of cool’ as they boarded the boat, with Prince Harry tenderly holding his pregnant wife’s hand.
Despite the dazzling success of the tour, a royal insider has disclosed that tensions were already beginning to surface between the couple and their royal aides, eventually leading to Harry and Meghan’s dramatic departure from the royal family in 2020.
Writing in his bestselling book Brothers And Wives – which peaks under the curtain at the private lives of the Prince and Princess of Wales and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex – Christopher Andersen claims the couple garnered a reputation for being ‘high maintenance’.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex at the Sydney Opera House during their royal tour of Australia in 2018
Prince Harry and Meghan with her assistant Amy Pickerill in Sydney. A royal insider has revealed that behind the glittering success of the tour tensions were already starting to rise between the couple and their royal aides
The press were equally positive in their coverage of the trip as they fawned over the newly minted royals on their first major royal tour
‘Several aides complained that the duchess occasionally snapped at them, and that the once-easygoing Harry was scrambling to make her happy. Just before delivering her Invictus speech, Meghan was reportedly giving orders to her hairdressers while at the same time someone was ironing the bottom of her dress,’ Andersen wrote.
Royal correspondent Duncan Larcombe told Andersen: ‘All of Harry’s staff have always thought he was fantastic. But the two of them together are high maintenance.’
Throughout the tour, the quarrels with members of the royal staff were not made public knowledge and instead it was hailed a resounding success by the family with Harry declaring that Meghan is ‘one of the greatest assets to the Commonwealth that the family could ever wish for’.
But with rumours growing about Harry and Meghan’s treatment of royal staff, the tour would become the high point in the public’s perception of the couple as they faced an ‘avalanche of stories leaked to the press for the sole purpose of discrediting Meghan’, Andersen claims.
This included allegations that Meghan rang staff at 5am and that her assistant Melissa Toubati quit after she was driven to tears by the duchess.
Andersen added that the source of the leaks likely came from Kensington Palace and by 2019 rumours of a falling out between Harry and William started circulating.
According to Robert Lacey’s bestselling biography Battle Of Brothers, William went ‘ballistic’ when he heard claims that Meghan was being rude to staff in Kensington Palace.
Meghan was reportedly giving orders to her hairdressers while at the same time someone was ironing the bottom of her dress during the tour
Prince Harry and Meghan faced accusations that they were ‘high maintenance’ during the tour
While Meghan brushed off a complaint about her conduct from a senior aide, claiming ‘it’s not my job to coddle people’, Prince William did not respond so flippantly to the issue.
According to Lacey, when Jason Knauf – a royal aide who worked with the Sussexes – presented William with a ‘dossier of distress’ about their behaviour he ‘went ballistic’ and was left ‘astonished’ and ‘horrified’ by what he heard.
William’s anger stemmed from the fact that a tradition of treating the staff ‘like family’ had been broken and that he personally knew many of those named, Lacey wrote.
Following the dossier, William and Harry allegedly had a testy phone call.
Roberts wrote: ‘The moment the Prince heard the bullying allegations he got straight on the phone to talk to Harry – and when Harry flared up in furious defence of his wife, the elder brother persisted.
‘Harry shut off his phone angrily, so William went straight round to find his brother on the Kensington campus.’
By 2020, tensions appeared to have deepened when Harry and Meghan announced their plans to step back as senior royals.
Harry later claimed in his Netflix series with Meghan that William screamed and shouted at him during the Sandringham summit.
Harry and Meghan with their royal aides close by. With rumours growing about Harry and Meghan’s treatment of royal staff, the tour would become the high point in the public’s perception of the couple as they faced an ‘avalanche of stories leaked to the press’
At the time the tour was hailed a resounding success by the family with Harry declaring that Meghan is ‘one of the greatest assets to the Commonwealth that the family could ever wish for’
The brothers were last together publicly at their grandmother Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral in September 2022, though they both attended the private funeral for their uncle Robert Fellowes last summer.
Since Harry and Meghan moved to Montecito more stories from their royal tour in 2018 have surfaced, including a claim that Meghan ‘hated every second’ of it.
Tina Brown in her royal biography ‘The Palace Papers’, claims to have discovered Meghan’s seemingly unimpressed opinion of Australia through a former Palace staffer.
‘So, Meghan must have been thrilled with it all… right? No. She apparently hated every second of it,’ she wrote.
‘She didn’t understand why things were set up in that way. Instead of being excited when thousands of people showed up at the Opera House, it was very much like, ‘What’s the purpose? I don’t understand this’,’ a Palace employee told Brown.
The staffer said Meghan didn’t appear to grasp the ‘representational role’ of the British monarchy when they toured, adding she was more interested in ’causes she wanted to spotlight’.
Brown’s claims are supported in an article from The Times in 2021, which asserts that Meghan found it ‘silly’ when people crowded to see the Sussexes when they arrived in Sydney.
‘What are they all doing here? It’s silly,’ she reportedly said to her team.
The Prince of Princess of Wales with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex following the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022. This was the last time the brothers have been together publicly
A source said that she simply ‘didn’t get it’.
The Sussexes completed 75 engagements in 16 days across Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Tonga during the whirlwind tour – all while Meghan was in the early stages of her first pregnancy.
They were often pictured having intimate conversations, embracing fans or receiving numerous gifts from admirers during their time Down Under.
Brown claims in her book that one of the main things Meghan took away from the tour was her and Harry’s unrecognised importance in the royal hierarchy.
‘It was head-turning for Meghan to experience the full-throttle motorcade-purring, outrider-vrooming, crowd-roaring adulation of a popular young royal on a tour planned to the last teacup by the Palace machine.
‘Meghan seemed to interpret the success as a call for Brand Sussex to be elevated in the Palace hierarchy.’
However, Meghan reportedly felt ‘snubbed’ by the Royal Family after the couple returned to the UK.
When they did arrive home, word soon spread that all was not well within the palace, including rumours of a rift between brothers and a falling out between Meghan and Kate Middleton.
Then in 2020, Meghan and Harry announced they were stepping down as senior working members of the royal family, and were later stripped of any remaining titles and patronages they had.
