How Harry and Meghan made Archie and Lilibet grow up in total confidentiality

One of the reasons the Sussexes gave when they left official royal life was that they wanted more privacy. They have since been ridiculed as hypocrites in some quarters by critics who say they continue to gain the world’s attention.

But such sniping, perhaps deliberately, misses an important point: that the couple managed to provide a level of privacy for their children that far exceeds what they were able to offer Archie in the traumatic first months afterwards. her birth, or, indeed, what Kate and William were able to offer their children.

Full-face photographs of William and Kate’s children (often taken by Kate) are regularly distributed on their birthdays and the children also make several carefully staged public appearances each year where the press has the opportunity to photograph them.

They’re also co-opted into other digital marketing stunts by their parents: think Instagram clips thanking the NHS for their work or wedding anniversary videos roasting marshmallows, for example.

These documents represent a long-standing palace peace deal with the media. The media get pictures of the children and the press is not supposed to publish any unauthorized images of the children in return.

Although the deal is difficult and sometimes broken, last week the Daily Beast revealed that the palace blew up after unauthorized photos of the Cambridges having lunch in a pub garden were published by the Sun– the architecture of the arrangement generally holds up.

Despite the arrangement giving the palace a level of narrative control that other celebrities would give teeth to, William still hates the principle of having to hand over pictures of his children for public consumption. He reluctantly nods.

Harry hated him too and now, freed from this collectively negotiated media compromise, he and Meghan are pursuing a much more radical policy. They appear to seek nothing less than complete anonymity for their children by aggressively pursuing photographers and, in an extraordinary case, bankrupting an agency that distributed photos of Archie.

As a result, four months after his birth, the public still has no idea what baby Lilibet looks like.

No photographs of their daughter, authorized or not, have yet been published. The couple even refused to announce a christening date for her.

Archie has a slightly higher profile on Google Images, though the fact that the latest photo of Archie to post shows his back, which the couple shared on their second birthday in May, gives a clue to how the Sussexes intend to manage access to their children’s images in the future. The black and white photo showed a rear view of Archie holding a bunch of balloons.

The last time the world saw her face was in a screened video of the couple playing with Archie on the beach in their interview with Oprah Winfrey.

Prior to that, the couple posted an image of him being held by his father on the shores of a Canadian lake to mark New Years Eve 2019.

There have only been a handful of notable unauthorized images of Archie that have fallen into the public domain. Sussex’s fierce response to such intrusions has been remarkable and a salutary reminder to the press that Harry and Meghan will take extreme measures to protect the privacy of their children.

They sued Hollywood agency X17 for drone footage that was taken of Archie and Meghan’s mother Doria in the luxury home they occupied in Canada at Christmas 2019. Bunte, a tabloid from German supermarket, posted a photo of Doria pushing the then 14-year-old Archie. months, in a small car.

As part of the settlement, X17 has committed to never again process photos of the couple or their son taken by drone, zoom or telephoto “in a private residence or the surrounding private land”.

X17 declined to comment on the Daily Beast on the matter.

Another agency, Splash, has publicly blamed its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing at the cost of legal action brought against her by Harry and Meghan after distributing photos taken of Meghan walking in a public park with Archie in a papoose. Splash may have been reckless to shake the Sussexes’ cage, having previously been forced to apologize to the couple when they lived in England for charting a helicopter to fly low over the couple’s private home in the Cotswold village of Great Tew.

The second time around, although Meghan was in a public place when the photo was taken and the case against the agency arguably less clear-cut, the Sussexes went to war with Splash. In March, he filed for bankruptcy, citing the “unbearably expensive” lawsuit.

Giles Harrison, a veteran paparazzi and CEO of London Entertainment Agency, told The Daily Beast that the Sussexes’ propensity to sue has had a chilling effect on his industry’s inclination to cover up and photograph family.

“A lot of people decided it wasn’t worth bothering. It is not worth the fallout from it. If you get the photos of them, they will try to pursue you no matter what, no matter where you were, no matter if you were in the most legal public place on the planet. And they can afford to sue you far more than you can afford to defend yourself. “

Some photographers, of course, are still working to the beat, precisely because the scarcity of family photos in Sussex has increased their value. Harrison is reluctant to put an exact number on such images but says, “They are worth a lot. If you’re lucky and have a family photo of them all together at Disneyland, you might never need to work again.

Harrison says that while protecting the privacy of your children is a difficult task in Los Angeles, doing so effectively is a powerful expression of power, wealth and status: “There is a level of fame that if they don’t want to. not that children are photographed, they will not. Think Beyoncé and Jay-Z or Brad and Angelina in their children’s early years.

The upshot of all of this is that we don’t know much about exactly how children are raised, other than what the Sussexes have allowed, or at least not blocked, into the public domain.

It’s hard to imagine Meghan and Harry wouldn’t move heaven and earth to allow their children to meet other people their age, but Archie has never been pictured with friends or playmates. The ultra-secure, ultra-private, seven-acre Montecito comes in handy like that.

Internet detectives, however, concluded that Archie had attended kindergarten after Page Six posted photos in April this year of him being carried along an LA street by his mother while sporting ” a green backpack and a space-themed lunch box. The photos were taken by an anonymous photographer and credited to the Backgrid agency.

What is clear is that a large part of both parents’ time is spent with their children: Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand wrote in their biography Finding Freedom that Archie was taken on “daily walks” by his parents, and they also described how a “practical” Harry was assigned to change Archie’s diapers.

We also know that after a mysterious incident with an “unprofessional and irresponsible” night nurse, the new parents decided to do without night help (despite having a nanny).

Meghan has always presented herself as an active mother. In his moving article for The New York Times in which she described having had a miscarriage, she painstakingly portrayed her home as a scene of domestic normality, describing her morning routine in a series of jerky sentences: “Make breakfast. Feed the dogs. Take vitamins. Find that missing sock. Pick up the rogue pencil that rolled under the table. Throw my hair in a ponytail before pulling my son out of his crib.

She also spoke in this track of being “exhausted” in Archie’s first months of life, an admission of vulnerability that made her dear to many parents.

We also saw a few other glimpses of their domestic lives in Oprah’s interview: the famous rescue chickens in the backyard and, of course, Archie contentedly playing on the beach with his parents, happily trotting from there. ‘to one another.

There is no reason to believe that baby Lilibet will receive a parentage noticeably different from that of his brother.

The most visible outward expression of Harry and Meghan’s love and concern for their children, however, ironically enough, will continue to shield them from the prying eyes of the world.

It will of course become increasingly difficult for Harry and Meghan to protect children as they grow older and have to leave home daily to school or playgroups.

As royal commentator and writer Christopher Andersen, author of the bestselling Harry and William biography Diane’s boys, Told the Daily Beast: “As the smaller Sussexes get older, they face the inevitable stalking of an intrusive paparazzi – photographers leaping from behind bushes and parked cars and all that. I’m sure Harry mostly wants to protect them from this trauma for as long as humanly possible, so that his children can have something akin to the proverbial “normal” childhood.

A spokesperson for the Sussexes declined to answer questions about this report.