Staff at their London home are being shifted to other jobs , looks like they are not going to live there much in the future
I’m planning a trip to London in the next year. Now I know where I can stay. And I won’t have to bring a hostess gift.
And you’re an authority on her past because…?
Do you know her? Are you qualified to thoroughly investigate her background and/or hired a professional to do so?
Frankly, I think avoiding her half-siblings is a GOOD sign.
And, by your standards, I myself am a horrible person incapable of long-term relationships… nevermind most of my people from my family, school years, and so forth are dead which makes producing at your command just a bit difficult. I’ve gone for quality of relationships over quantity, maybe Meghan is the same.
Not to mention she’s moved around a lot in her life, which makes maintaining long-term relationships outside of family a bit difficult at times.
How about “they live on two different continents” for starters.
Meghan’s father has little money (he’s been bankrupt) and may not be able to afford to visit the UK, and that’s aside from his health problems which also legitimately limit his travel.
So no, not that mysterious to me.
So… a decade-long friendship. How is that not long-term?
You are just determined to find something horribly wrong, aren’t you?
No, I’m not an authority on her past, and I really have a lot of sympathy for her and the position she finds herself in.
However, one of the reasons (not the only reason, but one of the reasons) she gets such terrible press is because she (and she and Harry together) make a lot of unforced errors. If there is a way to present herself that makes her look good and one that makes her look bad, she almost invariably goes for the latter. The optics of the situation are working against her/them, and the optics are something they have a great deal of control over. The timing of their media announcements I’ve already mentioned as examples of bad optics.
Another is the case of her father. Yes, he may very well not have been able to travel to the UK. She and Harry, however, were under no such constraints. They spent a chunk of their engagement jetting around the world, just not to the part of the world he lived in. She made a big deal of wanting him to walk her down the aisle, but couldn’t make time to go see him. That’s bad optics. If their relationship is tense enough to want to keep him in the background, then keep him in the background, rather than talking it up and then dropping him.
Similarly, her friends and acquaintances from her earlier life are not dead; they’re just mostly not in her circle anymore. Some of them have spoken publicly about feeling like they were discarded when she met more prominent and important people, while others have not said anything publicly but are known to have expressed disappointment. When one of the criticisms against you is that you ghost old friends to court celebrities, it’s bad optics to be seen almost exclusively with new celebrity acquaintances. That’s playing into the story.
Jessica Mulroney is a good example here. She and Meghan do seem to have established a genuine and close friendship since meeting (I don’t know when they met, but it was after 2011). However, a socialite Canadian, the daughter-in-law of one prime minister and the close friend of another PM’s wife, is easy for the gutter press to portray as somebody she courted assiduously in her quest for "important’ friends. Even if that’s not the reality, the optics of the friendship are more important to the tabloids than the reality, and the optics don’t work in favor of highlighting Jessica Mulroney as a friend. The Sussexes, however, have done precisely that, by setting up situations where the socialite became part of the story.
The Sussexes employ a full team of media specialists who are by repute quite good. However, either they’re not as good as their reputation or the Sussexes are ignoring their advice.
You might ask why Harry and Meghan should care about “optics” or what the press thinks. For better or for worse, that’s what they signed up for. The modern royal family depends on the press, on the attention and publicity that comes with being in the press, to draw attention to their causes and justify their continued status. They could lead a far more sheltered life; some movie stars or other public figures manage to do so. However, that works only if you are willing to walk away from public attention.
Some members of the family are better than others at playing the media game. Camilla, for example, used to get terrible press; she was after all the Rottweiler who broke up Saint Diana’s marriage. These days, you don’t see those kinds of stories much, because she has a great PR team and she has worked diligently to befriend the press, including the gutter press. She is always on message and handles the optics quite well, and the tabloids are reported to adore her.
Harry and Meghan, however, seem to want to control the press. Their “new media policy” is hopelessly naive. The press cannot be treated like the enemy (even when they are the enemy) if the Sussexes hope to get the kind of publicity they want and need for their “progressive role.” Excluding all of the press they do not like simply gives the excluded reporters more time to come up with bad press, and I suspect they’re going to get a lot more bad press in the days and months ahead. .
Toronto Globe and Mail says H/M should not live in Canada, same is true for any member of the royal family. They explain the reasons here:
seems they quit for good:
Harry and Meghan will no longer use 'His and Her Royal Highness,' Buckingham Palace says | CNN
No longer working members of royal family , no longer his/her royal highness
Last night Bill Maher said they should quit and that nobody should be a royal highness. Guess they listened to Bill. 
No longer using HRH, they’ve not been stripped of the style.
also they are paying back the costs for the recent renovation of the cottage they were living in. I think around $3 mil was spent .
A distinction without a difference? I haven’t been following it obsessively, but some reports are saying they have been told to not use it, which is close enough to having them stripped.
I’m not sure any of us really understand the nuance. I certainly haven’t heard any journalists or historians come up with a clear explanation. Unchartered territory I suppose.
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SanVito has the right of it, I think. It’s all a bit unprecedented.
Harry’s former job is listed on Indeed. I applied , hopefully Liz likes me. I will marry anyone if that is required. 
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That’s the basic question I have, wrt the original ‘step back’ announcement and whether the Queen’s later statement makes any difference to that. Do they want to be celebrities, ‘making a difference’ as many celebrities intend or pretend to do (or achieve depending your POV, but I’m relatively skeptical of the need for celebrities in solving the world’s problems) just not ‘full time’ royals? Or is the goal being ‘ordinary people leading quiet lives’ at least in some relative sense? I guess time will answer, actions will speak louder than today’s confusing words as to what they are really trying to do.
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I agree with your point, they travel a lot. So the simple conclusion is that Meghan isn’t close to her father. But plenty of adults aren’t close to their parents. That doesn’t conclusively demonstrate fault on the part of the adult child necessarily. Although one of our kids in similar age range had a failed (we hope, that it doesn’t start up again) relationship with somebody estranged from their family. On the internet we tend to present ourselves sometimes as great people who don’t prejudge anyone for anything, at all…but that’s not real life IME. A person seeking to join your family who’s estranged from their own, yellow flag at least. Something which you might come to realize doesn’t signify any problem with that person as you come to know them better. But as least as likely it is indicative of a problem, whether it’s the number a dysfunctional family did on this person’s head growing up, or whether it’s just an ungrateful person. The person I’m thinking of had problems that were fairly apparently related to their family situation and being unsupported emotionally, or any other way for too long going back to pre adulthood, flip side of ‘strong and independent’ sometimes. Of course I don’t know Meghan Markle, I must remind myself sometimes I don’t actually know any celebrities I read about.
What crap. Meghan was treated like shit by the press, and the Palace let them twist in the wind while defending sweaty pedo-adjacent Andrew.
My favorite was how the same paper that gushed over Kate’s choice of lilac and lily-of-the-valley at her wedding damned near accused Meghan of poisoning Charlotte at hers. In every example, it’s the same paper and the exact same thing that Katie Keen gets praised for.
I know people think it’s a racial issue with Meghan but I think the fact that she’s American is probably a big issue too.
Interesting trivia most Americans don’t know: Winston Churchill’s mother was American.
…and a bit of a wild child too, if you read her wiki page
Does Harry and Meg really think this changes very much? They will use their notoriety to attract press attention and $$$ just like the Kardashians. But that comes with intense pressure, rumors, and even lies written about them. They’ll have photographers stalking them all over Canada. Photographers are worse than blow flies swarming a turd. Candid photos of celebrities are very valuable and easily sold to publications.
They aren’t really going into private life like Prince Edward. He gets nearly zero press attention. I assume that’s by design. He wants a private life and that’s what he’s achieved. He apparently avoids the lifestyle that attracts the paparazzi.
No. He understood the lot of younger sons and minor royals. That is that they are replaced in the public consciences as the kids of senior royals grow up. Prince Andrew did not. That affected his public position even before the whole Epstein saga.
The Queen’s cousins and their spouses used to be big in the media. Princess Alexandra and the Duke of Kent’s weddings (not to each other) were big TV events. These days they live quiet lives.
I suspect it’s a combination of the above (with particular reference to earning potential) plus the media attention. Up until now, they’ve gotten a lot of media attention, for good or bad, but been restricted in how they can wield their influence and make the media work for them. Now, they can take the attention while they have it, while they can still pass for “young and attractive” (highly subjective, and dependent on class, I know), and actually make some money off it, perhaps even build a brand that will persist beyond their “young and attractive” years. Because if they wait until they’re Prince Andrew’s age to be cast adrift, then no one is going to give a damn, even if they don’t get involved in sex trafficking and exploitation of minors.
With respect to earning potential specifically, some take a similar position when deciding whether or not to stay in the (US) military until retirement eligibility (typically requires twenty years), or punch out while they still have time to enter a new (civilian) profession, starting once more at the bottom and working to the top before they for real have to or want to retire. Not a whole lot of companies want to hire someone in their mid-40s with zero experience in that specific field, which can limit earning potential significantly, even for mediocre performers. Plus military promotions, for officers anyway, are based heavily on seniority with no small amount of luck going into the process.
What exactly was the palace supposed to say? Andrew denied specific factual allegations (yeah, he’s probably lying, but they were still specifics); the palace couldn’t very well deny that Meghan chose lily-of-the-valley, and they can’t deny that flower can be poisonous. Yes, it was a stupid article, a stupid insinuation, we agree on that. What could the palace say that would not be perceived as either heavy-handed or drawing more attention to a stupid rumor?
Back in the day, Kate was very harshly criticized by those same newspapers: she was common, she was a social climber, she was “Waity Katie,” she was lazy, she was faking her pregnancy, she couldn’t even figure out how to stop flashing the press when her skirts blew up, and her family was even worse, cashing into on their royal connections. (Sample article about her mother, including quoting alleged unnamed palace sources that Carole Middleton “is pushy, rather twee and incredibly middle-class … The irony is that Carole has been so busy pushing her daughter forward and doing her best to groom her for Royalty that she’s rather missed the point that she might not fit in herself.”) Now the gutter press has a new target, so of course Kate can’t possibly do anything wrong.
Meghan has the additional disadvantage of being both American and bi-racial, giving added ammunition to an already chauvinistic press, but the British tabloids going to mock and criticize her because that is what they do, until they get bored and move onto somebody else, and they are rewarded handsomely by their readers for doing so.