Terry Prone: Good luck to Harry and Meghan on moving back to Britain. They’re going to need it

The Sussexes are moving to a new chapter, which reportedly has surprised the royal family as much the rest of us

Britain's Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are heading back to the UK. Picture: Aaron Chown/PA Wire

You might not think Britain's Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle would have much in common wth US president Donald Trump, but they have one consistent commonality.

Inconsistency.

Inconsistency on the part of the president is fueled by rage, the urge to self-justify, and an insistence that the world disregard everything he’s said up to this point and concentrate, instead, on what’s currently engaging his attention.

The similarity with the Montecito émigrés is inescapable.

One minute, the Prince is suing newspapers and indicating that he couldn’t safely set foot on British soil without a small army of state security to protect his family, the next he’s coping with his court case failure and planning to relocate almost immediately, with his children going to local schools. 

This despite Meghan announcing a while back that Archie and Lilibet would be unbearably papparazied if they were educated in England.

The two of them will thank you to move on from all that forceful grievance stuff. Never mind “As Ever”. 

Let’s move to the next iteration of this couple’s life. Pausing only to register the inevitability of what is now happening.

The American novelist and essayist Tom Wolfe nailed part of it in the 60s, when he pointed to British celebs who thought they could straddle the Atlantic and make loadsa money in America. 

He mocked them as having become too slick for their home country while not quite grasping the scale and complexity of the States.

The Sussexes are a pretty classic 21st Century rendition of that syndrome, with a few quintessentially individual traits thrown in.

Their arrival in the States was media perfection, sitting, as they did, opposite a booted Oprah, ready to tell all. 

“All” wasn’t that much, if we’re to be honest. “All” more or less consisted of the two of them moaning about their tough lives as part of The Firm. 

“All” was the former actress upset because her rampant hugging wasn’t appreciated. 

“All” was some unnamed Royal asking an unfortunate question about how tanned Archie was going to look when he was born. 

Oprah personified shock/horror: What? Really? Racism right there. Great viewership figures, also.

It looked like they were set. America didn’t seem to be able to get enough of them. 

Netflix fell over them in its eagerness to stuff money into the formerly royal coffers. 

Meghan was going to be the new face of Dior. Or was it L’Oreal? Maybe Charlotte Tilbury? One of them, anyway.

Harry was going to do his book, which was always certain to be a huge bestseller, so more money would be headed for the coffers. 

When the book, Spare, appeared, his older brother reputedly took the dimmest of dim views when it implied conflict between the wonderfully open Meghan and Prince William’s wife while recounting how William dumped Harry into a dog bowl. 

Prince William and Prince Harry. File picture: Toby Melville/PA Wire

Harry’s former band of army brothers were in the dim view department too because of him claiming body counts, which is considered inappropriate, not to say disloyal and possibly likely to endanger them.

But the two golden couple — now parents of a boy and a girl — were still on a roll. They had Netflix programmes lined up and Meghan wrote an achingly cute book about a bench. It may even have been so titled. 

The book stank up the room. You stood in B&N or Walmart and read it in three minutes and came to the conclusion that maybe it wasn’t so much achingly cute as just achingly twee.

That was nothing compared to Meghan’s TV show, which was car crash watching, involving, as it did, two B-list celebrities and a few nameless make-up artists, who came to Meghan’s kitchen to watch her throwing flower petals on her salad. 

Except it wasn’t her kitchen at all, and she told off one of the B-listers for not calling Meghan a Sussex. Which incident gave a glimpse into how much our Meghan is a team player. Cross her, and she’ll hit you with a royal surname. Despite regarding the royals as racists.

Because, in the early days of their sojourn stateside, they had signed contracts as “content creators”, Harry next had to ride into town on his horse, to offer a programme on a sport — polo — that has never attracted Americans for a very good reason: it’s boring to watch. (Live horses is about the only advantage polo has over watching chess.) 

The curated photographs emerging from Montecito portrayed a life of unremitting positivity and happiness. Harry had earlier indicated that without Meghan sending him to eye-movement therapy, he would not be the solid, grounded, equable, balanced lad he is today. 

Not that being solid, grounded, equable and balanced stopped him from going after the Daily Mail, which exemplifies all that he sees as evil in mainstream media, which is a lot. The Daily Mail liquidised him and cost him a fortune. Which he still has.

However, somewhere along the line, the Americans realised there was less to Harry and Meghan than met the eye. 

She got an odd award from a group of feminists including Gloria Steinem, who must have been having a bad day, given that Meghan, who may be an actor of Streep genius, has damn all feminist track record. 

That award led to a car chase. Well, that’s according to the Sussexes. The local cops, in contrast, went “Sorry? What, now?” Then they did a gig in Oz which was shuddering in its commercial ruthlessness.

All of it came together to create a sense that the former royal couple might just have peaked. Or, as one of their American employers put it, be “grifters”. 

Meaning worthless, talentless folk whose initial capacity to get dollars into their coffers was not followed by the money-making solidity guys like George Clooney present. 

Neither of them can pretend to intellectual heft, nor, as it has emerged, to creativity. Their profound belief in their own wounds is not as easy to monetise as it was in the Oprah days. 

Meghan’s brand has tanked and the sound of Netflix washing its hands of them was carried at high volume.

Three months ago, I stood in front of the magazine wall in a branch of Barnes&Noble and was startled by the covers. 

No fewer than 11 carried smiling tiara’d shots of the Princess of Wales. 

Only one carried a shot of Meghan. 

The conclusion was inescapable. If this was a brand competition, Wales had crushed Sussex. 

Prince Harry and his wife had become the latest example of the Tom Wolfe scenario.

Now, Prince Harry has announced that they’re heading for a life in the UK, which irrevocably evokes the comparison with Trump. 

The Sussexes are glossing over all the contradictions, all the insults, all the accusations, all the condemnation and moving to a new chapter, which reportedly has surprised the royal family as much the rest of us.

The decent response is to wish them luck. Because they’re going to need it.