Getty/Instagram
It was a weekend of two distinct halves. Over in London, Prince William and his wife Kate dressed to the nines as they stepped out for the royals’ traditional Easter Sunday church service, with their smartly attired children Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis in tow.
It was a “show of strength” one royal expert claimed – a move to project senior royals putting on a united front in spite of recent turmoil linked to the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
Over in California, however, a very different scene unfolded. There were no formal photo opps, no stiffly buttoned shirts and forced smiles. Instead, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, took it upon herself to post footage of her and Prince Harry’s children running barefoot in the garden, ostensibly in the search for Easter eggs.
Lillibet, dressed in a pink sundress, clutched an oversized plush rabbit in one shot – bunny ears perched atop her head. In another video, Prince Archie – his face largely visible to the camera – carefully decorated a chicken egg, likely plucked from the family’s own brood.
But the new images of Archie and Lillibet – which come a mere two months after Meghan shared a photo of Lillibet’s face in profile for the first time – have raised eyebrows.
Tom Sykes, royal expert and author of The Royalist substack, said the depiction of the Sussex children in contrast to their London-based cousins was sending a message, “because they are being held up as examples of what great parents Meghan and Harry are, how relaxed they are, how chilled they are…”
Indeed, while Sykes suggested that the Sussexes’ decision to share the new pics were to show the world ‘we are not the stuffy, old Windsors’, he claimed there was another, more financially motivated, move at play – that “clearly” Meghan was moving into the mummy influencer sphere.
“Let’s face it, the lifestyle influencer space hasn’t really worked but the mummy influencer space seems to be really opening up for her now and what she is leaning into,” Sykes claimed, adding that he had “two problems” with the turn of events.
First, he claimed, was the “hypocrisy” of Meghan and Harry campaigning for stricter regulation of social media platforms while “actively using their children on social media”.
“The next thing that I find really troubling about it is more specifically Harry’s… hypocrisy in allowing this to happen,” Sykes said. “Because Harry has never ceased in telling us how damaged he felt by being co-opted into… having to sell the Royal Family without any agency or any input himself.”
The royal expert went as far as to claim he thought the posting of footage of the couple’s children on social media was symbolic of a shift within the family unit.
It should be noted that Harry and Meghan have always “anonymised” their children on social media – so that the entirety of their faces have never been shown.
However, Sykes – a journalist by trade – sees another side to it.
“The argument that this is about anonymising the children is so misleading and deceptive,” he claimed. He went on to liken it to the creation of a headline on an article – where there is enough of a “tease” to create a “curiosity gap” that makes the reader want to know more.
He claimed Meghan had created a “curiosity gap” by putting anonymised photos of the children online.
“It creates curiosity about what they look like. It’s creating excitement for the days when more of their faces are revealed rather than less of their faces are revealed,” he said.
Sykes isn’t the only Royal expert having a say over the latest moves from Montecito. In an opinion piece in the Daily Mail Editor-at-Large Alison Boshoff said a source in California had told her three weeks ago that Meghan was “settling on her next direction”.
“She has been talking for years about how meaningful she finds being a mother, and now this is going to be her focus,” the expert wrote.
“Naturally, she will have to build her ‘mom’ identity on Instagram, since you cannot have a lifestyle brand without using social media.”
