Harry and Meghan’s new charity won’t fight inequality – it will perpetuate it

The couple’s new charity Archewell is a prime example of ‘philanthrocapitalism’: a means of legitimising social injustice through good works

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have traded the contradictions of royalty for the contradictions of capitalism. Before they couldn’t fail – now they can.

Last week, Harry and Meghan renamed their charity, Archewell. It replaces Sussex Royal, the name the couple devised for themselves in January when they announced their intention to leave the royal family, and which the Queen demanded they stop using less than three months later. Indeed, a short history of the Sussexes’ self-branding reveals much about the contradictions of royal celebrity.

Harry and Meghan announced their departure in January with the launch of a heavily branded website. But the Sussex Royal brand represented an impossible attempt to have both freedom and royal status. The royal brand is enabling (hence Harry and Meghan’s desire to maintain association with it), while also being disabling (as shown by their need to exit); enabling as it catapulted Meghan to a new level of stardom, disabling as it created a public interest justification for scrutinising her every move, and prevented her from engaging in politics.

There are parallel tensions in royal do-goodery: a huge proportion of royal “duties” are photo opportunities with charities, when in fact royalty depends upon the maintenance of an unequal status quo. Harry and Meghan will need to make huge sums of money if they are to cover their own security costs. This puts Archewell squarely in the conflicted space of “philanthrocapitalism”: a means of legitimising social inequality through “good works”.

Take Travalyst, Harry’s eco-tourism venture with Skyscanner, TripAdvisor and Booking.com. Its environmentalist tactics include carbon offsetting, one on which Harry and Meghan have themselves relied in order to justify their use of private jets. Harry’s attempt to make air travel guilt-free is at odds with the environmentalist movement they seek to support. But then, calling for the collapse of global air travel would hardly garner the support of the companies with social-responsibility budgets to spend.

In Archewell, Markle will be able to parlay her celebrity status. But at the same time, class politics will proscribe what kinds of work are acceptable for a royal-adjacent celebrity charitable enterprise.

While rags-to-riches stories have always been spun for royal brides, there is a public record of Markle’s past work, from Deal or No Deal and Suits to her lifestyle blog The Tig. The continued visibility of her historic hustle is anathema to a repressive class system in which those at the top are supposed to pretend it was always thus.

This is why the Sussex Royal brand has been a site of such a power struggle. When the Queen barred Harry and Meghan from using the word “royal” in their branding after their departure, Meghan’s American PR team responded by leaking to the Daily Mail that there was nothing “legally stopping” them from using the name, since “Harry and Archie have royal blood and no one can take that away”. In this rebrand to Archewell, apparently derived from Greek word for ”source of action”, Harry and Meghan centre their privilege. At the very moment of claiming financial independence, the Sussexes are taking pains to distance themselves from the unroyal grubbiness of having to work for a living.

Hannah Yelin is a senior lecturer in Media and Culture at Oxford Brookes University