Omid Scobie: Meghan Markle “Doesn’t Want Anything to Do” with the Royal Family, But for Prince Harry, There’s Still “Unfinished Business”

Approaching four years since Prince Harry and Meghan Markle stepped back as working members of the royal family, royal author Omid Scobie said Meghan “doesn’t want anything to do” with the royals and has “moved on,” while Harry still has “unfinished business,” according to People.

Scobie—whose new book, Endgame: Inside the Royal Family and the Monarchy’s Fight for Survival, is out November 28—told the outlet “Quite early in the [book-writing] process, some of those Meghan sources that I really leant on in the earlier years this time were like, ‘You know what? She doesn’t want anything to do with it,’” he said. “For Harry, it’s different. He still has unfinished business when it comes to his battles with the press. His challenge will be to find something that balances that out so we can see him working in a space that isn’t connected to the ties that bind from the past.” 

Despite reports to the contrary, there is apparently an open line of communication with Harry’s father King Charles, and they reached out to wish him a happy 75th birthday this past Tuesday. “With Harry, there’s a reluctant acceptance that this is just who his father is,” Scobie said. “He would rather have that in his life than to cut it off completely. Hence, when they talk, it is often [Harry] reaching out. And I was surprised to learn that even Meghan has some sort of correspondence with Charles, sending over photos of the children, although they’re not directly to him. So there is a willingness there.”

Endgame chronicles what Scobie calls the breakdown of the royal family and the weakening of the modern monarchy. As far as relations between Harry and his older brother (and future king) Prince William, Scobie said Harry “is in the rearview mirror” for William. 

“William’s so far forward in his journey that what is important today is very different to what was important 10 years ago,” Scobie said. “You really feel this when you talk to people working at the Palace, that they really consider what Harry and Meghan, but mostly Harry, say as just irritating noise. The feelings of this man are not worth anything anymore. That’s sort of typical for any big corporation. I know it’s different because they’re family. But as we’ve known for a long time, the meaning of family is very different to them.”

Royal author Clive Irving told The Daily Express that Harry and Meghan’s future will be totally separate from the royal family: “Harry and Meghan’s celebrity used to rest on the former’s connection to the royal family, but they’ve now been celebrities in their own right for so long that they don’t need to trade on that anymore,” he said. “That’s no longer part of their lives. Harry and Meghan’s future will be seen as completely independent of the monarchy. They are no longer attached to it in any meaningful way, and I don’t think they can get back into it in any meaningful way, either.”