Six years after stepping down as working members of the British royal family and triggering a national media firestorm, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s reported plan to relocate back to the United Kingdom has thrown a new spotlight on the significant challenges waiting for the Duchess of Sussex.
Meghan, a 45-year-old former American actress who captured global attention with her 2018 fairytale wedding to King Charles III’s younger son, has never shied away from detailing the immense struggles she faced during her time as a working royal. Through high-profile explosive interviews and a tell-all Netflix documentary, she and Harry have repeatedly called out the hostile treatment she received from the British tabloid press — treatment Harry told a UK court earlier this year turned her life into “an absolute misery”.
While Harry has maintained strong ties to the UK, driven by his long-standing charitable commitments and his desire for his two young children to build connections with their British royal relatives, Meghan’s path back to British public life is far more complicated. After years based in the sunny, laid-back lifestyle of Montecito, California, where the couple built their post-royal life, experts say Meghan’s readjustment to UK life poses far more open questions than Harry’s.
“There’s more questions sort of over her and how she re-adapts to the life back in the United Kingdom than about Harry,” said royal historian Ed Owens. Owens added that predicting how she will navigate the transition remains unclear, as “she’s tried successively over the last six years to reinvent her public image to relaunch her brand” with mixed results.
Reports of the planned return first emerged from Australian news outlet news.com.au, and a spokesperson for the couple did not issue a denial when contacted by Agence France-Presse. Multiple sources indicate the move is partially tied to an acting role Meghan has been offered for a UK-based production, marking a potential return to her pre-royal career for the former star of hit US legal drama *Suits*. For Meghan, who saw her US-based career prospects stall after her lifestyle and cooking show *With Love, Meghan* was dropped by Netflix following the end of their content deal, the UK role could open a new professional chapter. Talent manager Jonathan Shalit, chairman of the InterTalent Rights Group, told the Press Association that if Meghan was serious about returning to acting full-time, industry leaders would be eager to meet her.
For the couple’s family, the transition appears to already be underway: their two children, seven-year-old Archie and five-year-old Lilibet, have already been enrolled in a British school, and the pair have reportedly selected a new permanent residence in the country. Experts widely expect Meghan will prioritize family life in her return, noting she has previously spoken publicly about finding joy in routine parenting moments like the daily school run.
Despite any personal or professional opportunities the move may bring, Meghan continues to face deep public unpopularity in the UK that complicates her return. A YouGov public opinion poll released in late July found that 65 percent of British adults hold an unfavorable view of the duchess. Her lifestyle and food brand As Ever remains a regular target of mockery in the British tabloid press, which initially framed her 2018 entry into the royal family as a breath of fresh air for the centuries-old institution before quickly turning on her, portraying her as demanding and unwilling to accept the strict constraints of royal life.
In her 2022 Netflix docuseries, Meghan summed up the hostility she said she faced, saying: “Truth be told, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how good I was, no matter what I did, they were still going to find a way to destroy me.”
Since the couple left the UK in 2018, Meghan has made only rare return visits: most notably for Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee in June 2022 and the late monarch’s state funeral later that same year. A short, private holiday last month that saw the couple meet with King Charles and Queen Camilla was widely interpreted as a sign that icy family relations may be starting to thaw. But Nathalie Weidhase, a media studies specialist at the University of Surrey, warned that Meghan’s permanent return risks reigniting long-simmering conflicts that first pushed the couple to leave, including explosive accusations of institutional racism within the royal household.
Tensions remain raw from Harry’s 2023 memoir *Spare*, in which he accused his older brother Prince William and sister-in-law Catherine, Princess of Wales, of being unwelcoming to Meghan and undermining her attempts to integrate into the family. In a 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Meghan also alleged that an unnamed senior royal had raised repeated questions about the skin color of her unborn child before Archie’s birth.
Still, Owens argues that the couple’s return is not motivated by a desire to restart public conflict with the working royal family. “They are not coming back for another fight with the wider royal family, that’s not their purpose here,” he said. “They want stability for their family … stability for their children.”