The dismal timing of Harry and Meghan’s Colombia tour

As Harry and Meghan prepare to head off on yet another quasi-regal tour, this time to Colombia, it is surely nothing more than a coincidence that their experienced chief of staff Josh Kettler — a so-called “executive accelerator and strategist” — has left “by mutual agreement” after a three-month trial period in the job. The only detail released was that he was not felt to be the right fit.

The timing would be dismal by any standards, given that he was responsible for organizing and executing the couple’s trip; the Duke and Duchess of Sussex will now be traveling without Kettler. However, his departure now means that he is the eighteenth member of the Sussexes’ staff to have quit, or been fired, since they moved to Montecito a few years ago. It has been suggested that there is an informal group, “the Sussex survivors’ club,” that those who have been through the traumatic and dispiriting experience of working for Harry and Meghan have formed. To lose one key member of staff is understandable, to lose two or three a pity, but to lose eighteen surely suggests that to enter Casa Sussex is to step foot into the least hospitable working environment imaginable. 

Still, onwards and upwards. Perhaps one of Kettler’s tasks while planning the Colombia jaunt for the pair may have been to gently suggest to the Duke of Sussex that he should make some sort of public statement about his use of the country’s most famous export that he admitted to in his memoir Spare. Ideally, this would be contrite and heartfelt, rather than defiant, but who knows with an untethered Harry. One item on the itinerary that has been planned for the pair is a meeting with Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro, who has been vocal about his country’s war on drugs. It is therefore unfortunate that he will be photographed meeting someone whose high-profile use of cocaine as a younger man has rendered him notorious in many people’s eyes, especially at a time when the president’s administration is said to be “drowning in scandal.”

In any case, the purpose of the tour is obscure. After a pointless and self-aggrandizing but strangely well-received trip to Nigeria earlier this year — in which, you’ll no doubt remember, Meghan announced that she was “43 percent Nigerian” — the stated object is for the couple to address Colombia’s issues of child poverty and social discrimination through their star power and influence. No doubt Harry will get in a plug or two for the Invictus Games. There will be photo opportunities of the pair with children, smiling. But given that the impromptu visit is fraught with security and safety issues, the risks of something happening to either of them (heaven forbid) are likely to outweigh the limited PR opportunities that Brand Sussex will receive from the visit. 

Kettler’s departure may have reminded many of that old saying about rats and sinking ships. This latest piece of hubris may or may not be a success on its own, limited terms, but it is difficult to fathom why the Sussexes are still bothering to inflict their faux-messiah complexes on the world when few seem to welcome their presence in foreign climes any longer. Obscurity is a hard fate to contemplate, but sometimes it is better than the ritual humiliation that both seem masochistically intent on putting themselves through, apparently forever.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.