Meghan used HRH privately but not for commercial purposes, sources insist
In 2020, Buckingham Palace announced the Sussexes ‘will not use their HRH titles as they are no longer working members of the royal family’.
The Duchess of Sussex used her HRH style privately but not for commercial purposes, sources close to Meghan have said.
The revelation flouts the agreement made with Buckingham Palace when the Sussexes stepped down as senior working royals five years ago.
Controversy has grown over Meghan’s use of HRH after it emerged she sent a gift basket to make-up entrepreneur Jamie Kern Lima last year, with a monogrammed card reading: “With Compliments of HRH The Duchess of Sussex”.
Kern Lima showed an image of the present in footage of her podcast interview with Meghan which she released on Monday.
A source described the basket as a “personal gift”.
It contained a jar of Meghan’s jam which she has started selling as part of her As Ever lifestyle business brand.
As part of their Megxit negotiations with the Palace, Meghan and the Duke of Sussex agreed to stop using “Her Royal Highness” and “His Royal Highness” at the end of March 2020.
They still retain the styles, with Harry having had his since birth, but they are essentially held in abeyance, as is the case for the Duke of York, who also no longer uses his HRH style.
The duchess’s representative denied on Monday that the couple used them, but a source said on Tuesday that the Sussexes did not use HRH publicly but retained the style, and did not use it for commercial purposes.
In January 2020, the late Queen issued a statement after Harry and Meghan announced they wanted to step down as senior royals, saying that “together we have found a constructive and supportive way forward for my grandson and his family”.
Buckingham Palace outlined “the new arrangement” for the “next chapter” in Harry and Meghan’s lives.
It included the statement: “The Sussexes will not use their HRH titles as they are no longer working members of the royal family.”
No documents were signed or laws passed, but the decision was seen as a blanket ban, with no suggestion that Harry and Meghan were permitted to use the style privately.
Amid the growing controversy, Meghan spoke of her “fear of failure” and revealed she was given business advice by US media figure Oprah Winfrey.
In her latest Confessions of a Female Founder podcast, the duchess claimed she was an over-achiever because her blood type is A positive, and admitted ignoring her own advisers to follow her gut feelings.
Meghan told her friend Kern Lima, who she interviewed in return: “I feel like we haven’t talked about our blood type, but yours is probably an A positive like mine, because I was like ‘Even my blood is over-achieving’.”
She added of her jam-making: “At the beginning, I just liked making jam. All I liked to do was just make jam and preserves.
“And it went from ‘OK, I’m going to share this jam with lots of friends and family’ to ‘People really like it and it brings me joy, so maybe I can share it more broadly’.
“But even then I was in so much fear of failure or opinion that I wasn’t thinking big enough at first.”
