Meghan Markle is already on the long road to recovery, but will have to wait years before she gets her reputation back, a PR expert told Newsweek.
The Duchess of Sussex released her new cooking show, With Love, Meghan, on Tuesday and reviews have made for painful reading.
Despite some scathing put-downs from TV critics, there are some positive signs for the royal, including that she made the Netflix daily top 10 in Britain, coming in at six.
Jake Rosenberg/Netflix
Edward Coram James, a PR expert and chief executive of Go Up, told Newsweek Meghan should have stayed out of the limelight for another year, but the project is still a move in the right direction.
“I think it is the first step on the road to reputational recovery,” he said. “There’s a certain contingent of people who will never give her the chance to recover reputationally.
“Maybe she’s permanently lost 25 to 30 percent of the population, but people do like to see reputational recovery.
“If she stays on track and doesn’t get into anymore slogging matches, then in maybe four years could have recovered her reputation to almost where it was pre-her leaving the U.K.”
Coram James said the show would have landed better when Prince Harry and Meghan first moved to America in 2020 after a messy exit from the palace.
However, after several broadsides at the royals, including via their Oprah Winfrey interview, their first Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan and the prince’s book Spare, they no longer have a bank of goodwill with the public.
“This is exactly what she should have been doing for the last three years,” Coram James said, “from the moment that they left the U.K.
“If she had been doing this from the very start and not having swipes at the royal family, I think her popularity would be very, very high right now.
“If you remember that there was a time when the most controversial thing that her and Harry did was leave [Britain]. At the time, that was considered a real reputational crisis and that now pales into insignificance next to everything else.
“If they had done this when they first left the U.K., it would have repaired the reputational damage because it’s her being nice and relatable within a home setting.
“She’s obviously very good on camera when she’s not taking swipes at people, that’s why she was a successful actress, and she’s being advised well right now.”
However, having prodded King Charles III for cutting them off financially, Prince William for his “alarming baldness,” Princess Kate for wanting Princess Charlotte‘s bridesmaid dress remade and Queen Camilla for being “dangerous,” the couple have exhausted some viewers.
“The road to reputational recovery for her is a long one because her reputational deficit is so large and there’s not very much good will at all,” Coram James said.
“When a famous person has a reputational crisis, often there’s enough good will that people think, ‘OK, she’s going to make it right, I want to see how.’
“A lot of people don’t want to see her make it right. The overarching sentiment over the past year has been, ‘We just don’t want to see you, we’re bored of it.’
“My sense is that she’s been quite disciplined in that she’s recognized there was a period in which the best thing for her to do was just say nothing and keep quiet.
“It was inevitable that would come to an end and she would try to reinvent herself after that. If I had been advising her, I would probably have said wait another year.”
Jack Royston is Newsweek‘s chief royal correspondent based in London. You can find him on X, formerly Twitter, at @jack_royston and read his stories on Newsweek‘s The Royals Facebook page.
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