A multi-million podcast deal between Britain’s Prince Harry, his wife Meghan, and Spotify may prove to be bad business, with a YouGov poll indicating that 89 per cent of Britons are not interested in what they have to say.
“Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan have announced that they have signed a multi-year deal with Spotify to host and produce exclusive podcasts. How interested are you, if at all, in listening to this?” the pollster had asked the public.
The response was likely not encouraging for the British-American couple — or, indeed, Spotify — with just 2 per cent of respondents selecting “I am very interested”.
The figures for “I am fairly interested” were not much better, accounting for 5 per cent of respondents — less than half the proportion who plumped for “I am not very interested”, at 12 per cent.
The runaway “winners” of the poll, however, were the respondents who said they were “not interested at all” in the couple’s podcast, accounting for a whopping 77 per cent of the total.
With “Don’t knows” coming in at just 4 per cent, there seems to be little scope for them to rebalance the results.
While Harry and Meghan retain the Duke and Duchess of Sussex courtesy titles granted to them by Queen Elizabeth II, they have had to stop using their ‘HRH’ (His/Her/Royal Highness) titles, having decided to step down as “working royals” in order to pursue private money-making ventures, only a little over a year after Meghan, formerly Meghan Markle, married into the family.
The Queen, 94, also vetoed their plans to operate under the ‘Sussex Royal’ brand, stripped their public funding, and arranged for them to repay taxpayers’ money used to renovate Frogmore Cottage for them while they were still working royals — although the costs involved appear to be dwarfed by their rumoured earnings from the Spotify deal, a similar deal with Netflix, and other moves cashing in on Harry’s royal pedigree.
Harry, an Armed Forces veteran who saw active service in Afghanistan, is also set to be deprived of his ceremonial roles as head of various military units.
The pair have become increasingly political since their decision to go “independent”, throwing themselves into the climate change movement and, after it became more fashionable following the George Floyd disorder in the United States, Black Lives Matter.
They also intervened in the U.S. general election — a major break with British constitutional norms, as royals are expected to remain above politics so they can represent all their countrymen regardless of individual views and act as honest brokers — to urge Americans to “reject hate speech”, which was widely seen as a thinly-veiled endorsement of Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Meghan was vocal in her opposition to President Donald Trump before she married into the royal family, branding him “misogynistic [and] vocal about it”.
President Trump, for his part, has said he is “not a fan” of Meghan, adding: “I wish a lot of luck to Harry. Because he’s going to need it.”