A different kind of feud between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle versus Prince William and Kate Middleton has been brewing in Britain. It has to do with these royal siblings trying to upstage each other when it comes to publicity in the press.
According to royal watchers via Daily Express, House Sussex and House Cambridge are in a game of one-upmanship. When one House publishes something good that captures the day's headline, the other automatically post their own set of publicity.
For instance, Harry and Meghan shared their behind-the-scenes wedding photos on their Instagram, which received over six million views with two days. The next day, William and Kate posted a video of their family playing in the garden created by Kate for the Chelsea Flower Show.
"It was a case of anything you can do, I can do better," one royal watcher told Daily Express. This had triggered a rift between the staff members of the Royal Household who want both Houses to have better coordination when it came to publicity.
Royal observers think that William and Kate are trying to steal the thunder from Harry and Meghan this week, who were celebrating their first wedding anniversary. Releasing publicity so soon after someone in the royal family did it is now considered a huge mistake and must be avoided at all times.
But then again, this wasn't the first time the royal families clashed about the stories they release. Princess Anne, the Queen's second child, and Prince Charles' sister, was annoyed at Princess Diana for upstaging her publicities.
"Princess Anne, she had no time for Diana, she didn't like the way she went about her duty and the way she used the cameras and the media to promote herself in her eyes," royal biographer Sally Bedell Smith said in the documentary Paxman on the Queen's Children.
However, there was never anyone more overshadowed in the press than Prince Charles. His mother was more popular than him, while the people loved his first wife more during their marriage. Now that he's older, Prince Charles' press releases are upstaged by the publicity about his sons.
In an interview with BBC Radio in 2017, Prince Charles told Harry that there were indeed a lot of good things he did in the past that should matter but were not given enough attention by the press, such as climate change, organic farming, and bad architecture. It was only years later that the press has been catching on to his advocacies, as per NBC News.
