Since the Sussexes moved to the Cotswolds in August, the British tabloids have been desperately trying to find an angle for why the move was “wrong,” despite those same tabloids spending the previous six years screaming about how the Sussexes needed to come back. The tabloids can’t say the thing, the actual reason why they’re mad: they don’t have any control over Prince Harry and Meghan, they don’t have an “in.” Not for lack of trying! Well, this week, we heard that the Sussexes moved houses in the Cotswolds, but the move was just from one house to another on the same billionaire’s estate. This too is driving the tabloids up the wall: they want physical access to the property and the community so they can convince everyone that the Sussexes are broke/unpopular/elitist/whatever. Speaking of:

With its honey-coloured stone cottages, rolling green hills and picture-perfect country pubs, the Cotswolds is the quintessential English countryside escape – and a magnet for the rich and famous. Now, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are the latest A-listers to set up home in the exclusive enclave, having finally found a private country retreat for themselves and their two children, Prince Archie, seven, and Princess Lilibet, five. After an extensive property search with a reported £10million budget, the Sussexes moved into their new home over the weekend.

The property is said to sit within the estate of a wealthy businessman friend, with whom the couple had been staying since moving from California earlier this year, the Daily Mail’s Richard Eden revealed. But while the Cotswolds may offer the couple the privacy and seclusion they crave, will they really fit in among their new neighbours? One royal commentator has suggested they could find themselves out of their depth in such star-studded surroundings.

Richard Fitzwilliams told the Daily Mail: ‘It depends who they befriend but given that there are (other) royals there and the likes of the Beckhams, they will be out of their depth as they have pretensions to be A-listers but are not! They were not a success in Hollywood. No one else is like them though, which is probably just as well. She failed at the Daytime Emmys and joins Junior MasterChef in Australia, perhaps in the Cotswolds she will find her own level.’

The Cotswolds is home to a number of the couple’s celebrity friends, including former talk show host Ellen DeGeneres and her wife Portia de Rossi, who bought Kitesbridge Farm near Burford for £15million in 2024. The couple were close to Meghan during the Sussexes’ stay in California.

But for a couple famous for wanting privacy, the Cotswolds may not prove the best option. Known for its chocolate-box villages and pretty cobbled streets, the region attracts thousands of visitors every year – contributing to ongoing battles with overtourism. Victoria Summerley has lived in Bibury for 14 years, which is home to only 600 residents but sees as many as 20,000 visitors in a single day during peak periods. She told the BBC how the behaviour of some tourists had grown worse over the years since the pandemic and described ‘unbelievable’ amounts of litter in the stream.

Given their celebrity status, Harry and Meghan’s arrival in the village will no doubt contribute to the Cotswolds’ already considerable touristic appeal. Mr Fitzwilliams is similarly pessimistic about what existing Cotswolds residents might think about their new neighbours.

‘The locals generally are likely to dislike the Sussexes’ presence in the Cotswolds as we know they are chronically unpopular in Britain,’ he says. ‘This is a rural area with traditional English villages, rolling hills and also a royal presence. Such areas tend to be extremely supportive of the monarchy. In the case of the Sussexes, they have ruthlessly exploited their royal connections and the world knows this. The often wealthy, conservatively inclined residents of the Cotswolds would look on this with extreme disfavour.’

To make matters worse, Mr Fitzwilliams predicts Harry and Meghan could ‘act as a draw to a certain number of tourists simply by getting the area in the media’. He adds: ‘The hype is likely to be of some significance.’

[From The Daily Mail]

These people are so dumb. They can’t stick to a coherent argument – the actual A-list celebrities will ignore the pretender Sussexes, but the Sussexes are also so interesting, they will drive tourism to the area, which will make their neighbors even angrier! What are we doing? I suspect that Harry and Meghan are living a lot like they lived in California, with private dinner parties, school runs and the odd outing to a pub or local restaurant. I also suspect that more tourists will visit the Cotswolds because of them, which is what happened in Montecito as well. Incidentally, I’m actually really surprised by how infrequently they’ve been seen in public, just as I’ve been surprised by how thoroughly the Sussexes have managed to keep their Cotswolds living situation under wraps.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images. Cover courtesy of The Sun.