ET’s royal expert, Katie Nicholl, is on the ground in Cape Town, and explained why Archie won’t be making too many appearances.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have embarked on their 10-day tour of Africa, but don’t expect too many cute travel pics of baby Archie.
ET’s royal expert, Katie Nicholl, is on the ground in Cape Town, where she explained why the little cutie won’t be making many public appearances.
Although a paparazzi shot taken at the airport showed Archie arriving in Africa, Nicholl expects it will be a few days before the public gets an official sighting.
“Archie is the youngest royal to make such a long-distance journey -- he is only five months old,” Nicholl says. “We are told the couple is hoping to involve him in the schedule at some point, but don’t expect to see too much of him on this tour.”
“We are hoping to see Archie later on in the program,” she adds. “The couple is hoping that he will be present for some of the engagements.”
Nicholl explained how the nature of this trip is vastly different than other royal tours, such as Prince William and Kate Middleton’s time in New Zealand and Australia in 2014, when Prince George was seen out and about.
“This isn’t quite the same as when the Cambridges took Prince George to Australia,” Nicholl says. “Archie is that much younger [and] this is Africa -- it’s quite a different sort of work to what the Cambridges did. The work that the Sussexes are doing is very, very different [to] the sort of things that the Cambridges did in Australia and New Zealand when they brought Prince George out for a play date.”
“They took him to the zoo in Sydney. We're not going to see Archie at any sort of engagements like that,” she adds. “We are hoping, however, that we will get a glimpse of the little royal at least once during the 10-day tour."
Once Harry, 35, and Meghan, 38, complete their official engagements in Cape Town, chances are that the public won’t see many photos of the royal couple together either.
Nicholl says they will go their separate ways on Wednesday, with Harry headed to Botswana, Angola, and Malawi, then returning to Johannesburg, where he will be reunited with Meghan and commence two final days of joint engagements.
“It would be almost impossible to take such a small baby on a small charter flight to very rural regions in Africa, where there is malaria,” Nicholl explains. “Flying on such a small plane would be very difficult and Harry is going to be going into quite remote parts of the country. That’s why the program is splitting. Harry will go off and travel [and] Meghan will stay behind with the baby here in Cape Town.”
And, while Archie may be laying low during the trip, that doesn’t mean careful thought doesn’t appear to have gone into his outfits.
Nicholl says that when he arrived in the country all bundled up for the cold, his attire was honoring a trip Harry took with his mom, the late Princess Diana, in 1985.
“He [was] wrapped up against the cold in an anorak and quite importantly a white bubble hat which was identical to the hat that Prince Harry wore when he was on an engagement with his mother back in 1985,” Nicholl notes. “The royals do have a habit of dressing their children in clothes worn many decades before and we call it twinning and this does seem to be an example of the couple deliberately choosing to put Archie in an item of clothing very similar to something Prince Harry wore back when he was a baby.”
Meghan, meanwhile, rocked a blue Mayamiko outfit in Cape Town on Monday -- the same dress she wore in Tonga in 2018.
See more on the royals below.
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