The Crown has shaped negative view of family
EVEN before the sensational Oprah Winfrey interview most Americans needed little persuading that there was something deeply wrong behind Harry and Meghan’s jailbreak.
The view of the Windsors on this side of the pond had already been indelibly shaped by watching The Crown.
And then, in the hands of Oprah, the story moved seamlessly from the anguish of Diana as portrayed in The Crown to the anguish of Meghan in the flesh. Same family, the Wicked Windsors. Same problems.
Harry, speaking of his mother, said “we felt her presence through this whole process” and it was clear Meghan was reaching back to Diana for the basic text to frame her unforgiving account of her suffering.
She was everything the Windsors were not. She was the beauty and they were the beast. She was vulnerable and they were strong and cruel. She was the future and they were the stubborn past. She was generous of spirit and they were mean.
But, unlike Diana, Meghan was addressing an audience already on her side.
America has enthusiastically welcomed the Sussexes as kin who fled a stuffy royal cage – almost as though they are fleeing the same tyranny that inspired the American war of independence. When Meghan wrote movingly about her miscarriage in the New York Times there was a telling line that foretold her Oprah revelations.
She talked of living in a silo “where moments sad, scary or sacrosanct are lived out alone. There is no one stopping to ask, ‘Are you OK?’”
Now, this performance with Oprah is bound to eclipse anything the Windsor spin machine can muster.
From here efforts at a pre-emptive strike on Meghan seemed vindictive and petty – dragging up an alleged case of intimidating staff and inadvertently wearing earrings gifted by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after he masterminded the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
That last was a bit rich from a family that has embraced Saudi royals for decades and acquired a hoard of jewellery given by them.
I seriously question whether anyone in the palace understands how much harm the trashing of Meghan had already done to the Royal Family’s reputation here.
A royal insider said to me before the broadcast he hoped “she doesn’t play the race card”. Well, she did not play a card, she laid it all out and only just managed to hold back, as did Harry, who in the palace had wanted to discuss how to handle “concerns” about the skin colour of their children.
When Oprah, hearing this, responded with a shocked “WHAT?” she was speaking for a large chunk of the huge American audience.
From here, that was probably the most damning moment.
The Last Queen: How Queen Elizabeth II Saved the Monarchy, by Clive Irving, is published by Biteback and priced at £20.
Harry and Meghan at the premiere of Cirque du Soleil’s Totem show at the Royal Albert Hall in January 2019. Just before the event, Meghan had told her husband she “didn’t want to be alive any more”.