Shocking interview with royal couple divides British.
LONDON — Hours after an interview with Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, was broadcast in the United States on Sunday, Britain was already grappling with the shock wave rippling out across the Atlantic, exposing a deep royal rift.
In the twohour primetime interview with Oprah Winfrey — shown in Britain on Monday night — Meghan and Harry spoke frankly about what drove them away from Britain last year, taking a sharp turn from the default silence of the royal family. They spoke of comments by one family member about the potential color of their son’s skin, racist coverage from the tabloid press and a general lack of support that Meghan said drove her to thoughts of suicide.
For many Black Britons, the interview offered a scathing assessment of the royal family and resurfaced barely submerged tensions over entrenched racism in the country at large.
“It’s very hard listening to the interview not to focus on some of the salacious details and the family drama,” said Marcus Ryder, a visiting professor of media diversity at Birmingham City University. “But what we’re talking about is a major part of the British state; it’s a major institution.”
The allegations of racism made during the interview could have major implications for the monarchy, he said, whose family members and their households are paid in part with public funds.
Meghan’s revelation that someone in the royal household questioned whether her son would be “too dark to represent the U.K.” was a major problem, he said. (On Monday, Winfrey said that Harry had asked her to clarify that neither Queen Elizabeth II nor Prince Philip was the source of that comment.)
Many critics noted the marked imbalance between the bombshell disclosures in the interview and the palace’s clumsy attempts to discredit Meghan as a bully in a leak to the Times of London last week.
For others, the interview was a moment to reflect on the decidedly different public persona of Harry and Meghan as they broke with the dutiful silence expected of the royal family and brought a more American approach.
Meghan had previously spoken about her struggle to adopt the British stiff-upper-lip sensibility, and during Sunday’s interview the couple signaled a desire to seize control of their own narrative, positioning themselves as global philanthropists.
The Daily Mail, a British tabloid that Meghan won a privacy case against last month, on Monday morning led with the allcaps headline “I wanted to kill myself.” While it trumpeted Meghan’s comments about her mental health, it called the discussions about race “a sensational claim.”
The interview left the country divided, with major news outlets publishing biting commentary. On social media, some denounced the couple’s infidelity to the family, while others firmly defended them.