Oprah talk was `madness'
Prince Philip thought `no good' could come from interview
Prince Philip was silent in the days following his grandson Harry and Meghan Markle's explosive interview with Oprah Winfrey. But following the Duke of Edinburgh's death last week at the age of 99, his biographer Gyles Brandreth has revealed his friend thought the tell-all chat was “madness.”
Meghan and Harry set off a bomb in royal circles when they claimed someone in the
Royal Family had expressed concerns about the colour of their son Archie's skin after he was born.
“That was relayed to me from Harry, those were conversations that family had with him,” Meghan recounted in an interview with Winfrey last month.
Elsewhere in the two-hour broadcast, Meghan claimed that life as a royal was awful and that when she asked the family for help, her pleas were ignored. “I just didn't want to be alive anymore,” she told Winfrey.
“I know from someone close to him that he thought Meghan and Harry's interview with Oprah Winfrey was `madness' and `no good would come of it,'” Brandreth told the Daily Mail. “I was not surprised because that is exactly how he described to me the personal TV interviews given by Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, back in the 1990s.”
Meghan and Harry were widely criticized for participating in the interview while Philip was in hospital during a month-long stay, but Brandreth said the fact they sat down with Winfrey didn't trouble Philip.
“What did worry him was the couple's preoccupation with their own problems and their willingness to talk about them in public. `Give TV interviews by all means,' he said, `but don't talk about yourself,'” Brandreth said.
“That was one of his rules. I know he shared it with his children. I imagine he shared it with his grandchildren, too.”