A house divided
Harry and Meghan lift the lid on palace strife
TODAY may be International Women’s Day, but when it comes to celebrating the global ‘sisterhood’, nobody in Buckingham Palace will be commending Meghan Markle for finally lifting the lid on life with the Royals in an explosive interview with Oprah Winfrey.
Finer details of the prized interview, which airs on RTÉ 2 tonight at 9.30pm, were kept more tightly guarded than the Crown Jewels. But just enough was leaked of last night’s broadcast, which cost CBS a reported $7m (€5.9m), to provoke an unseemly tit-for-tat campaign across the Atlantic Ocean.
Just a few hours before it aired, Queen Elizabeth gave a dignified televised address where she spoke about the importance of “friendship and unity” in her Commonwealth Day speech.
Yet when it comes to her grandson Harry, who is sixth in line to the throne, there is little to indicate that he and his pregnant wife enjoyed much of either during their time in Britain.
With the promise that “nothing is off limits” during the two-hour interview, it saw Ms Markle setting the tone for the conversation by referring to the royals in a slightly derisory fashion as ‘The Firm’.
“I don’t know how they could expect that after all this time, we would still just be silent if there is an active role that The Firm is playing in perpetuating falsehoods about us,” she said.
“If that comes with risk of losing things, I mean... there is a lot that has been lost already.”
Speaking about why she chose to do the sit-down interview now, the former Suits actor (39) said she and Prince Harry (36) are on “the other side of a lot of life experience that happened”.
“And also that we have the ability to make our own
choices in a way that I couldn’t have said yes to you then. That wasn’t my choice to make,” she said.
“As an adult who lived a really independent life to then go into this construct that is different than I think what people imagine it to be, it’s really liberating to be able to have the right and the privilege in some ways to be able to say, ‘yes I’m ready to talk’. To be able to just make a choice on your own. And just be able to speak for yourself.”
Ms Markle, who is pregnant with a sibling to Archie (22 months), also alleged that she was not able to privately speak to Ms Winfrey, who attended her 2018 wedding, before her nuptials.
“I remember that conversation very well. I wasn’t even allowed to have that conversation with you personally, right? There had to be people from the Comms sitting there,” she said.
Many have seized upon Ms Winfrey asking the Duchess of Sussex if she was “silent or were you silenced” as an indicator of how rigidly the Royal family’s PR machine controls the flow of information from the inner circle.
She also suggests that there was a “breaking point” when it came to the level of scrutiny she endured after marrying into the royal family.
Prince Harry touched upon the topic of his late mother Princess Diana and her troubled life before her sudden death in Paris in 1997. Drawing parallels with his own life situation, he said that his biggest concern was “history repeating itself”.
“I’m just really relieved and happy to be sitting here , talking to you, with my wife by my side, because I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like for her, going through this process by herself, all those years ago,” he said. Queen Elizabeth has indicated that she will not be watching the interview herself, given that Britain will today begin the first steps in easing lockdown restrictions and there are more pressing matters at hand.
But it’s hard to imagine members of the monarchy are best pleased with the timing of the interview, given that Prince Philip (99) has been seriously unwell in recent weeks.
Any overt criticism of the royal family will also be seen as sparking a deeper rift with the Sussexes, with Prince Harry and Prince William already on thin ice with each other.
Yet despite being heavily pregnant, much of the furore over the “media circus” has
‘I’m just really relieved and happy to be sitting here’
been directed towards Ms Markle. It’s over a year since they quit Britain for America but it was only last week that reports emerged in The Times of a bullying complaint against her. It claimed she drove two personal assistants out of the household and undermined another staff member.
Ms Markle was the subject of a formal email complaint sent to Buckingham Palace’s HR department in October 2018 by her then Kensington Palace press secretary Jason Knauf after concerns were reported over her “unacceptable behaviour”.
A spokesman for the Sussexes said they were “the victims of a calculated smear campaign”.
He added that the reports of bullying are “the latest attack on her character”.