Sussexes’ TV show claims are a ‘direct hit’ on late Queen’s legacy
‘Deeply offensive’ Netflix series brands the Commonwealth as Empire 2.0
‘Today is a day when you’re reminded that the Royal family are human beings. It’s sad to see it playing out in this way’
THE Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s Netflix documentary has been accused of attacking the late Queen’s legacy, after the Commonwealth was described as “Empire 2.0” in the programme.
The series has aimed a “direct hit” at Queen Elizabeth II’S decades of work to lead the Commonwealth into a new era, royal sources believe, describing it as “deeply offensive” to her memory.
Contributors to the Sussexes’ series, part of their multi-million-pound Netflix deal, called the Commonwealth a “privileged club of formally colonised nations” and said it was an economic block that has kept countries “intergenerationally poor”, with millions of Britons described as having “incredibly painful” memories of Empire.
The documentary also makes claims about the Royal family’s financing of the slave trade.
Afua Hirsch,a British writer, tells viewers: “It’s often said that Britain had a Deep South that was just as brutal, that actually enslaved more Africans than the United States of America did. But that Deep South was the Caribbean.”
Sources last night condemned the description of the Commonwealth as “appalling and factually inaccurate”, with one palace insider adding that it was a “good job” the late Queen “is not here to have to see this”.
Another said: “Some of this is deeply offensive to all those in the Commonwealth and, of course, the late Queen’s legacy. The real risk is that people are learning about the Commonwealth for the first time through hearing this.”
The Royal family has chosen to stay silent over the Netflix show, with senior members not intending to watch it.
The first three episodes were released yesterday morning, with the final three airing next Thursday on the streaming service.
Yesterday, the King was joined by religious leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, to visit London churches, where he wished worshippers a “happy Christmas”.
A source close to the palace said there was a feeling of “sadness” around the documentary, in which the Duke and Duchess criticise members of their family, including the “formality” of the Prince and Princess of Wales.
The feeling behind palace walls, a source said, was “that it’s quite sad that it’s come to this”.
“Today is a day when you’re reminded that they’re human beings,” they said of the Royal family. “It’s sad to see it playing out in this way.”
In the documentary, called Harry & Meghan, the Duke and Duchess open up their family photo and video albums to share intimate stories and images of their romance, young children and exit from Royal life.
They broadcast a series of self-filmed video diaries, detailing their struggles in Britain, with even their private engagement captured on camera for posterity. During extensive interviews the Duke and Duchess appear to criticise the Royal family and palace, as well as the media. In one scene, the Duchess mocks her attempts at curtseying for the late Queen, comparing the lives of her in-laws to a medieval-era theatre show.
Saying she was not given any training in how to become a member of the Royal family, she spoke of her shock at having to bow to the late Queen.
A palace source said last night: “The truth is, this is a real Royal family – they’re not playing a role.
“How did they not know that?” The documentary also risked deeply upsetting the Prince of Wales, who has called for his late mother’s now-disgraced Panorama interview never to be aired again.
Prince Harry’s documentary includes the 1995 footage, as he says the fact she was deceived into it did not negate “the truth of her experience”.
The programme yesterday also became the subject of a row between Netflix and the palace over whether the Royal family were given a proper right of reply.
The first episode carries a disclaimer that reads: “Members of the Royal family declined to comment on the content within this series.” However, Palace sources claimed that, while an email had been received, “purporting” to be from a third-party production company, they were unable to verify its authenticity and could not respond.
The first three episodes include sections claiming that the Brexit debate inflamed racial tensions and how Britain’s attitude towards the Duchess was affected by racism.
The Duke, who was appointed President of the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust and a Commonwealth Youth Ambassador by his late grandmother, spoke of his own awakening to racism, admitting he had been “blissfully sleepwalking through life” despite his travels until he met his now wife.
He spoke of the Royal family’s “huge level of unconscious bias”, which he described as “no one’s fault” but essential to “make right”.
“In this family, sometimes you are part of the problem rather than part of the solution,” he said.
THE Duke and Duchess of Sussex have used their six-part Netflix series to settle scores with the Royal family, the media, the Markle family, the Commonwealth and Britain itself.
Harry and Meghan, who have been paid an undisclosed sum by the streaming giant, portray the Royal family as cold and unsupportive and Britain as a racist realm that was not prepared to embrace a mixed-race princess.
The first three episodes of the series, called simply Harry & Meghan, were released yesterday morning, with the remainder coming at the same time next week.
The Sussexes said in a statement: “We are grateful to have the ability to share our love story through such an esteemed creative team and with the global reach of Netflix. We hope it helps others to heal, and to feel inspired.”
Criticism of the King, William and Kate
The couple expanded on previous complaints about the Royal family, whom they have accused in the past of being racist.
The Duchess accused the Prince and Princess of Wales of being cold towards her, saying they remained “formal” behind the scenes.
Recalling the moment she first met them, Meghan said: “They came over for dinner, I remember I was in ripped jeans and I was barefoot. I was a hugger, I’ve always been a hugger. I didn’t realise that was jarring for a lot of Brits.
“I guess I’d started to understand very quickly that the formality on the outside carried through on the inside.”
Prince Harry said that when he intro- duced Meghan to his family they were “incredibly impressed” but had imme- diately judged her and assumed the relationship would not last.
He said: “Some of them didn’t quite know what to do with themselves because I think they were surprised. Maybe surprised that a ginger could land such a beautiful woman, and such an intelligent woman.
“But the fact that I was dating an American actress was probably what clouded their judgment more than anything else at the beginning.”
In another episode, the Duke claimed that for male members of the Royal family, there could be a “temptation or urge” to marry someone who “fitted the mould” rather than someone they might connect with more naturally, prompting speculation he was referring to his brother.
He said: “The difference between making decisions with your head or heart. My mum certainly made most of her decisions, if not all of them, from her heart and I am my mother’s son.”
When his relationship with Meghan became public knowledge, “as far as a lot of the family were concerned, everything that she was being put through, they had been put through as well, so it was almost like a rite of passage”.
In a swipe at his father, the King, he said: “What’s most important for the two of us is that we don’t repeat the same mistakes that our parents made.”
He said that spending time in Lesotho as a young man gave him “the space and the freedom to breathe, to live and to grow”, adding: “I’ve got a second family out there and a group of friends that literally brought me up.”
A look that says ‘don’t disrespect the Queen’
Prince Harry appeared annoyed with his wife at one point as she joked about having to curtsey to the late Queen.
Speaking about when he first introduced Meghan to Elizabeth II, he said: “How do you explain that you bow to your grandmother? And that you will need to curtsey? Especially to an American… that’s weird.”
The Duchess said it was “surreal” and that she thought he was joking when he asked if she knew how to curtsey, then giggled as she performed an exaggerated curtsey for the camera.
“I was like, pleasure to meet you, Your Majesty. Like, was that OK? It was so intense,” she said. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Prince Harry shot her a look that suggested he was not sharing the joke.
One royal insider said: “The truth is, this is a real royal family, they’re not playing a role. It’s a real Queen and now a real King. Do the family bow to them? Yes, it’s about respect. How did they not know that?”
Dressing as a Nazi ‘one of my worst mistakes’
Prince Harry said wearing a Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party when he was 20 was “one of the biggest mistakes of my life”.
He claimed the entire Royal family have a “huge level” of “unconscious bias” on race and that it is “a constant work in progress for everyone, including me”, and added that he immediately sought to educate himself after the 2005 Nazi uniform incident.
“I felt so ashamed afterwards,” he said. “All I wanted to do was make it right. I sat down and spoke to the chief rabbi in London, which had a profound effect on me. I went to Berlin and spoke to a Holocaust survivor.
“I could have just ignored it and made the same mistakes over again in my life. But I learned from that.”
Meghan and the Markles
The Duchess’s mother spoke publicly about her daughter for the first time in the programme, saying she warned Meghan race would be a problem.
In a reference to the time her daughter’s relationship with Prince Harry became public, Doria Ragland said: “I said to her – I remember this very clearly – that this is about race. Meg said: ‘Mummy, I don’t wanna hear that.’ I said: ‘Well you may not wanna hear it but this is what’s coming down the line’.”
The Duchess also addressed her fractured relationship with Samantha Markle, her elder half-sister, saying: “My half-sister, who I hadn’t seen for over a decade, and that was only for a day and a half, suddenly it felt like she was everywhere.
“I don’t know your middle name, I don’t know your birthday. You are telling these people that you raised me and you are calling me Princess Pushy?”
Elsewhere, the Duke admitted he felt responsible for the breakdown of Meghan’s relationship with Thomas Markle, her father, who was absent from their wedding after a fall-out over his refusal to stop speaking to the media. He said: “She had a father before this and now she doesn’t have a father.
“And I shouldered that because if Meg wasn’t with me, then her dad would still be her dad.”
Intruding on their own privacy
The Duke and Duchess, who have always been fiercely protective of their privacy, handed over their personal archive of intimate photographs, video diaries and audio voice notes to Netflix.
In one scene, baby Lilibet Mountbatten-windsor is shown a photograph of her late grandmother Princess Diana, her brother Archie is shown running round their home and garden, and Meghan rubs noses with her babies in the nursery.
The excitement of their engagement at Frogmore Cottage is captured via a phone video shot in the dark, thought to be for Meghan’s then close friend Jessica Mulroney, in which she tells her: “Oh my God, Jess, Jess it’s happening, it’s happening. Oh my God, he told me not to peek.”
The first episode of the show opened with footage from video diaries recorded during the couple’s final trip
‘I started to understand very quickly that the formality on the outside carried through on the inside’
to the UK, in March 2020, where they were undertaking engagements in what was called their “finale” in Britain.
Harry said: “A friend of ours actually suggested that we document ourselves through this period of time.
“With all of the misinformation that was going on out there, especially about us and the departure, it seemed like a really sensible idea.”
A makeup-free Meghan, back in Vancouver where the couple lived temporarily before moving to California, is seen speaking into her phone camera, saying of the decision to start documenting: “I don’t know. We’ve talked about it. We keep talking about it, because we know that, right now it might not make sense, but one day it will make sense.”
Other shots include never-beforeseen images from their first date, a private five-day camping trip to Botswana and later their children speaking and playing on camera.
Both are snapped in bed, presumably on the other’s mobile phone while they were long-distance dating, with photographs of Meghan at home in pregnancy. They also share a photograph of what appears to be their son’s first birthday.
Prince Harry said: “As a dad, and as parents, I think consent is a really key piece to this. That if you have children it should be your consent as to what you share.”
Royal life is nothing like The Princess Diaries
Joining the Royal family is nothing like the film The Princess Diaries, the Duchess said, as she complained that she was not offered lessons in etiquette.
Despite being an actress used to red carpet appearances, Meghan told Netflix viewers that she was not taught how to dress or curtsey, and Prince Harry said it was “ridiculous” that she was not given help with her wardrobe.
“I needed to learn a lot, including the National Anthem,” Meghan said.
Asked how she learnt the National Anthem, she replied: “I Googled it.”
The Duchess said: “Joining this family, I knew that there was a protocol for how things were done, and, do you remember that old movie Princess Diaries with Anne Hathaway? There’s no class and some person who goes ‘sit like this, cross your legs like this, use this fork, don’t do this, curtsey then, wear this kind of hat’, doesn’t happen.”
In the 2001 Disney film, Hathaway, as a gawky American teenager, discovers she is heir to the throne of a European country, and is taught how to be a princess by her estranged grandmother and the reigning queen, played by Julie Andrews.
Meghan said she had no idea what a royal walkabout was, and Prince Harry complained that his wife-to-be was given no advice on how a female member of the Royal family was expected to dress for such an occasion.
The couple recalled how, on the morning of their first walkabout, in Nottingham in December 2017, the zip broke on Meghan’s dress and they were left trying to find a safety pin.
“I mean the whole thing was just ridiculous,” the Prince said with irritation.
Later in the episode, the Duchess is shown getting ready for an event after the couple moved to America, with four people helping her into a dress.
She said that when she joined the Royal family she wore muted tones of white, beige and camel so she would not accidentally wear the same colour as the Queen. “I’m not trying to stand out here,” she said.
“There is no version of me joining this family and trying to not do everything I could to fit in. I don’t want to embarrass the family.”
The third episode opens with the couple’s 2017 official engagement interview, conducted by the BBC’S Mishal Husain, in which Meghan described how the Royal family had been “so welcoming”.
But she described the interview as an “orchestrated reality show”, adding: “We weren’t allowed to tell our story because they didn’t want...”
Husain has hit back by borrowing a phrase from the late Queen, saying: “We know recollections may vary on this particular subject but my recollection is definitely very much, asked to do an interview, and do said interview.”
At odds with William over Panorama
Prince Harry appeared to be at odds with his brother the Prince of Wales when he discussed their mother Princess Diana’s 1995 BBC interview. Prince William has said the interview should never be shown again, after it emerged that the journalist, Martin Bashir, had used subterfuge to obtain it, but clips from it are shown in Harry & Meghan.
Prince William has said that what his mother told Bashir was “substantially influenced” by Bashir’s deceit after he faked bank statements to fuel her paranoia.
Prince Harry, however, told Netflix that “she spoke the truth about her experience”.
The Panorama interview is dramatised in the latest series of The Crown,
which is also made by Netflix.
‘Hunted’ by the media
Prince Harry said the couple’s relationship with the media was “really the hunter versus the prey”.
He took aim at British journalists who write about the Royal family and have the title of royal correspondent to give “legitimacy” to what they write. “And they get paid for it,” he exclaimed.
He claimed the royal press pack is “an extended PR arm of the Royal family”,
implying that royal correspondents only ever write positive stories about the royals, but then contradicts himself by saying that the British press believes “this family is ours to exploit. Their trauma is our story”.
He said it is his “duty to uncover this bribery and exploitation that happens within our own media”.
He added: “Back in my mum’s day it was physical harassment, cameras in your face, following you, chasing you. Paparazzi still harass people but the harassment really exists more online now.”
Their first date
The couple also shared extensive details of their first date. In the past, they have said they met on a blind date arranged by a friend, but in the Netflix show they described how they “met” on Instagram, after Harry saw a photograph of Meghan on a mutual friend’s feed.
An email shown on screen appears to confirm that the matchmaker was Violet von Westenholz, a PR executive for the fashion brand Ralph Lauren.
Meghan scrolled through Prince Harry’s Instagram feed to do her “homework” before swapping numbers. “So come on – what u doing tomorrow night?” Harry asked her. “Hope you’re having fun over there!”
Meghan replied: “Heading back to Soho. I have a dinner tomorrow at 8 but can do drinks tomorrow night. Would that work? Maybe 6?”
Harry wrote back: “You’re ON!” On their first date, they said, Harry was late, arriving flustered and redfaced. Afterwards, Meghan – describing herself as “so forward and American” – asked him for dinner, sharing a photograph with Netflix viewers in which they “capture[d] the feeling of just sitting in that little restaurant and going ‘Oh my gosh. We were going to give it a go’.”
Speaking about the moment he proposed, Harry said he bought a magnum of Champagne to open while they were cooking a roast chicken at their cottage at Kensington Palace, which “slightly gave the game away”, and lit 15 electric candles in the garden. A grainy photograph of Harry, down on one knee holding up an engagement ring in a box, is included, showing the candles, a bouquet of white roses and Meghan’s dog.