HARRY, MEGHAN GOING PUBLIC AT TOUGH TIME FOR THE ROYALS
LONDON» Prince Harry told a television interviewer that the exile in California of he and his wife, Meghan, was driven as much by the British news media’s unsparing scrutiny of them as by a rift with members of his family.
“We all know what the British press can be like, and it was destroying my mental health,” Harry told British talk show host James Corden in an interview broadcast Thursday. “I was, like, this is toxic. So I did what any husband and what any father would do — I need to get my family out of here.”
It was a revealing, if familiar, glimpse into the bitter animus that Harry bears toward the British press, which he blames for hounding his mother, Princess Diana, who was killed in a car crash after a high-speed chase involving photographers.
And it served as a kind of tease for a prime-time interview of him and Meghan by Oprah Winfrey that is scheduled to run March 7 in the United States.
Corden, who hosts “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” is a friend of Harry. Their interview, conducted on the open-air upper deck of a London-style tour bus as it cruised around Los Angeles, was breezy and informal.
It was not intended as a forensic inquiry into Harry’s complicated relations with his brother, Prince William, Meghan’s frosty introduction into the House of Windsor or last year’s sensational split.
But Harry, also known as the duke of Sussex, suggested the decision to sever ties was driven by Buckingham Palace, not by them.
Unexpectedly, Harry offered a backhanded endorsement of “The Crown,” the popular Netflix series about the royal family that has drawn criticism from some in Britain for playing fast and loose with the facts.
While acknowledging its artistic license, he said it captured the unrelenting scrutiny placed on working royals.
“I’m way more comfortable with ‘The Crown’ than I am seeing the stories written about my family or my wife or myself,” he said, referring to Britain’s rough-and-tumble tabloid papers.