Prince Harry revealed how he responded to a backlash from friends against his royal bombshells during a passage in his book.
The Duke of Sussex revealed he was asked “how could you reveal such things?” by “beloved figures” in his life after he
and Meghan Markle gave a tell-all interview to Oprah Winfrey, broadcast on CBS in March 2021.
Among them was Tiggy Pettifer, formerly Tiggy Legge-Bourke, who Prince Harry said elsewhere in his book was his “favorite nanny” and had acted like a surrogate mother after Princess Diana’s death.
Another was a close childhood friend, one of the four sons of Hugh and Emilie van Cutsem, friends of King Charles III.
Prince Harry wrote: “Several close mates and beloved figures in my life, including one of Hugh and Emilie’s sons, Emilie herself, and even Tiggy, had chastised me for Oprah.
How could you reveal such things? About your family?
“I told them that I failed to see how speaking to Oprah was any different from what my family and their staffs, had done for decades—briefing the press on the sly, planting stories.”
Harry said he compared his own disclosures to his father’s authorized biography, written by journalist Jonathan Dimbleby in 1994, which suggested Prince Philip bullied him to tears and the only place he was guaranteed a hug was in the nursery with his nanny.
“And what about the endless books on which they’d cooperated,” Harry wrote, “starting with Pa’s 1994 crypto-autobiography with Jonathan Dimbleby? Or Camilla’s collaborations with the [former Daily Mail] editor Geordie Greig? The only difference was that Meg and I were upfront about it.
“We chose an interviewer who was above reproach, and we didn’t once hide behind phrases like ‘Palace sources,’ we let people see the words coming out of our mouths.”
Charles would take Prince Harry and Prince William to stay with the van Cutsems “for a week or two, during school holidays and summers,” according to the prince.
And Tiggy was “one of our nannies. Our favorite nanny, to be accurate, though Tiggy couldn’t stand being called that. She’d bite the head off anyone who tried.
“‘I’m not the nanny, I’m your friend!’ Mummy, sadly, didn’t see it that way. Mummy saw Tiggy not as a nanny but as a rival.
“It’s common knowledge that Mummy suspected Tiggy was being groomed as her future replacement. (Did Mummy see Tiggy as her Spare?) Now this same woman whom Mummy feared as her possible replacement was her actual replacement—how dreadful for Mummy.
“Every hug or head pat from Tiggy, therefore, must’ve unleashed some twinge of guilt, some throb of disloyalty, and yet I don’t remember that.”
During the Oprah Winfrey interview, Meghan said the royals had discussed the possibility of denying her children prince and princess titles and police protection, though they have ultimately been given titles.
Asked whether race was a factor, she replied that an unnamed royal had “concerns and conversations about how dark” her unborn son’s “skin might be when he’s born.”
Royal book Endgame, by Omid Scobie, later revealed King Charles III had written to Meghan after the interview to suggest there was no malice contained in any remark made.
Meghan also said she experienced suicidal thoughts while pregnant and during a storm of media criticism that she argued Kensington Palace did not protect her from.
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Source: New York Post