The Queen’s youngest son Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, has played down the impact of the highly public and increasingly fierce attacks on Britain’s Royal Family by his disgruntled nephew, Prince Harry, joking that he and his wife do not even know who Oprah Winfrey is.
“Oprah who?” he asked with a smile when pressed by Telegraph Magazine on the question of the bombshell interview his nephew and his wife, former television starlet Meghan Markle, gave to U.S. talk show host Oprah Winfrey.
“Yes, what interview?” added the Earl’s wife, Sophie, Countess of Wessex, with what their interlocutor described as a chuckle.
Camilla Tominey, interviewing, said she had the impression that the royal pair were joking, but the Countess did defend the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, when Tominey relayed an anecdote about the clergyman having reportedly had a long conversation with Winfrey without realising who she was.
“You know, if you’re not into chat shows, there’s no reason why you should know who she is,” said the Countess.
“Certainly not in this country, anyway.”
The Wessexes, aged 57 and 56, have found themselves taking on more duties as working royals since the younger Sussexes abandoned their public roles — but not their titles — in order to move to California and pursue money-making ventures and woke activism.
As a younger son of a senior royal, like Harry, the Earl also attempted to make his own way in the world, heading up the television production company Ardent until 2002 — when, unlike Harry, he stepped away from his private interests in order to offer full-time support to the work of his ageing mother, now in her mid-nineties.
His wife Sophie is not entirely dissimilar to Harry’s wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, being the commoner daughter of a well-to-do sales director, and trained as a secretary and ultimately ended up running her own public relations firm prior to marrying into royalty — but like her husband she has given up her career in order to devote herself to public duties.
Also like Meghan, Sophie’s children do not bear the title of prince or princess, despite being even closer in relation to the Queen as grandchildren rather than great-grandchildren — casting Meghan’s hints that her son Archie was somehow singled out for poor treatment by not being made an HRH into doubt.
Rather than focus on Harry and Meghan’s exploits, Prince Edward was keen to stress the legacy of his recently deceased father, Prince Philip, a Second World War veteran and the Queen’s consort of over seven decades.
“It was extraordinarily odd walking into St George’s Chapel and finding the nave completely empty. Coronavirus guidelines limiting the guest list to just 30 people meant the Queen was forced to sit two metres from her family – and well-wishers, banned from paying their respects in person, had no choice but to watch on television,” he lamented, reflecting on Prince Philip’s state funeral.
Images of the elderly monarch sitting alone at her husband’s funeral despite being double-vaccinated caused some disquiet in Britain, with Brexit leader Nigel Farage remarking that it was “desperately sad” to see her separated from family members due to the “inhuman” coronavirus rules.
Harry also attended the funeral, minus his wife, but the brief reunion with his family does not appear to have thawed relations between them, with his public complaints having only intensified on his return to California.
Indeed, the 36-year-old even saw fit to criticise the parenting skills of the Queen and his late grandfather on an expletive-laden podcast with actor Dax Shepard, complaining that his own father Prince Charles had passed on “a lot of genetic pain and suffering”.
More recently, Harry railed that he “will never be bullied into silence” and revealed that his wife had “share[d] with me [her] suicidal thoughts and the practicalities of how she was going to end her life” while six months pregnant as a result of what he alleged was “total neglect” by the royals.
Meghan told Harry she would not go through with it because of “everything that had happened to my mum” and the fact that she did not want him “to be in a position of losing another woman in my life with a baby inside of her, our baby,” however.
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