Prince Harry has suggested that senior royals turned on his Diana-like wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, because she was “doing the job better” than them and overall just too popular with the public.
In the final three episodes of the Netflix docu-series they have produced, irrelevant social justice issues such as imperialism and the historic slave trade take a back seat to the royal infighting and personal psychodrama of their brief stint as working royals, which they gave up to pursue activism and a celebrity lifestyle in California.
One of their strongest narratives is that other royal communications teams were deliberately feeding the press stories about Meghan in order to shine the wheels of their own principles — or bury negative coverage of them in exchange for negative coverage of Meghan — with Harry suggesting that the root of the trouble may have been jealousy that they were too good in their public roles.
“When someone who’s marrying in, who should be a ‘supporting act’, is then stealing the limelight, or is doing the job better than the person who was born to do this, that upsets people, it shifts the balance” Harry suggested, with the show helpfully illustrating his point by overlaying an image of a newspaper headline claiming — perhaps dubiously — that Meghan was more popular than the Queen.
Tellingly, footage of Prince William and wife Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, is also displayed as Harry makes this case, with the Cambridges perhaps surprisingly receiving more direct criticism than any of Harry’s other relatives in the back half of ‘Megflix’.
“[Y]ou’ve been led to believe that the only way that your charities can succeed, and the only way that your reputation can be grown or improved is if you’re on the front page of those newspapers,” Harry said of the royal mentality.
He suggested the Telegraph leading with Meghan in coverage of an event attended by all the top royals, including the Queen, was particularly irksome, with Meghan herself expressing horror at what she claimed was unwanted attention.
Not for the first time, Harry compared his wife’s situation to that of his mother Diana, the “People’s Princess”, whom the press were often much keener to interact with than her comparatively unglamorous husband, King Charles III, then Prince of Wales.
Other guests and news clips were used to build up this idea of Meghan as “a royal rock star” who left the Palace feeling “threatened” — a picture of reality curiously at odds with polling showing that she is in fact less popular than any high-profile royal other than the controversial Prince Andrew, with the third-lowest on the totem pole being Harry himself.
Prince William, who is said to have subjected Harry — an Afghanistan veteran — to a “terrifying” torrent of screaming and shouting at a meeting of top royals ahead of ‘Megxit’ — is meanwhile the most popular royal, followed by his wife.
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