Harry says William ‘screamed and shouted’ at him at crisis Sandringham meeting
The Duke of Sussex has claimed his brother, the Prince of Wales, screamed and shouted at him at a crisis summit in January 2020 at Sandringham in front of the Queen. His wife, Meghan, had “deliberately not been invited, Harry says, to the gathering at which the couple’s plans to step back from royal duties was to be discussed.
Harry says he went to that Sandringham meeting with five options ranging from option one “all in”, to option five “all out”, and that in the meeting he chose option three – for them to have their own jobs, but continue to support the Queen’s work in the Commonwealth, while living abroad in Canada.
“But it became very clear,” he says, “that option was not up for debate.
“It was very terrifying to have my brother scream and shout at me and my father says things that were just simply untrue, and my grandmother quietly sit there and sort of take it all in.”
A joint statement was issued on the day of the Sandringham meeting declaring a front page story about the brothers’ relationship as false, offensive and potentially harmful.
But Harry said in episode five of the Netflix documentary: “Once I got in the car after the meeting, I was told about a joint statement that had been put out in my name and my brother’s name, squashing the story about him bullying us out of the family.”
He continued: “I couldn’t believe it. No one had asked me. No one had asked me permission to put my name to a statement like that. I rang Meghan and I told her and she burst into floods of tears because within four hours they were happy to lie to protect my brother, and yet for three years they were never willing to tell the truth to protect us.
“So there was no other option at this point. I said: ‘We need to get out of here.’”
Key events
The Duchess of Sussex said she felt free to finally wear colourful outfits during her royal farewell tour in the UK. Meghan said “Until that last week in the UK, I rarely wore colour and I never wanted to upstage or ruffle any feathers, so I just tried to blend in. But I wore a lot of colour that week, I felt “well let’s just look like a rainbow.”
She’s A Rainbow by the Rolling Stones is playing over a montage of clips as Harry explains they “wanted to go out with a bang.”
Nuance often feels out of fashion in a social media age, I know, but one thing I thought after watching the first three episodes is that it can be true that the royal family did not treat Meghan very well, and that a lot of the British press had racist undertones to the way that they covered her.
And it can also be true at the same time that as a couple they can come across as a bit attention-seeking and lacking self-awarensss about how things are going to come across. The documentary has just followed up a really quite harrowing bit with Meghan tearfully talking about her fears over death threats with a bit of them doing guided meditation, and it just suddenly felt somewhat self-indulgent again as Meghan started talking about them “looking back at our whole love story.”
The documentary has gone off at a bit of a tangent here about online hateful content, tracing online abuse of Meghan and the couple back to some 80 specific accounts that agitate and foment stories that then get widely amplified across the platforms. Netflix is giving us a bit of a lecture on how online radicalisation happens here.
They are suggesting that Samantha Markle, Meghan’s estranged half-sister who was mentioned in the earlier episodes, may have been involved in some way on this online activity, but I am – all jokes from earlier aside – going to be quite clear that at this point in the documentary they have put up a caption which reads that her attorney has maintained that “Samantha’s Twitter account has never been ‘suspended’ but was instead ‘hacked’, resulting in ‘imposter accounts’ made by third parties to defame his client” and that the claims are denied.
Harry says one of the problems is that journalists on social platform can amplify lies, which he describes as “unethical and an abuse of power”.
One of the social media experts being interviewed – I didn’t catch his name earlier apologies – says that for the core accounts the motivation is about monetisation, but for the second tier that amplify the message, the motivation is hatred, and often about race.
It is a pattern you see very widely on Twitter and YouTube, where making controversial tweets and videos can earn you money once you’ve got enough of a group of people who will nod and retweet along with it.
“The seriousness of what happened to her, what happened to us, and what continues to happen to her,” Harry says, “That needs to be acknowledged.”
Meghan is talking about reading through the manual for her security staff and how it has guidance on how to report death threats to her on social media with examples.
Meghan says “you are making people want to kill me. It’s not just some tabloid. It’s not just some story. You are making me scared. Are we safe? Are the doors locked? That’s real. Are my babies safe? And you’ve created it for what? Because you’re bored? It sells your papers?”
Meghan says the coverage took her sense of self away from her. “The truth didn’t matter – the clickbait did,” she says.
“It was my decision; she never asked to leave,” says Harry, saying that the media blaming the woman for the decision of a couple was misogyny.
Harry says: “The saddest part of it was the wedge created between me and my brother so that he’s now on the institution’s side, and part of me I get that. That’s his inheritance. So to some extent, it’s already ingrained in him that part of his responsibility is the survivability and the continuation of this institution.”
“From their perspective, they [the royal family] had to believe that it was more about us and maybe the issues we had, as opposed to their partner the media and their relationship with it that was causing so much pain for us,” Harry says.
“It was really hard,” says Harry. “The meeting finished without any solidified action plan.”
Anybody who has ever worked in an office can tell you that is the worst kind of meeting, regardless of whether there’s also a family row involved.
Harry says William ‘screamed and shouted’ at him at crisis Sandringham meeting
The Duke of Sussex has claimed his brother, the Prince of Wales, screamed and shouted at him at a crisis summit in January 2020 at Sandringham in front of the Queen. His wife, Meghan, had “deliberately not been invited, Harry says, to the gathering at which the couple’s plans to step back from royal duties was to be discussed.
Harry says he went to that Sandringham meeting with five options ranging from option one “all in”, to option five “all out”, and that in the meeting he chose option three – for them to have their own jobs, but continue to support the Queen’s work in the Commonwealth, while living abroad in Canada.
“But it became very clear,” he says, “that option was not up for debate.
“It was very terrifying to have my brother scream and shout at me and my father says things that were just simply untrue, and my grandmother quietly sit there and sort of take it all in.”
A joint statement was issued on the day of the Sandringham meeting declaring a front page story about the brothers’ relationship as false, offensive and potentially harmful.
But Harry said in episode five of the Netflix documentary: “Once I got in the car after the meeting, I was told about a joint statement that had been put out in my name and my brother’s name, squashing the story about him bullying us out of the family.”
He continued: “I couldn’t believe it. No one had asked me. No one had asked me permission to put my name to a statement like that. I rang Meghan and I told her and she burst into floods of tears because within four hours they were happy to lie to protect my brother, and yet for three years they were never willing to tell the truth to protect us.
“So there was no other option at this point. I said: ‘We need to get out of here.’”
Harry says the royal family were only willing to make a date for the meeting after Meghan had departed for Canada to be with Archie.
Meghan says imagine having a conversation about the whole future of your life, with you as the mum and the wife and target, “aren’t invited to have a seat at the table”.
“It was clear to me that they planned it so that you weren’t in the room,” Harry says.
Meghan said in the documentary that their intentions to continue supporting the Queen and the Commonwealth were “in black and white” in the statement.
“This idea that I supposedly blindsided my grandmother just never happened. I have so much respect for her,” Harry said.
Meghan said: “This has been on going for months and months,” but some people portrayed it like an impulsive post to Instagram.
Harry says his attempts to have a meeting with palace staff to discuss it were rebuffed.
“Our story, our life, literally got taken from underneath us,” says Harry.
Meghan said they put out a statement saying sadly they would be “stepping back, not stepping down”.
“For my whole life, the purse strings have been controlled by my father,” Harry said.
Harry accuses Charles’ office of leaking letter to press about proposed move to Canada
In episode five of the Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan, the Duke of Sussex has accused his father’s office of leaking private correspondence between Harry and Charles to the media over his plans to move to Canada.
“The key piece of that story that made me aware that the contents of the letter between me and my father had been leaked was that we were willing to relinquish our Sussex titles. That was the giveaway.”
Harry maintains this possibility was only mentioned in written communications with his father up to that point. He had been reluctant to put the plans in writing. The documentary also contains a claim that Harry was prevented from meeting the Queen to discuss the plans, when she had previously invited the couple to stay with her and have tea.
Harry is detailing how his father, now King Charles III, was insisting on getting their plans to move to Canada in writing, which Harry says he was reluctant to do because he was concerned about whther it would remain a secret.
Once plans are made a matter of public discussion, he says, nine times out of 10 they fail.
Before they left, Harry said he spoke to the Queen, and she had invited him to stay with her at Sandringham. Harry then said he got a message saying that she was now busy and they couldn’t go, and he says he rang the Queen and she said: “I’ve been told that I’m busy all week.”
“This is when a family and a family business are in direct conflict,” says Meghan. “They are blocking you from seeing the Queen, but really what they are doing is blocking a grandson from seeing his grandmother.”
Harry says the couple now knew that the story of their plans was going to come out in the press.
Meghan is essentially saying the compromise they were offering was her and Harry would work on behalf of the Queen for free in Canada, and avoid having to deal with the royal media circus in London. That, she said, would free up the front pages for the rest of the family, whom the couple have said in part four were jealous of the positive coverage that Meghan was initially getting.
“We wanted to remove the public interest element” from media coverage, Harry says, by not being funded by the public.
Harry’s paranoia about the media chasing him down features again, telling about how they had moved to Vancouver Island specifically because it was an island, and then paparazzi were still there.
“We’re going to have to change this,” says Harry, saying they have to protect their mental health. He says he phoned his father and said: “What if we move to Canada?”
Harry says at this point “we were really passionate about continuing our work within the Commonwealth” and he wanted to support the Queen.
“Everything changed after that,” says Meghan. “That litigation [against the Mail on Sunday over the letter] was probably the catalyst for everything unravelling.”
They were duly advised by the palace not to take legal action, and Meghan said she reminded them that the advice from senior members of the family had been to write the letter in the first place. Harry says after months of delay they took independent legal advice.
The duchess’s lawyer, Jenny Afia, is now here, saying her thing about negative breifing from the palace to suit other people’s agendas, and the royals usually adopting a “never explain” position with the media.
Meghan is now talking about how she was convinced to try to write a letter to her father to trigger a rapprochement, but there were complications in getting it sent. Meghan says she couldn’t just send it directly from the palace. When she gets confirmation it has been received, she says, it is obvious to her that it has been signed for by someone who wasn’t her father, and she knows his handwriting.
The letter then became public. “It was horrendous,” she says. She says that the Daily Mail said “we have the full and complete five-page letter”
The letter ended up the subject of litigation. She is complaining that the Mail published it in a redacted format that took out key details.
Harry then says why would the Mail be “stupid” to publish the letter between daughter and father, and he says the answer is simple, that the paper knew the palace would encourage them not to sue.
NOTE TO SELF: Remember to avoid the Guardian getting sued by writing this stuff out from the documentary (this is a joke by the way).
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