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Prince Philip was silent in the days following his grandson Harry and Meghan Markle’s explosive interview with Oprah Winfrey. But in the wake of the Duke of Edinburgh’s death last week at the age of 99, his biographer Gyles Brandreth has revealed his friend thought the tell-all chat was “madness.”
Meghan and Harry set off a bomb in royal circles when they claimed someone in the Royal Family had expressed concerns about the colour of their son Archie’s skin after he was born.
“That was relayed to me from Harry, those were conversations that family had with him,” Meghan recounted in an interview with Winfrey last month.
Elsewhere in the two-hour broadcast, Meghan claimed that life as royal was awful and that when she asked the family for help her pleas were ignored. “I just didn’t want to be alive anymore,” she told Winfrey.
“I know from someone close to him that he thought Meghan and Harry’s interview with Oprah Winfrey was ‘madness’ and ‘no good would come of it,'” Brandreth told the Daily Mail. “I was not surprised because that is exactly how he described to me the personal TV interviews given by Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, back in the 1990s.”
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Meghan and Harry were widely criticized for participating in the interview while Philip was in hospital during a month-long stay, but Brandreth said the fact they sat down with Winfrey didn’t trouble him.
“What did worry him was the couple’s preoccupation with their own problems and their willingness to talk about them in public. ‘Give TV interviews by all means,’ he said, ‘but don’t talk about yourself,'” Brandreth said.
“That was one of his rules. I know he shared it with his children. I imagine he shared it with his grandchildren, too.”
Following Harry and Meghan’s allegations of royal bigotry, many viewers watching took to social media to paint Philip, who himself had been accused in the past of displaying casual racism, as the culprit.
“I don’t know who it was,” TV personality Megyn Kelly said the following day in an interview on Good Morning Britain. “But while the guy’s in hospital, you might want to put a corral around him and say, ‘I can tell you it’s not the suffering 99-year-old.’ Something to throw the guy a bone.”
After the broadcast, Winfrey confirmed to Deadline that the comment about Archie’s skin tone didn’t come from Queen Elizabeth II or Prince Philip.
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Elsewhere in his interview with the Daily Mail, Brandreth said Philip wasn’t pleased his grandson and his wife moved to America last year.
“Harry had only succeeded his grandfather as Captain General of the Royal Marines in 2017. Philip had done the job for 64 years. Harry had barely managed 30 months. The Duke of Edinburgh was not pleased, nor did he believe that Harry and Meghan were doing the right thing.”
But, Brandreth added, Philip said, “People have got to lead their lives as they think best.”
After arriving back in the U.K. on Sunday without his wife and son, Harry praised Philip on Monday for his devotion to “granny” Queen Elizabeth.
“He was authentically himself, with a seriously sharp wit, and could hold the attention of any room due to his charm and also because you never knew what he might say next,” said Harry.
Philip’s funeral is set to take place this Saturday.
Prince Philip called Meghan Markle and Prince Harry's Oprah interview 'madness' - Toronto Sun
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