Los Angeles: The much-anticipated second volume of “Harry & Meghan”, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s documentary about their experiences with the British Royal Family, has dropped and it’s already making waves in the UK, reports ‘Variety’.
One headline describes the final three episodes of the series as “Harry’s all-out war on William and Charles”, thanks to a series of revelations and accusations the couple make about Prince William, King Charles III, and their staff.
The docuseries suggests, via interviews with the couple’s friend Lucy Fraser, that their first royal tour to Australia shortly after their wedding was where things started to go wrong after the Royal Family saw how popular Harry and Meghan were, adds ‘Variety’.
“The internals at the palace were incredibly threatened by that,” Fraser says, according to ‘Variety’. Harry adds: “The issue is when someone who’s marrying in, who should be a supporting act, is then stealing the limelight or doing the job better than the person who was born to do this. That upsets people, it shifts the balance.”
Among the most explosive claims in the docuseries are that Prince William “bullied him” out of the Royal Family and “traded” stories with the press and his father, King Charles III, told lies about him and possibly leaked stories to the media.
“There’s leaking but there’s also planting of stories,” Harry claims, according to ‘Variety’, of the Royal Family’s relationship with the media. He also said he and his brother, who originally shared an office and staff within Kensington Palace, had sworn never to “trade” stories with the media, a practice he describes as offering journalists a story on members of the family to quash a negative story about to come out about themselves.
“And to see my brother’s office copy the very same thing we promised the two of us would never ever do, that was heartbreaking,” Harry says, although he doesn’t give any specific examples of what stories Prince William tried to suppress.
Harry also implies his father (or at least his father’s staff) leaked the story about him and Meghan wanting to move to Canada.
The prince details how his father demanded Harry and Meghan put their plans to “step back” from the Royal Family in writing, which Harry says he was reluctant to do because the last time he had put similar plans in writing to his father, they had ended up in the media.
Perhaps the most damning claim, according to ‘Variety’, in the entire nearly six-hour-long series is that William bullied Harry out of the royal family.
Harry recalls that after the couple’s plans to leave the UK were made public, a meeting was arranged with Queen Elizabeth II at her country home Sandringham with William and Charles also in attendance.
“It was terrifying to have my brother scream and shout at me and my father say things that weren’t true and my grandmother quietly sit there and take it all in,” Harry says of how the meeting went down, his interview interspersed with videos of the brothers, who are only two years apart, playing together as children.
–IANS