Netflix have released the final three episodes of the Harry & Meghan documentary. Here is what we learned:
The Duchess of Sussex spoke of having a miscarriage while living in the US after the birth of the couple’s first child, which Prince Harry says he blames on the actions of Associated Newspapers – publisher of the Mail On Sunday and Mail Online.
The couple were engaged in legal action over the paper reproducing in February 2019 a letter that Meghan had sent to her estranged father, Thomas Markle. Harry says: “I believe my wife suffered a miscarriage because of what the Mail did. I watched the whole thing. Now, do we absolutely know that the miscarriage was caused by that? Of course we don’t. But bearing in mind the stress that caused, the lack of sleep and the timing of the pregnancy – how many weeks in she was – I can say from what I saw, that miscarriage was created by what they were trying to do to her.”
Harry 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 said, 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. “It became very clear,” Harry said, “that the 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.”
Harry said a joint statement that was issued on the day of the Sandringham meeting declaring a front-page story about the brothers’ relationship as false, offensive and potentially harmful was done without his knowledge.
The Duke of Sussex 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,” he said. “That was the giveaway.” Harry maintains this possibility was only mentioned in written communications with his father up to that point.
The Duchess of Sussex described feeling suicidal after her treatment by the British media. In a clip Meghan said she just wanted to not be there, and Harry said that he did not handle the situation well and “I hate myself now” for the way he reacted as “institutional Harry” rather than “husband Harry”. “I wanted to go somewhere to get help,” Meghan said. “But I wasn’t allowed to. They were concerned how that would look for the institution.”
Meghan said they did the interview with Oprah Winfrey because “people just didn’t really understand why we left” and that without their side of the story being put, there was a vacuum. “It was less about setting the record straight as filling in the blanks that other people were filling in for us.”
Meghan said she thought the main takeaway from the Oprah interview would be about her struggles with mental health, not race. The couple were seen reacting to the statement from the Queen releasedafter the interview being shown, in which the late Elizabeth II said “The whole family is saddened to learn the full extent of how challenging the last few years have been for Harry and Meghan. The issues raised, particularly that of race, are concerning. While some recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately.”
Harry described one of the first things he saw on social media after the birth of his son Archie was the tweet by BBC Radio 5 Live presenter Danny Baker which depicted a black and white photo of a well-dressed couple next to a suited chimpanzee with the caption: “Royal baby leaves hospital”. Baker departed the BBC over the tweet, which he had subsequently deleted.
Meghan spoke of her disquiet over death threats, saying of the media coverage of her “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?”
Harry said returning to the UK for the funeral of his grandfather, Prince Philip, was hard because of the attitude of his brother and father towards him. “It was hard. Especially spending a time having chats with my brother and father who were just, you know, very much focused on the same misinterpretation of the whole situation. None of us really wanted to have to talk about it at my grandfather’s funeral, but we did. I’ve had to make peace with the fact that I’m probably never going to get genuine accountability or a genuine apology.”
Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace have declined to comment on the documentary.
You can read a full report from my colleague Caroline Davies here:
Stuart Heritage has also cast his eye over the documentary this morning:
Thank you very much for joining me for our live coverage, which is now closing.
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So what did I make of it? Well, as I’ve mentioned, I personally feel like everything Harry has done seems to come off as being driven by the experiences of his childhood with the media coverage of his mum, and he’s essentially sought to change his whole life to avoid his children having the same experience.
I think it is perfectly possible to believe that there was negative briefing about the couple, that racism is a factor in the way that Meghan was covered by the press in the UK, and also that the couple can come off as annoyingly self-centred and a bit tone deaf at times. As an informative work, the documentary would definitely have benefited from anybody putting a bit of context into it from a more neutral viewpoint than the “this is our story, our way” path it took, but I guess for the couple that was the whole point.
The industrial-level production of negative stories about the documentary and the vociferous refusal in some quarters to accept that racism framed some of the coverage in the media tells its own story.
Anyway, thank you for joining me and reading along. I’m going to write a summary post of the key points made in today’s three episodes, and then I’m going to go and do something else.
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The bit I am not skipping forward is the captions that have gone up with legal disclaimers about the comments made in the documentary about Jason Knauf [see 12.58am GMT]. I will repeat them in full here. They read:
In response to allegations that Mr Knauf submitted a voluntary witness statement in connection with the Daily Mail litigation with the consent of Prince William’s office, a representative for Mr Knauf sent the following statement:
These claims are entirely false. Mr Knauf was asked to provide evidence by both the Duchess of Sussex and Associated Newspapers.
He was advised by counsel that evidence in his possession could be relevant and he then provided this directly to the courts, staying neutral in the process.
The Duchess of Sussex attorneys responded with the following statement:
The legal team for Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, disputes this claim. Mr Knauf was not asked to provide a witness statement by The Duchess or her tea.
Nor do her attorneys believe Mr Knauf remained “neutral” y submitting a witness statement relied on by Associated Newspapers whilst working fo the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.
The documentary appears to be coming to a close, with Meghan reading a fairytale-esque version of their story off a phone while we get lots of archive clips. I must confess I’ve skipped forward through this bit.
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“We are exactly where we are supposed to be,” says Harry. I assume he means in California, not on Netflix.
I think we are on the last stretch now. There’s some upbeat music vibes, Follow the Sun by Xavier Rudd, and lots of shots of the family playing and vistas of their new life in California. Although there are still nine minutes to go, so who knows?
Harry says he misses “the weird family gatherings” and he misses the UK and friends, and notes: “I’ve lost a few friends in this process as well.”
“I came here because I’ve changed. I’d outgrown my environment,” he says, and mentions that California was probably one of the places where his mother would have ended up living.
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There’s more yoga and meditation now as Meghan is saying she just wants to be at peace with herself. The editing on this documentary does have some genuinely odd jarring moments.
Meghan’s niece, Ashleigh, is back. You may – or may not – recall from last week that her and Meghan fell out after the palace stopped Ashleigh from coming to the wedding because Ashleigh’s maternal mother was Samantha Markle who had been talking a lot to the newspapers about Meghan.
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We are back to the court case with the Mail now, and I’m going to tread lightly here as they are discussing Jason Knauf. For clarity he is frequently correctly described as being a former aide to the Sussexes, but he is also a former aide to Prince William and is on the board of the Earthshot Prize, which William is involved in. There has been some disagreement over the years over who said what to who and when. Knauf’s witness statement became an important factor in the court case.
One of the frustrations of this documentary as anything approaching a journalism project is that the people speaking are all from Meghan and Harry’s team, and there is no interrogative interview at any point. Former palace spokesperson James Holt is involved with the Archewell Foundation that has been promoted during the episodes. We hear from Meghan’s lawyer, but not from any other legal expert about the case, and so forth.
There’s a US news interview clip now where Meghan is saying that she was doing the court case to “stand up for what’s right”.
Harry says: “As has been proven time and time again, there’s an incentive for the British media to get you to trial, because they can make so much money, and create such a circus around it, which is exactly what they did here.”
I must interject personally at this point to say that is almost entirely the opposite of everything I’ve ever been taught about media law, responsible reporting and not landing my employers with massive court costs, but I have not worked in every newsroom and so I cannot speak for the prevailing culture everywhere.
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There’s a moment now that I think gets to the heart of it. As I’ve mentioned before, I just feel like the main thing that came across in the first three episodes was that Harry grew up with a deeply damaging experience of the media intrusion on his mother. After some more clips of the kids, he says:
Just seeing Archie running across the lawn and a big smile, this is the world that he knows. He spent his first five months in Windsor, that was it. This is home to him. This is home to Lili. And this is our home.
I can’t help feeling that the entire premise of the decisions Harry and Meghan have made is driven by his desire to avoid his children having the same childhood that he did.
Other media will no doubt criticise the couple for talking about privacy while also publishing loads of clips of their kids on Netflix, but the difference here surely is that Archie and Lilibet are being seen in home movies filmed in the same sorts of circumstances that parents the world over film their kids using their phones. It is a world apart from that grim footage of the royal children being assembled on parade at a ski resort in the 1990s, or Diana being chased through an airport trying to hide her face with a tennis racket.
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“I think at the moment I see a lot of my wife in Archie and a lot of my mum in Lili,” Harry says. “She’s very Spencer-like”. There are a lot of home movies now, and Serena Williams reappears to say: “Friends can be family too.”
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There are then some clips of the couple’s second child, introduced as Lilibet Diana, at a very young age, resting on Meghan.
In the Netflix documentary, the Duke of Sussex said returning for the funeral of his grandfather, Prince Philip was hard because of the attitude of his brother and father towards him.
“It was hard. Especially spending a time having chats with my brother and father who were just, you know, very much focused on the same misinterpretation of the whole situation. None of us really wanted to have to talk about it at my grandfather’s funeral, but we did.”
“I’ve had to make peace with the fact that I’m probably never going to get genuine accountability or a genuine apology. You know, my wife and I, we’re moving on.”
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In a reference to Harry’s mother’s funeral, one of Harry’s friends says that “to be walking behind the coffin again must have brought up some other stuff as well,” as we see Charles, William and Harry among the entourage accompanying Philip’s cortege. Prince Andrew is also briefly in shot.
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We have now fast-forwarded to the death of Prince Philip, and Harry is showing footage on his phone of black cabs paying their respects outside Buckingham Palace. Harry is clearly quite moved by it.
“My grandfather was a man of service, honour and great humour,” says Harry, after we’ve seen a segment of a heavily pregnant Meghan discussing with Harry how he can get back to the UK for the funeral.
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We then see the moment that Harry has apparently received a text from his brother. “I wish I knew what to do,” says Harry, in a clip that I suspect is going to be widely criticised for showing a clearly very personal moment in this story that was also conveniently being filmed for the ensuing documentary.
“I know,” Meghan tells Harry. “Let’s take a breather. Get some air and then decide.”
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Meghan is now reading out the royal family statement that was made after the interview, which was issued by the late Queen Elizabeth II:
The whole family is saddened to learn the full extent of how challenging the last few years have been for Harry and Meghan. The issues raised, particularly that of race, are concerning. While some recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately. Harry, Meghan and Archie will always be much-loved family members.
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We’ve cut back to the row about racism in the aftermath of the Oprah interview, with a clip of William being asked if the royal family is racist. “I haven’t spoken to him but I will do,” says William of his brother. “We are very much not a racist family.”
I’ve just reached a bit in the documentary where Meghan has said “Beyoncé just texted” and Harry’s face at that precise moment is potentially going to be a meme for the ages.
Harry’s reaction to Meghan getting a text from Beyoncé is everything #HarryandMeganNetflix pic.twitter.com/wz02oSrCsc
— Alice May Dear (@According2Al) December 15, 2022
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Meghan says that she thought the biggest takeaway from the interview would be about her talking about her depression and how deep it got, but “it was entirely eclipsed by the conversation about race,” she says.
“It was less about setting the record straight as filling in the blanks that other people were filling in for us,” Meghan says of the Oprah interview.
We’ve got to the bit where they discuss why they did the Oprah Winfrey interview. Meghan says the idea had been a long time in the making. She says “people just didn’t really understand why we left” and that without their side of the story being put, there was a vacuum.
But just prior to the interview, it emerged that there was to be an investigation into allegations of bullying against Meghan.
“The timing of the bullying story has even been admitted by the journalist that wrote it” to be a distraction from the interview, says James Holt – although, as I am often minded to write on live blogs, he does so without actually providing any evidence.
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We’ve had a long interlude of family videos now, which concludes with the announcement that Meghan was expecting the couple’s second child. Harry says he was shocked when people told him it had happened on the anniversary of his mother announcing that she was pregnant with him.
Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace decline to comment on latest documentary episodes
While I have been watching the documentary and live blogging, other journalists have been trying to contact some of the people who are mentioned but do not speak during the programme. PA Media has just reported “Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace have declined to comment on the Sussexes’ Netflix documentary, Harry & Meghan.”
That deeply personal segment has been followed by what is effectively a promo spot for the couple’s Archewell foundation.
“If we are going to have this glaring microscope on us at all times,” says Meghan, “if people are looking at us, then look at what we are looking at.”
Duchess of Sussex describes having a miscarriage, which Harry blames on 'what the Mail did'
In the final episode of the Harry & Meghan Netflix documentary, the Duchess of Sussex speaks of having a miscarriage while living in the US after the birth of the couple’s first child, which Prince Harry says he blames on the actions of Associated Newspapers – publisher of the Mail On Sunday and Mail Online. The couple were engaged in legal action over the paper reproducing in February 2019 a letter that Meghan had sent to her estranged father, Thomas Markle.
Harry says: “I believe my wife suffered a miscarriage because of what the Mail did. I watched the whole thing. Now, do we absolutely know that the miscarriage was caused by that? Of course we don’t.
“But bearing in mind the stress that caused, the lack of sleep and the timing of the pregnancy – how many weeks in she was – I can say from what I saw, that miscarriage was created by what they were trying to do to her.”
Meghan’s friend, Abigail Spencer, describes watching the duchess fall to the floor while she was holding her son, Archie, in her new home, having said “I’m having a lot of pain”.
Meghan’s lawyer, Jenny Afia, says in the documentary that the case was taking a huge toll on Meghan. Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, said “I thought she was brave and courageous. But that doesn’t surprise me because she is brave and courageous.”
The duchess goes on to say in the programme: “When I reveal things that are moments of vulnerability, when it comes to having a miscarriage and maybe having felt ashamed about that, like, it’s OK, you’re human, it’s OK to talk about that.
“And I could make the choice to never talk about those things, or I could make the choice to say with all the bad that comes with this, the good is being able to help other people. That’s the point of life, right, is connection and community like that.”
Meghan wrote a piece – The losses we share – in November 2020 for the New York Times about miscarriage, saying:
Losing a child means carrying an almost unbearable grief, experienced by many but talked about by few. In the pain of our loss, my husband and I discovered that in a room of 100 women, 10 to 20 of them will have suffered from miscarriage. Yet despite the staggering commonality of this pain, the conversation remains taboo, riddled with (unwarranted) shame, and perpetuating a cycle of solitary mourning.
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Oooooft. We’ve got to the bit of the documentary where Meghan’s friend Abigail Spencer, part of the group who had gone to the press to try and correct the narrative about Meghan, has had to point out that one of them had mentioned the letter in People magazine.
“You do something in total love and that is for good, and they find one piece, and then it becomes this whole other thing,” says Spencer.
If I recall correctly, that whole other thing is going to significantly undermine the Sussex case in court, in an action which they ultimately win a token amount of damages.
“They are making a fortune out of us,” says Meghan. Harry says the media never settle. Meghan is saying that the Mail’s attempt at getting disclosure extended to asking for all text messages on her phone including the words Kate, William and Archie, despite Archie not even being born or named at the point where she sent the letter that they published.
This has got quite into the knotty inside baseball weeds of how media litigation works. I’m fascinated about the footage here of Meghan dealing with the case personally. Her lawyer Jenny Afia is saying it was taking a huge toll on the duchess.
I’m just going to point out that currently the MailOnline homepage has 16 stories about the documentary leading the site, including video clips and gifs of lots of clips of the children headlined “Archie’s baby diaries: Unseen pictures in Harry and Meghan’s Netflix show reveal their son’s early days.”
The main headline is “Harry twists the knife”. None of the 16 stories appear to be headlined on the litigation between the Sussexes and the Mail, which has been a prominent theme throughout the episodes this morning.
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“Let’s create an entire tab on our homepage with her name” says Meghan, in possibly the first time that the actions of the obscure web-making job “information architect” have ever made an impression in a Netflix documentary.
She is criticising the paper for providing constant rolling coverage of her litigation against it.
The documentary now shows them having to build a wall round the property to stop photographers taking pictures from a distance on the hills, and there is a clip of Meghan saying Archie has been woken up by a helicopter that is now continuously circling over the property. “What is wrong with these people?” she says.
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There is now a video clip of Harry saying it is being filmed the day after “the Mail, once again, pinpointed our location and put it on their website”.
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Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, says that without needing long flights, it was much easier to visit her daughter and grandkids with them in the new house.
“We were there for six weeks and no one knew,” says Harry. “My family still thought I was in Canada.”
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Perry says there was no plan, and he offered them somewhere to stay. Harry says it “was a week before Covid and we had no security”.
“For the first six weeks,” Harry says, they were able to just walk around. The couple say they arrived with 13 suitcases. Meghan describes it as “a little slice of freedom”.
Harry says it was “bliss, because nobody knew we were there”.
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Episode six has opened with an interview with Tyler Perry, who has assisted Harry and Meghan. They are talking about when they first spoke, and he reassured her that her fears were valid.
He retells a moment he recalls seeing of Diana, Princess of Wales being hounded by photographers as she is trying to walk though an airport and she is protecting her face with a tennis racquet and the photographers are shouting for “one without the tennis racquet” and in a clearly distressed voice she is saying “No”. The clip appears to have been from a trip Diana made to Spain in the early 90s and makes for pretty grim watching.
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I am on to the last episode of what I guess is probably only season one of Harry & Meghan, as they will no doubt do a “What we did after the documentary” documentary at some point.
Several of you have messaged me to say you pity me having to sit through it. Certainly last week Lucy Mangan said the first three episodes were “so sickening I almost brought up my breakfast” in one of our TV review headlines of the year.
The episode is ending with Harry saying he reassured Meghan that their security would never be withdrawn.
“Meghan’s background, her heritage, the well-documented hate campaigns against us, suspicious packages being sent to the palaces specifically with her name on or my name on. They would never do that. And then they did it.”
There is a video diary clip where Harry says he was left with just three weeks to make alternative arrangements. “I am genuinely concerned for the safety of my family,” he says over footage of boats patrolling outside their location and someone trying to enter the property up the main driveway.
Episode five is over. I’m going to take a short break and then go on to what I might term “the season finale”.
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The documentary now has footage of Prince Edward and Sophie, Countess of Wessex, getting a less-than-stellar reception on a royal tour of Caribbean nations where the topics of reparations for the slavery trade and becoming republics made a very different backdrop to the kind of royal tours we had been used to seeing in the 1960s and 1970s. Barbados is shown declaring itself a parliamentary republic in 2021.
“Anyone inside that system, whether its my family, staff, PR, whoever it is, have already missed an enormous opportunity with my wife and how far that would go globally,” Harry says.
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“It was impossible not to feel emotional investment as a black British person,” says historian David Olusoga, “watching Meghan enter this institution, and become this icon. This figure that we all had these high hopes for.”
“Part of what makes the inablity of the palace to defend Meghan,” he continues, “an even bigger disaster is that at the centre of the argument for the monarchy in this country is the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth is 2.5bn mainly black and brown people. Here was a woman who just looked like most of the people in the Commonwealth. And they somehow, for some reason, couldn’t find the capacity to protect her, to represent her, to stand by her, to take on vested power in her name. To fight for her.”
“We appreciate everything that you did for our country” Meghan says somebody on their flight back to Canada said to her after that last royal engagement. “I tried so hard,” Meghan says. “And that’s the piece that’s so triggering cos you go ‘and it still wasn’t good enough and you still don’t fit in’.”
“The first time that we saw the [royal] family [again] was in public,” says Meghan, about their final engagement, at the Commonwealth service at Westminster Abbey, London in March 2020.
“It’s like living through a soap opera where everybody else views you as entertainment,” says Harry, slightly puzzlingly in his own documentary.
“It looked cold. And it felt cold,” Harry said.
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“I’m going to miss this country, and so is Meghan,” Harry says, after having explained agin that he feels it didn’t have to be this way.
Meghan said the public reception, even after two years of negative stories about her, was great.
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”.
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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?”
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Meghan says the coverage took her sense of self away from her. “The truth didn’t matter – the clickbait did,” she says.
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“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.
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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.”
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“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.’”
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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.
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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 ongoing 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.
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“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.
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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.
Updated
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.
Updated
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.
Updated
“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).
Updated
Episode five opens with some cute footage of Archie trying to navigate a cornfield maze. Meghan says that she felt alone a lot as a child, and wanted a big family.
“So when I was pregnant with Archie,” she says, “I was just so excited that we were going to create for him that thing that I had always wanted.”
She said she did everything to make them proud and “really be a part” of the royal family. “And then the bubble burst.”
“It was already clear to the media,” says Harry, “that the palace wasn’t going to protect her.”
Meghan says this was a turning point and that they started having harder conversations about “what has to happen for us to continue to make this work”.
And that is the end of part four. I am going to grab a coffee and then start part five. Do drop me a line at martin.belam@theguardian.com.
Updated
There is now a clip of an ITV documentary that had been greenlit by the palace about the trip to Africa, and Meghan says she thought it was just going to be a glossy brochure of the tour, and then she is being asked about her mental health in an interview that she says she din’t even expect to be used in the documentary.
The quotes went viral and spawned the hashtag #WeLoveYouMeghan, the couple say.
There is an archive clip of Diana talking about depression and being at the end of her tether.
Harry says “from an institution perspective” there was something wrong with Meghan revealing her struggles, rather than something wrong with the system. Harry says the media coverage was out of kilter with the reaction of the public.
Updated
The documentary now features Harry, Meghan and four-month-old Archie doing their first royal tour as a family in South Africa.
Aside from the legal situations with newspapers that I mentioned earlier, the allegations that there were negative briefings from inside the palace to favoured royal reporters about Meghan & Harry carries with it another bind for the press. As one supporter of the couple on Twitter put it succinctly:
Harry & Meghan have put royal reporters in the position of either having to admit that the palace was briefing against the couple OR that most of the press exclusives were completely fabricated.
Neither is a comfortable position to be in.
Lorren Khumalo, Archie’s former nanny, is being interviewed now, saying Harry and Meghan were “really hands on parents.”
Meghan says she didn’t just take care of Archie, “she took care of me.”
Harry described one of the first things he saw on social media after the birth being the tweet by BBC Radio 5 Live Danny Baker which depicted a black and white photo of a well-dressed couple next to a suited chimpanzee with the caption: “Royal baby leaves hospital.”
Baker departed the BBC over the tweet, which he had subsequently deleted.
“Their dignity and their right to be treated equally and have their humanity respected and acknowledge was secondary to a white patriarchal media establishment,” says historian Afua Hirsch.
Meghan’s mum says it was almost like “this is not your child, this is the institution’s child”.
Updated
After a high-profile baby shower in New York organised, Meghan says, by her friends at their own expense, sparked a backlash, we have reached the part where the Queen offered Harry and Meghan to move to Frogmore Cottage and have their first child.
The fake town crier who shouts the news as a hobby while wearing fancy dress has appeared right on cue to annoy me.
Footballer Ian Wright is shown celebrating, saying there is a black prince and it has changed the game.
Archive footage of the presentation of young royals is being shown, and the documentary is talking about how Meghan and Harry took a different approach, and that the palace was not sympathetic to her concerns about being shifted around to appear at the traditional hospital doors.
The media is then shown complaining that, as Harry put it, they hadn’t “served our child up on a platter”.
Updated
Meghan’s friends are now talking about how they got together to try and “turn the narrative around”.
Harry accuses William of breaking promise not to operate press office like their father had
Harry describes disagreeing with his father about taking on the media. Harry says he has 30 years’ experience of how it works. We get to the “It’s a dirty game” moment, when Harry says the communications offices at the palace work against each other.
Harry says that both he and William saw what happened with his dad’s office – presumably about his mother – and said that the two of them had agreed never to operate like that.
The documentary goes on to the moment when William and Harry split households.
“I would far rather get destroyed in the press than play along with this game, or this business of trading. To see my brother’s office copy the very same thing the two of us promised we would never ever do, that was heartbreaking,” Harry says.
Updated
Duchess of Sussex discusses being unable to get help when feeling suicidal in Netflix documentary
In the fourth episode of the Netflix Harry & Meghan documentary, the Duchess of Sussex has described feeling suicidal after her treatment by the British media. In a clip Meghan says she just wanted to not be there, and Harry says that he did not handle the situation well and “I hate myself now” for the way he reacted as “institutional Harry” rather than “husband Harry”.
“I wanted to go somewhere to get help,” Meghan says. “But I wasn’t allowed to. They were concerned how that would look for the institution.”
Meghan’s mother Doria Ragland describes finding out from her daughter that she had been suicidal, and says “To constantly be picked at by these vultures, picking away at her spirit, that she would actually want to think of not wanting to be here. That’s not an easy one for a mum to hear. And I can’t protect her. Harry can’t protect her.”
Meghan’s husband says “I was devasted. I knew that she was struggling. We were both struggling. But I never thought that it would get to that stage. ANd the fact that it got to that stage I felt angry and ashamed. I didn’t deal with it particularly well. I dealt with it as ‘institutional Harry’ rather than ‘husband Harry’, and what took over my feelings was my royal role. I had been trained to worry more about what are people going to think if we don’t go to this event. We’re going to be late. And looking back at it now I hate myself for it now.”
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. For more information visit www.samaritans.org. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
“The lies that’s one thing, you kind of get used to it in this family,” says Harry. But he says the effect it was having on Meghan, “enough of the pain and suffering.”
He described seeing his mum in floods of tears in a car, and then getting a thirty second warning to get ready to face the public and photographers.
Meghan says that there was a belief that if it was in a tabloid, people wouldn’t believe it, but then for the first time during a walkabout in Liverpool someone said to her “What you are doing to your father isn’t right” and the Duchess says she was rocked by it. “Oh my god people actually believe it.”
If you recall in last week’s episodes Meghan and Harry had become convinced that her father was being paid to generate publicity and stories ahead of her wedding by the media, and that when they were texting him and trying to call him, they were getting replies from someone else who had possession of his phone. Notably in a text message “her father” called her Meghan, when all her life she had been called “Megs” by him.
Again on the subject of the way that race has been part of the treatment of Meghan in the media, writer and broadcaster Nels Abbey wrote for the Guardian last week saying a white lens sees Harry and Meghan as villains – but through a Black one, they’ve done Britain a favour:
The Guardian columnist Afua Hirsch was widely condemned for labelling the Commonwealth of Nations “empire 2.0” in the documentary. Her sin was to “attack the Queen’s proudest legacy”.
The idea of “common wealth” would be a hard sell to any of the millions of Africans who are going to increasingly extreme lengths to flee the true legacy of colonialism – extreme poverty, low life expectancy and insecurity. But the white lens didn’t view Hirsch’s comments through the compassionate prism of the billions of Black and Brown victims of empire, but through the prism of what they decided would be the feelings of the Queen.
The white lens has played a major role in how Harry & Meghan, both the documentary and the living beings, are viewed. More broadly, it has played a major role in how Britain views itself, its place in the world and the people it has subjugated. As Britons of different ethnicities, we are often viewing the same events very differently. Yet what is considered the official record of events remains the property of the white lens.
Nevertheless, white mainstream Britain may not have known it, but Black people saw Meghan in some ways as a proxy for our own experiences. In the treatment she received, many saw a nation revealing its hand. And the new hand looked just like the old hand.
Whereas some will portray contributors to the documentary such as David Olusoga, Hirsch and Kehinde Andrews as anti-British incendiary radicals, most Black people will see them as deradicalisers of a nation radicalised by the white lens.
Read more here: Nels Abbey – A white lens sees Harry and Meghan as villains – through a Black one, they’ve done Britain a favour
The documentary has turned to racism being a factor in the coverage, and Harry says: “So many people expect racism to really just be the N-word. To say: ‘Oh none of that’s racist.’ You don’t understand.”
“The UK is perfect at doing this,” says Kehinde Andrews, the author of the New Age of Empire. “Nobody wants to be openly racist. That wouldn’t be civilised and that wouldn’t be British. But it’s perfectly fine to sort of give a nod to it. She’s a diva. She’s making people cry. This kind of ‘angry black woman’ trope. It just really came to the fore, really quite suddenly.”
Harry goes on to say: “Even the sterotyping or the association to drugs and terrorism.”
Munira Mahmud, a Grenfell Tower survivor, describes a time the media “put my picture and Meghan’s picture, saying that the mosque is related to Isis. Why?”
Updated
Other examples given in the documentary show Kate being praised for shoes and an elegant off-the-shoulder white gown, while Meghan was criticised for breaking royal protocol with similar relaxed shoes and showing too much shoulder.
“All of a sudden these tabloid stories started to appear criticising Meghan for everything,” says James Holt, a former palace spokesperson who has been a regular feature of the documentary. There is a particular Daily Mail headline criticising Meghan for touching her pregnancy bump highlighted on screen.
The contrast with how Kate’s pregnancy had been covered was elegantly skewered on social media at the time.
Spot the difference between the @DailyMailUK treatment of Kate and her “baby bump” and their attack on Meghan on exactly the same issue pic.twitter.com/1V7sLbEfSW
— Diane Abbott MP (@HackneyAbbott) January 11, 2020
Updated
The documentary now features a Remembrance Day event that Harry says every senior member of the royal family attended, including the late Queen. Then, in the morning at Buckingham Palace, the Sunday Telegraph arrived while the couple were having breakfast, and the front page featured Meghan rather than anybody else. There is also a clip of the Sunday Mirror with the headline “Meghan’s tribute to the fallen” and the Queen featuring only as an inset thumbnail picture.
Meghan says she said “Oh my God” when she saw it. Harry recalls her saying: “But it’s not my fault,” and that he told her: “I know. And my mum felt the same.”
There is then an archive clip of Diana, from the well-known Panorama interview, where Harry’s mother said: “We’d be going round Australia, and all you could here were people saying: ‘she’s on the other side’,” about members of the public disappointed they were getting a view of her husband, and not her.
The clip then has Martin Bashir asking her if she was flattered by the media attention, and she said: “No, because with the media attention came a lot of jealousy. A great deal of complicated situations arose because of that.”
Updated
It is worth noting that some of the media outlets most engaged with writing about the Harry & Meghan series last week and today are not dispassionate observers of events, but participants. Earlier in December, as my colleague Jim Waterson reported:
The Daily Mail has sought to delay the publication of potentially damaging court allegations about its journalism made by Prince Harry, Doreen Lawrence, Elton John and others.
Lawyers acting for the group of high-profile individuals claim they have “compelling and highly distressing evidence” they have been the “victims of abhorrent criminal activity and gross breaches of privacy” by Associated Newspapers over many years.
The claimants – who also include Sadie Frost, David Furnish and Liz Hurley – filed proceedings against Associated Newspapers at the start of October.
Read more here: Daily Mail seeks to delay court allegations of high-profile breaches of privacy
Harry claims Meghan's popularity 'upset' other members of royal family
Prince Harry claims there was resentment in the royal family at the popularity of Meghan during the couple’s official tour of Australia and New Zealand, during which they had announced that the Duchess of Sussex was pregnant.
In a pointed moment in the fourth episode of the Netflix Harry & Meghan documentary, Harry says: “The issue is when someone who is 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.”
Over a montage featuring Kate, now the Princess of Wales and the now King Charles III, Harry continues: “You’ve been led to believe that the only way your charities can succeed, and the only way that your reputation can be grown or improved, is if you are on the front pages of those newspapers. But the media are the one to choose who to put on the front page.”
Meghan’s friend Lucy Fraser says that she thinks the Australia tour was a turning point because they were so popular with the public. “The internals at the palace” did not like it, she says during an interview.
Updated
Historian David Olusoga says the couple seemed to speak so easily to a younger generation, and there are clips of them being rapturously received in Australia. They announced that Meghan was pregnant during the tour of Australia, New Zealand and Fiji.
The couple says there were 76 engagements on the tour and that it was gruelling. Harry said whenever you meet someone, “that’s their moment” and you have to give 100%.
Updated
Meghan stood with the Queen on that day during 72 seconds of silence as it fell on the one year anniversary of the Grenfell fire.
There is now a segment talking about the context of the Grenfell fire with one of the survivors who ended up in a hotel for about 19 months. Meghan is talking about her work with the survivors, and how she helped them launch a fundraising cookbook, which ended up being her first speech as a member of the royal family.
Meghan is talking about her first official engagement after the wedding with the late Queen Elizabeth II. There is a news clip saying that Meghan had “had the Queen in stitches” and “you rarely see the Queen giggle”. Meghan said she had a fantastic day, and was so pleased there was a grandmother figure in the family, while also having to keep a proper level or propriety.
Updated
Former palace spokesperson James Holt is saying that if you were writing the royal family as a novel, it was at this point you would write in a new character to give the institution a fresh younger diverse face.
Harry and Meghan are describing how they first lived in Nottingham Cottage, in the grounds of Kensington Palace, and how small it was. I suspect this segment is going to be pilloried for them coming across as ungrateful.
Updated
If I can be slightly disparaging for a moment, this episode so far is a bit like being forced to watch somebody else’s wedding video, but with added DVD commentary.
We are being treated to clips from the wedding. Harry says there wasn’t much pushback on having the gospel choir, who performed Stand By Me at the event. Harry says his dad helped organise it.
Serena Williams appears in the documentary as a friend of Meghan and says: “To have her culture represented at that wedding, amazing, I loved it. I thought it was really courageous and breaking boundaries, but not trying to.”
Dhru Purohit, another friend, describes a moment where celebrities including Oprah Winfrey and Idris Elba and himself had a chuckle without needing to say anything “because everybody knew exactly the layers of symbolism that were taking place that day”.
Updated
“Harry’s dad is very charming,” Meghan says. She says that she told Charles: “I’ve lost my father in all of this, so him as my father-in-law was very important to me,” and that is why she asked him to walk her down the aisle.
Updated
Meghan says that on the morning of her wedding all she wanted was some food and to be playing Chapel Of Love by the Dixie Cups, which is now the soundtrack as we see a montage of people looking forward to the wedding.
There are clips from international news coverage. I remember covering it myself and that at the time it was very much presented as a popular and much anticipated event. Meghan said she hadn’t realised people would be lining the street to cheer her on.
“There was an expectation – Diana’s boy – to have a public wedding” says Harry, saying that William had done it, and that once he had it was “job done” as far as the public were concerned.
The clips from the day include Phillip Schofield. There is no indication whether he queued for his spot or not.
Updated
I’ve started watching episode four, which has begun with archive footage of the weddings of the late Queen Elizabeth II, and then of Charles and Diana, and then of William of Kate.
There are soundbites from British TV chatshows describing Meghan as manipulative, and then some positive vox pops from the public about the couple being “the one that is going to change the face of the royal family”, and Meghan says “And I was really hopeful that was true.”
I’ll be watching the documentary this morning – partly because you might not want to sit through it all or be able to watch it right at the second it arrived – and I will bring you the key quotes and lines. I will also be monitoring reaction to the allegations it contains across the media, and will bring you some of the highlights of that too.
Netflix releases final three episodes of Harry & Meghan documentary
In the final three episodes of the series, which Netflix says was its most watched documentary last week, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to make the allegation that negative stories about Meghan were planted in the press by the royal household itself, in order to distract attention from other stories. The episodes became available at 8am GMT.
Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace have declined to comment on the allegations in advance.
In a trailer released in advance, as footage of Buckingham Palace is shown, Jenny Afia, of Schillings, says: “There was a real kind of war against Meghan and I’ve certainly seen evidence that there was negative briefing from the palace against Harry and Meghan to suit other people’s agendas.”
One of the duchess’s friends, Lucy Fraser, adds: “Meg became this scapegoat for the palace. And so they would feed stories on her whether they were true or not to avoid other less favourable stories being printed.”
As Meghan spoke in the trailer, footage was played of newspaper front pages with the headlines “Meghan made Kate cry” and “Heir heads” – about Kate and Meghan’s flower dress dispute and the Sussexes’ use of private planes – along with others saying “Meghan: I won’t parade with baby” and “Celeb BB royal ‘race’ row”.
We are not far away now from the second instalment of episodes becoming available. Here is a reminder of the trailer for what we are getting today, in which Harry says there was “institutional gaslighting” and in which Meghan says “I wasn’t being thrown to the wolves. I was being fed to the wolves.”
You can see similar deflection this morning. In the trailer this week, one of the interviewees describes a barrage of negative stories over a montage of newspaper headlines. One of the headlines featured ex-Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe, and so elements of the press have gone to her this morning, got a great quote that Meghan is “peddling conspiracy theories” because Widdecombe said she wasn’t briefed by the palace to give those quotes and BOSH! case closed as far as the Mail and the Sun are concerned.
In @TheSun
— Matt Wilkinson (@MattSunRoyal) December 15, 2022
Meghan Markle accused of “peddling conspiracy theories” on Netflix.
A story used to back up claim palace briefed against her and Harry was in fact comments made on TV by ex-Tory MP Ann Widdecombe in the Celebrity Big Brother House.https://t.co/XCfab3RM6h
But that’s not what the documentary is claiming or illustrating is it?
It is using front pages to illustrate that there was a barrage of negative stories. At no point is Widdecombe mentioned by name, at no point does the documentary appear to claim that ALL of those headlines were planted by the palace. It is such a perverse way of viewing a documentary and holding it to a standard that you would not do to any other TV show.
Updated
One of the intriguing aspect of the press backlash against the documentary has been the strenuous attempts to “fact check” the use of illustrative imagery and other standard documentary and television techniques.
One that really stood out for me was over something that interviewee historian and writer Afua Hirsch said. Hirsch said:
One of the realities of life in Britain is that if you go into a palace or a stately home or anywhere that represents tradition, you are likely to be faced with racist imagery. There are murals on the walls, or carvings on the ceiling that that depict enslaved people in a way that glorifies the institution of slavery.
The Mail Online has gone to tremendous lengths to track down all of the images shown in that segment to demonstrate that none of them were in royal palaces and suggesting therefore that the segment was misleading.
I nearly laughed out loud at the fact check defiantly saying that a 1780 painting of King George IV being dressed by a black servant was in fact hanging “in York Mansion House, which is the official residence of the Lord Mayor of York,” as if that didn’t prove exactly what Hirsch was saying: “if you go into a palace or a stately home or anywhere that represents tradition, you are likely to be faced with racist imagery.”
Historian David Olusoga was one of the people interviewed in the documentary to talk about race in Britain, and he also wrote for the Observer at the weekend, saying Meghan and Harry’s documentary has hit the raw nerve of tabloid prejudice:
The series reminds us that, back in 2017, when news of her relationship with Harry became public, Meghan and her backstory represented an extraordinary opportunity for the royal family. An interracial couple within the palace was presented by some – even some within the tabloids – as the apotheosis of a modernising process, not just for that institution but for Britain as a whole. The narrative was that Britain, and even her most conservative institutions, could elegantly embrace the diversity of the 21st century while maintaining its traditions.
Ultimately the story of Meghan and Harry became instead an example of conditional Britishness. Calling out the racist aspects of Meghan’s treatment was an unforgivable sin. And like the black and mixed-race players of the England football team – young men who choose to campaign against poverty or express their anti-racism rather than “sticking to football” – the couple were identified as transgressive. They had strayed from the narrow lane allotted to them.
Tabloid rule is rule by intimidation. It has long rested on the presumption that no one – not even the royals – would dare to stand up to the papers. The ongoing barrage of fury against the Sussexes is motivated therefore by more than the usual strategy of selling newspapers by monetising hate. It also reflects a creeping realisation that, for all their toxic and unwarranted power, the tabloids are ultimately incapable of destroying this couple.
Read more here: David Olusoga – Meghan and Harry’s documentary has hit the raw nerve of tabloid prejudice
I must confess that I was one of those a bit unimpressed with the revelations in the first batch of episodes, and didn’t feel that I had learned anything I didn’t already know.
What struck me most of all was that Harry seemed like someone who had been deeply affected by what he had witnessed of the way his mother was treated by the media when he was a young boy, and that he had never had a chance to process that trauma. The sequences showing him and his brother and their cousins as children being ordered around by photographers during a skiing holiday photocall were deeply unpleasant to watch.
As a consequence, it seemed to me, when he felt the same intrusion was being directed at his wife-to-be, he reacted very strongly to it. Given that he has moved ever further from being in line to the throne – as the title of his forthcoming autobiography Spare implies – it felt he had just reached a moment where he had questioned what was the point of them both being put through this any more?
Those viewing figures are all the more remarkable because there was quite a lot of gloating social media noise in the first couple of days after the episodes had launched that Harry & Meghan hadn’t made a dent in the top ten charts that the public can see on the Netflix home screen.
‘This is not a show that has even cracked the Netflix top ten here.’
— GB News (@GBNEWS) December 9, 2022
Showbiz Journalist, Sam Rubin, on what the US reaction has been to the first three episodes of Harry & Meghan’s Netflix documentary. pic.twitter.com/jDSMsJE1Je
As I mentioned earlier, Netflix have been touting the viewing figures for the documentary as a success. On Wednesday Sian Cain reported for us:
Harry & Meghan, Netflix’s documentary series about Britain’s Prince Harry and his wife, racked up more viewing time on the streaming service than any other documentary during its first week, the company said on Tuesday.
The first three episodes of Harry & Meghan recorded 81.55m viewing hours around the world after its debut last Thursday, Netflix said, “the highest view hours of any documentary title in a premiere week”. More than 28m households watched at least part of the series.
Harry & Meghan was the second-most watched English-language series on Netflix globally between 5 and 11 December, behind Tim Burton’s Addams Family drama Wednesday.
Harry & Meghan was the No 1 English-language series during the week in Britain, and No 2 in Australia and the US. It made Netflix’s television top 10 in 85 countries.
Read more here: Harry and Meghan becomes Netflix’s biggest documentary debut yet
Jenny Afia, who is a partner at Shillings law firm in London, appears in the documentary episodes we are about to get this morning. Yesterday Netflix released a clip in which she says:
There was a real kind of war against Meghan, and I’ve certainly seen evidence that there was negative briefing from the palace against Harry and Megan to suit other people’s agendas. This barrage of negative articles about the breakdown of the relationship with her father was the final straw in a campaign of negative nasty coverage about her.
Royal households accused of ‘war against Meghan’ to protect palace
My colleague Caroline Davies reported on those accusations in the trailer yesterday – Royal households accused of ‘war against Meghan’ to protect palace:
The royal households have been directly accused of deliberately planting negative stories about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to deflect attention from less favourable coverage of other royals as part of what a lawyer calls “a war against Meghan”.
In the latest trailer for the Sussexes’ controversial Netflix documentary, the duchess’s lawyer, Jenny Afia, claims to have seen evidence of briefing from the palace against the couple.
Meghan appears in the teaser, before the release of the final three episodes on Thursday, saying: “You would just see it play out, like a story about someone in the family would pop up for a minute, and they’d go, ‘We’ve got to make that go away’.
“But there’s real estate on a website homepage, there is real estate there on a newspaper front cover, and something has to be filled in there about someone royal,” she said.
Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace declined to comment.
Read more here: Royal households accused of ‘war against Meghan’ to protect palace
Welcome and introduction
This last time week we were prepared for a series of blockbuster revelations from the first three episodes of the Harry & Meghan Netflix documentary that, frankly, didn’t materialise. That didn’t stop the show generating acres of media coverage in the UK, and becoming Netflix’s most watched documentary during the last week.
This week’s drop of three episodes will pick up their story just as the couple are about to be married, and the trailer hints that there will be revelations about negative briefing about them coming from other members of the royal family. In a 90-second teaser released on Monday, Harry says: “They were happy to lie to protect my brother,” before adding: “They were never willing to tell the truth to protect us.”
I will be doing the same as I did last week. As soon as the documentary arrives, I’ll start watching it, and I will bring you the key quotes, accusations and revelations over the slightly longer than three hours it will take to get through it – coffee breaks included. At the same time. I’ll also be monitoring other media and social media reaction to it, and will bring you the highlights of that.
As I said previously, you don’t have to be supportive of the royal family, or interested in Harry and Meghan themselves, to be deeply fascinated at what this documentary is attempting to reveal about the royal family’s relationship with the media, and how the reaction to Meghan in the UK can be viewed through the prism of it being a reaction to her race.
You can get in touch with me at martin.belam@theguardian.com.
