How Harry met Meghan
He first spotted Meghan on a friend’s Instagram feed. “I was like: ‘Who is that?’. The friend then sent Meghan an email saying, “Prince Haz is dying to meet you”. “Who is Prince Haz????” Meghan replied. They only had two dates – one over drinks, one over dinner – before he invited her to accompany him to Botswana. “I was astonished she said yes …,” Harry said. “This woman I have only met twice, she is coming to Botswana and living in a tent for five days. Wow.” Meghan said: “I am getting on a plane and I am going to the middle of the bush. What am I doing? What if we don’t like each other and I’m stuck in the middle of the bush in a tent?” At their engagement party, guests wore animal onesies, with Harry and Meghan dressed as penguins – “because they mate for life”, a friend told the documentary.
That Nazi uniform
Headlines of a 20-year-old Harry dressed in Nazi uniform in 2005 were flashed on the screen. “It was probably one of the biggest mistakes of my life,” he said. “I felt so ashamed afterwards. All I wanted to do was make it right.” He said he spoke with the chief rabbi in the UK and then visited Berlin, where he met Holocaust survivors. “I could have just ignored it and probably made the same mistakes over and over again in my life,” he said. “But I learned from that.”
Royal formalities
Meghan said: “When Will and Kate came over, and I met her for the first time, they came over for dinner, I remember I was in ripped jeans and I was barefoot. I was a hugger. I’ve always been a hugger. I didn’t realise that this is really jarring for a lot of Brits. I guess I started to understand very quickly that the formality on the outside carried through on the inside. There is a forward-facing way of being, and then you close the door and go, ‘you can relax now’. But that formality carries over on both sides. And that was surprising to me.”
Wardrobe risks
Meghan revealed she avoided colourful outfits while in the UK for fear of clashing with the late Queen and other more senior female royals, opting for “muted tones” of beige, white and camel so she could blend in. “Most of the time that I was in the UK, I rarely wore colour. There was thought in that. To my understanding, you can’t ever wear the same colour as Her Majesty if there’s a group event. But then you also shouldn’t be wearing the same colour as one of the other more senior members of family. So I was like, well, what’s a colour that they’ll probably never wear? Camel, beige, white? So I wore a lot of muted tones, but it also was so I could just blend in. Like I’m not trying to stand out here. There’s no version of me joining this family and trying to not do everything I could to fit in. I don’t want to embarrass the family.”
A reminder of Diana
Among many references to his mother, Harry said Meghan had striking similarities to Diana, Princess of Wales. “When I got to know Meghan more and more I was like, I’m really like falling in love with this girl. So in spite of my fear I just opened my heart to see what’s going to happen.” He went on: “So much of what Meghan is, and how she is, is so similar to my mum. She has the same compassion, she has the same empathy, she has the same confidence. She has this warmth about her. I accept that there will be people around the world who fundamentally disagree with what I’ve done and how I’ve done it, but I knew that I had to do everything I could to protect my family, especially after what happened to my mum. I didn’t want history to repeat itself.”
