INTERVIEW WORLD IS TALKING ABOUT

Whoever thought that royalty would one day deign to sit down with Meghan and Harry?

Still, miracles do happen. As Oprah settled her guests among the lavender pots and lush greenery of an unnamed private estate, the pillared splendour told its own tale of the kind of sequestered luxury the Sussexes now call home. Yet in this sun-dappled paradise, all they wanted to talk about was paradise lost. “I’ve lost my father. I lost a baby. I nearly lost my name. I mean, there’s the loss of identity,” said Meghan.  This was odd, considering that she has always seemed to quietly revel in her royally bequeathed duchessdom, but let’s not quibble because she is Speaking Her Truth and just trying to live her authentic life. Oprah’s task was a simple one: to grill the Duke and Duchess on the fractious circumstances behind Megxit. I say grill, but the chat show veteran didn’t have to rake over many coals to get to the main beefs. Indeed, Oprah had barely put a match to their gas-fuelled umbrage before it all went up in a bonfire of piping hot pique.

Cry

Kate made Meghan cry! The royal family was racist! No one taught Meghan how to sing the national anthem and she had to Google it all by herself. The entire country of not-so-Great Britain was put in the dock and found wanting and, even worse, there were money worries when 36-year-old Harry revealed that his family had ‘literally cut me off financially’. He was left to scrape together a living from only the millions his mother had left him. “Without that we would not have been able to do this,” he said. Indeed, throughout the broadcast there was so much complaining about who was and who wasn’t going to pay for Harry and Meghan’s security. For the first half of the interview, it was just the two women. Meghan was poised, purposeful and delivered a strong performance full of dramatic pauses, deep breaths, Streep-like sideways glances and the occasional trembling lower lip. When Harry appeared in the second half, it was interesting that Meghan took on a more supplicant role, gazing at her husband in adoration as he talked emotionally of the ongoing estrangement from his father and his brother. Yet despite this, she was still in charge; reassuring him, rubbing his arm, nodding in agreement even as the chasm peeled open ever wider between the two families.

Relationship

Here, too, the nature of their relationship seemed clear; he is the Rodney to her Del Boy, she is the princess to his pea. “No one in my family ever said anything over those three years. And that hurts,” Harry said, of perceived slights to his wife. Yet amid the 50 shades of green in this far-flung Garden of Eden they still had each other and their fingers were entwined like bindweed. The original interview was three hours and 20 minutes long, edited down to 85 minutes of pure peeve – or ‘setting the record straight’, as Oprah insisted. The Sussexes did take pains to compliment HM, who gave Meghan some pearls, once shared a knee blanket and was kind. She was practically the only soul who emerged with a shred of dignity from the entire programme. Even still, the show remained a royal spectacle — it was right up there with Prince Edward’s. ‘What?’ Oprah would cry, saucer-eyed, as the couple dropped another killer zinger and detailed their belief that everyone was out to get them, almost from the start.
As the minutes ticked by, it became obvious that the Sussexes’ revelations were designed to cause maximum damage to the royal family. From the outset, the bomb-bay doors were open wide on this transatlantic revenge flight, the missiles falling like the raindrops Harry recently urged us all to become.

On the screen, but not off it, according to Oprah, the Sussexes stopped short of actually accusing anyone of anything, which was perhaps the worst crime of all. Harry and Meghan clearly have suffered difficulty and pain, how we all wish things had been different on all sides, but was this carpet-bombing really necessary? As one would expect from a friend, neighbour and wedding guest, Oprah did not probe or question too closely when the couple became vague on details, as they often did.
Interestingly, there was very little discussion of Thomas Markle, a key figure in the Sussex drama, which makes one suspect that questions about him were discouraged. As, indeed, was anything that might have shown the couple in a bad light. So in the end what did we learn? The couple showered lots of calculated praise on the Queen but said nothing about Prince Philip. We learnt that Prince Charles stopped taking his son’s calls, Harry is not on speakers with William and so far, so Crown.

Poor old Kate was thrown under the bus and kicked to the kerb by her sister-in-law, and Oprah just sat there and let it all happen. “I forgive her,” said Meghan, after claiming that the Duchess of Cambridge made her cry but refusing to say why. At the root of everything, if you ask me, is a husband who failed to grasp the bigger picture and a wife who confused being royal with being famous, and still can’t tell the difference, even now.

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