Prince Philip thought Meghan Markle and Harry's Oprah interview was 'madness': 'No good would come of it’
Prince Philip reportedly felt that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s controversial tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey was “madness”, a royal biographer has claimed. The Duke of Edinburgh and longtime consort of British monarch Queen Elizabeth II died on Friday, April 9, at the age of 99.
As per royal biographer Gyles Brandreth, the author of ‘Philip and Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage’ and ‘Charles and Camilla: Portrait of a Love Affair’, Philip thought “no good would come of” the interview and regretted his grandson’s decision to quit the royal family.
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Brandreth wrote in the Daily Mail, “To me Prince Philip was a hero and a role model -- and a friend… I was lucky enough to know Prince Philip in his prime -- the most dynamic man I have ever met. And I was privileged to know him almost to the end.”
He said that there was “no laughing in January last year, when Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, announced their desire to 'step back' from their lives as 'senior royals'. They planned to divide their time between the UK and North America; they wanted financial independence; they hoped to be able to continue to serve Queen and Commonwealth, but on their own terms. It was a naïve hope and not to be.”
That their HRH titles would be put in abeyance and that Harry was required to give up his royal patronages and military appointments distressed the Duke of Sussex - as he supposedly put it, “that it should come to this.” The Duke of Edinburgh, per Brandreth, was equally sorry “that it should come to this.”
Philip, per the biographer, “was not pleased, nor did he believe that Harry and Meghan were doing the right thing, either for the country or for themselves,” adding, “Contrary to the popular caricature of him, the Duke of Edinburgh was neither judgmental nor unfeeling.”
Philp, however, supposedly had “some sympathy with the couple's mistrust of the media” and even more so with Harry's desire to “do his own thing in his own way.” But someone close to Philip told the biographer that “he thought Meghan and Harry's interview with Oprah Winfrey was 'madness' and 'no good would come of it'.” The biographer added that he was not surprised “because that is exactly how he described to me the earlier personal TV interviews given by Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, back in the 1990s.”
The fact that the Meghan and Harry interview was aired while Philip was hospitalized did not trouble him, the biographer said. What worried him, Brandreth said, was the couple's “preoccupation with their own problems and their willingness to talk about them in public.” He quoted Philip as having said: “Give TV interviews, by all means. but don't talk about yourself.” As per him, this was one of Philip’s rules.
The Duke of Edinburgh told Brandreth once: “It's a big mistake to think about yourself. No one is interested in you in the long run. Don't court popularity. It doesn't last. Remember that the attention comes because of the position you are privileged to hold, not because of who you are. If you think it's all about you, you'll never be happy.”
While the Duke of Sussex will attend the funeral of his grandfather on Saturday, Meghan, who is pregnant with a baby girl, will remain in the US on doctor's advice. A source said that Meghan made “every effort” to travel but didn’t receive medical clearance from her physician.