Harry and Meghan’s claims their front-page dominance upset senior royals rejected by palace sources
The claim by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex that other members of the family were “upset” about being upstaged by Meghan has been roundly rejected by sources close to the palace at the time.
Prince Harry suggested in their Netflix series that his wife’s popularity and her domination of newspaper front pages at the expense of more senior members of the family caused jealousy that directly contributed to the rift with his brother and father.
But former palace aides noted that Meghan was not the first young, glamorous woman in the family, claiming that they had “fundamentally misconstrued” the institution’s understanding of the media.
They pointed out that the Royal family had been in the public eye for generations and was acutely aware that glossy images of younger royals would always be favoured by newspaper and magazine editors.
“The reality is that when it was a group, family event, every single person expected Meghan or Kate to be the lead shot in the papers,” one said.
“They’ve seen it happen over generations."
Another source said the Royal family, particularly the Queen, understood that interest in its new members would always draw the spotlight of public interest, having seen and welcomed it after numerous royal weddings across the decades.
"The interest is always going to change," they said. "It's part of the cycle of the monarchy.
"It's only the issues that people mind being overshadowed, not individuals.
"That's why they coordinate intentionally. It's only if the right issues don't get oxygen [of public interest] that there's a problem, and that's incredibly rare."
In the documentary, called Harry & Meghan, Prince Harry cited a Sunday Telegraph front page bearing an image of both him and his wife at the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall in November 2019, suggesting that it was the moment “the penny dropped”.
He said: “The issue is when someone who’s marrying in who should be a ‘supporting act’ is then stealing the limelight or is doing the job better than those who were born to do this then it upsets people – it shifts the balance.”
Recalling the moment she saw the front page that morning, Meghan said: “I went, ‘oh my God.’”
Harry went on: “She said: ‘But it’s not my fault’. I said: ‘I know. And my mum felt the same way.’”
The then Duchess of Cambridge and the late Queen featured on other front pages that day.
James Holt, the chief executive of Archewell, claimed in the documentary that the aim within the palace, from that point on, was to “put them (the Sussexes) in a box or make them irrelevant”.
But by then the couple’s plans to leave the UK were already well advanced. They flew to Canada later that month on a six-week trip from which they never properly returned.
One former palace aide described how royal households shared their diaries in an effort to ensure that the younger royals did not always eclipse the work of others.
“If a senior member of the family was doing something important with a charity, we’d make sure that there wasn’t a gala dinner that evening involving the then Duchess of Cambridge, for example,” they said.
“It was completely accepted that that was how it was, there were no frustrations.”
Another source also pointed out that the late Queen had been the young royal once, as had the King, who for years accepted that Diana, Princess of Wales would be the one to adorn front pages.
“To suggest that they would be surprised or frustrated is to fundamentally misconstrue that the institution understands how the media works,” they said.
