Commonwealth criticism ‘attack on Queen’s legacy’

Royal insiders said the Commonwealth were shocked by Prince Harry and Meghan’s Netflix special where they attacked a key part of the Queen’s late legacy.

Harry and Meghan’s controversial Netflix special shocked the Royals after the pair attacked the Commonwealth.

Royal insiders expressed shock that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s documentary included an attack on the Commonwealth, a key part of the late Queen’s legacy.

One contributor to the programme, the writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch, called the Commonwealth “Empire 2.0” while the academic and author Professor Kehinde Andrews said: “It’s not changed a thing, they’ve just got better PR. If you look at the black people in the Commonwealth, well their conditions are almost just as bad as they were 50 or 100 years ago.” Their words were interspersed with footage of the Queen broadcasting to the Empire in 1947 and her speech at the Commonwealth summit in London in 2018.

“That was shocking,” said one former royal adviser. “It goes to the root of attacking her legacy. But they have obviously held off from attacking her in any way.”

Another former insider said: “That was unexpected. This was a full-scale attack on not just the Commonwealth, but the Queen’s association with the Commonwealth. It is an attack on her life’s work.”

The former insider said that editorial control rested with the Sussexes. The programme’s credits say it was made in association with Archewell Productions, the couple’s media company.

Harry and Meghan shocked the Commonwealth with their attack during the pair’s controversial Netflix special.

However, Meghan, 41, has already partially distanced herself from its content, saying it tells “our story through someone else’s lens”, in an interview with Variety magazine in October.

She added: “It’s nice to be able to trust someone with our story - a seasoned director whose work I have long admired - even if it means it may not be the way we would have told it.”

Meghan embraced the Commonwealth when she became engaged to Harry in November 2017. In the couple’s interview with Mishal Husain she said: “There is so much work to do in the Commonwealth.”

Shortly before the wedding, the Queen made Harry, 38, a Commonwealth youth ambassador and president of the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust, a youth charity. Meghan was later made vice-president of the trust, and patron of the Association of Commonwealth Universities. They were forced to relinquish their roles after stepping down as working royals.

The former insider was surprised by the attack “given they were so happy to accept Commonwealth roles, and Meghan had the flowers of the Commonwealth embroidered into her wedding veil, which she did on her own. “It was Commonwealth, Commonwealth, Commonwealth. They could not stop talking about it as their platform.”

Dickie Arbiter, a former press secretary to the late Queen, criticised Harry’s claims about the media’s relationship with the palace. “To suggest that reporters are an extension of the Buckingham Palace communications office is an absolute nonsense,” he said.

Arbiter also criticised Meghan’s exaggerated mime of how she curtsied to the Queen, saying it was “very disingenuous” of her to “mock the curtsy, mock the Queen” and that Harry had looked “uncomfortable”.

Ingrid Seward, the royal author, said that Harry had “projected his mother onto Meghan. He couldn’t look after his mother - obviously, he was a little boy - and he has projected his mother’s love onto Meghan. I think he genuinely feels he wants to protect her.

“But I think that is also quite dangerous. Because in his eyes, Meghan can do absolutely no wrong. He is in her thrall, completely, and anything she does is wonderful.”

THE TIMES