Queen Elizabeth's Comments on Prince Harry Revealed

0:01Queen Elizabeth called Prince Harry a carer for Archie, the Epstein email about Andrew sending his daughters and Prince Harry wants an invite to Sandringham from the king. I'm Jack Royston, Newsweek's Chief Royal Correspondent, and this is Newsweek's Royal Report.

0:40with Harry and Meghan, which is particularly interesting because obviously that has been a huge source of debate over the years. You know, Harry and Meghan have always framed themselves as being really close to the Queen. Harry even described them as having a special relationship back in 2022 and told the Today Show that, you know, there are things that they can talk about that the Queen couldn't really talk about with anybody else. Now, Vickers gives a slightly different impression to that, to say the least. But there's also some quite interesting stuff in there about Andrew. And most importantly of all, Hugo Vickers says that the Queen didn't actually believe the Epstein allegations.

1:17She didn't think that Andrew acted inappropriately. So quite a lot to talk about. I'm going to start with Harry and Meghan, which is not a reflection on, you know, suggesting that their issues are worse or more important than Andrew and Epstein. Actually, it's the other way around. But it's a huge topic. This issue of their relationship with the Queen is one we will be talking about for years to come. And there's quite a lot in there, whereas the stuff about Andrew is slightly more sparse. But let's get into it. So the line that I think probably caught the most headlines and the most attention when this was serialized in the mail over the weekend is this thing about Harry being a carer for Archie, which is obviously hugely dismissive if the Queen did say it.

2:06contextualized. It is at the point when Harry and Meghan are basically crashing out of the monarchy. Annie Vickers says that the Queen kind of couldn't understand why they wanted to leave. So he writes, the Queen took a dim view of her grandson, saying to a confidant, and now Harry has opted out, and for what? To be a carer for Archie. So, you know, obviously, Harry would say he's done all these projects and, you know, media interviews and all these kinds of things. He's not just a carer for Archie, but it's very interesting because obviously a huge amount of the narrative from people who criticize Harry and Meghan is that Meghan's the one in the driving seat.

2:41She's the one holding the steering wheel. Harry's like a walk-on part or a non-player character in the game of Meghan's life. And if the Queen really did say this, you know, the source isn't named, but if the Queen really did say this to a friend or confidant, then And yeah, I mean, that is quite damning for Harry and Meghan because they've placed so much capital in their relationship with the Queen. You know, other royal family members, Harry and Meghan would be in a much better place to just laugh it off and say, well, you know, they didn't get on with William anyway. And, you know, the Sussex Squad hate William and Kate and would just pile in on them.

3:18But they all love the Queen. So, you know, if this is true, they kind of they know, I think the Queen is the one person who Harry and Meghan have always known that they couldn't gun for. You know, they couldn't throw hand grenades at the Queen in the way that they did at Charles and William because they would have been destroyed. You know, Americans love the Queen. She is so universally loved across huge swathes of American society that she was just somebody they couldn't attack or criticize. But the passage goes on and arguably in some ways it gets worse. It says, the following year, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip, obviously now the Duke of Edinburgh is Prince Edward, but this is back when Prince Philip was still alive.

3:55The following year, the Duke of Edinburgh, then aged 99, was admitted to the Elizabeth VII Hospital in London for tests. On March 1st, he was moved to the Bartholomew Hospital, where he had an operation on his heart. This is all in 2001, by the way. His medical team nearly lost him twice. On Sunday, March 7, just six days later, with no consideration for the stress the Queen was under or for the precarious health of the Duke of Edinburgh, a much-heralded interview between the Duchess of Sussex and Oprah Winfrey was screened. So obviously Harry did take part in that interview too. It wasn't just Meghan, but it did start off with Meghan and Oprah, just the two of them.

4:34So it started off as an interview with Meghan and then Harry joined the interview halfway through. so what the new part of this the bit that's new is vickers saying that prince philip nearly died during surgery that the medical team nearly lost him twice so the queen basically had gone through this incredibly traumatic experience not only of her husband being ill but her husband nearly dying during surgery and then in the days afterwards she just had this basically bombshell interview dropped on her and had to react to it and had to work out how to respond to it Now, Harry and Meghan actually recorded this interview before Philip became ill and before he went into hospital.

5:12He went into hospital after the taping of the interview. But obviously, it was known that the interview was in the can. It was known that the interview was coming out. There was pressure on Harry and Meghan at the time to postpone the interview until after Philip came out of hospital, until after Philip was better, essentially. um and they didn't cbs didn't oprah didn't they went ahead with it while philip was in hospital and of course about a month later philip passed away um having been having gone home um so you know it was a big call big decision at the time and they got huge amounts of flack over it um but it is interesting that he says that philip nearly died i mean it must have been awful for the queen and actually for the whole family you know we always when it comes to philip we pretty much do always talk about the Queen because he was her husband, but we can't forget that actually that's also Charles' father.

6:04And clearly Charles would have been hugely, hugely impacted by it as well, emotionally and very anxious and stressed out. And he was in the, you know, substantially with a lot of decision-making in the royal family by this point. He was already in the driving seat for quite a lot of it. The Queen still making a lot of the big calls, no doubt. and obviously the statement responding to the interview, responding to Harry and Meghan publicly was in the Queen's name. Charles actually took a decision to write privately to Harry and Meghan. Obviously Meghan made this incredibly dramatic allegation that an unnamed royal family member had been talking about the colour of her child's skin before Archie was born.

6:45Endgame by Oma Togoby later said that that was Charles, who Meghan was relating to. but the whole that whole allegation has become very difficult um to deal with and controversial because obviously harry has kind of walked back the suggestion that megan was accusing the royals of racism so if you imagine you know it must have been awful for them knowing that philip was ill you know if you do at the time if the perception was basically the royals of the villains and megan's the victim and we would never have talked about it but you know talked with sympathy about how awful that experience was for the royals.

7:19But it must have been for Charles, you know, to suddenly see headlines all over the world saying, basically, he's racist, which he would have known it was him at the very time that he nearly just lost his father and then obviously did lose his father. And it's his own son and his own son's wife, his daughter-in-law, who are saying it all. I mean, it must have been incredibly intense. And yeah, and Vickers is very much of the opinion that Harry and Meghan treat the Queen terribly. Obviously, make your own minds up. You have your own impressions and your own brains to think about for yourselves.

7:58I do personally think, actually, that Meghan and Harry handled this pretty badly. And it's one of the reasons, actually, why they disintegrated, is that, you know, you have to be able to... If you're going to try and have a go at everybody else for being terrible, which is what they did, then you have to not be terrible yourself. And if somebody did this to Harry, then he would think that they were awful. This is the trouble with Harry and Meghan, is that you know deep down that if anybody else did to Harry and Meghan what Harry and Meghan did to the royals, Harry and Meghan would think they were awful.

8:31And that's what kind of makes it very difficult to side with Harry and Meghan, is that they would never be able to handle or accept anybody else treating them in the way that they treated the royals. And that is not to undermine the issue of race in the monarchy, which, you know, it's a really important issue. But ultimately, it stopped being a debate about race in the monarchy the minute Harry walks back that racism allegation, and it just became a debate about Meghan and the royals. And that's what, you know, that's a big part of what undermined them. But let's carry on. so Vickers also talks a little bit about the early days between Harry and Meghan when their relationship is getting together and how the Queen and Philip and everybody thought of them so he says even the royal family seemed to be bending unspoken rules for Markle unlike previous royal fiancées she was invited to join the Queen and the royal family at Sandringham for Christmas 2017 and attended church with the family the staff at Sandringham joyfully surrounded the couple at the annual Christmas party and nicknamed the actress Sparkle Prince Philip, however, was not taken in.

9:35He referred to her dryly as the American. The view Prince William expressed privately that Harry should take more time to get to know her contributed to a lasting rupture between the brothers, but their father also had doubts. Prince Charles took the line, obviously now King Charles, took the line that Lord Mountbatten had taken with him before he started courting Diana. Have fun, but don't marry her. So Lord Mountbatten is Dickie Mountbatten for those who watch The Crown. they will remember him but he was Charles's great uncle basically and a huge mentor to Charles. Charles respected him hugely and obviously this was his perspective on Diana.

10:11Vickers writes, the Queen herself suggested that Harry should wait a year. He did not take her advice. Instead, as we know, the wedding went ahead just over six months after the couple's engagement. So basically, we've known since Finding Freedom by Omid Scopey and Caroline Durand, which was published back in the summer of 2020, that William had this view that Harry was going too fast with Meghan, that he should take a little bit longer, get to know her a little bit better, ease her into royal life, and that Harry really took exception to being told that and kind of blew up about it, and that helped to kind of fuel the rift between them.

10:44But Vickers is basically saying, well, it wasn't just William. Quite a few of the family, including the Queen herself, thought that Harry was going a bit too fast and should wait and just be sure. Harry basically was offended that people didn't just leave him to take the decision himself and felt that maybe they knew better and could tell him what to think of his own future wife. But it's quite striking, if Vickers is correct, that both Charles and the Queen agreed with William. In fact, that kind of means that the entire senior branch of the monarchy all thought that Harry was going too fast.

11:18So Vickers also writes about Harry not meeting Thomas Markle, because Harry's never met Thomas Markle. Obviously, that's Meghan's father. Usually you would think you would take your future husband to meet your dad. And Vickers, this is something that I've thought about quite a lot over the years, and I do kind of agree with Vickers about it, which is that there's something weird going on there. Why would you not take your future husband out to meet your father or bring your father to meet your future husband one way or the other? But this is what he writes. So Harry never met him. For this, in my view, there can be only one of three reasons.

11:52First, that Meghan was ashamed of him. Second, that he may have done something. In an interview, her father said that when Harry rang to ask permission to marry Meghan, Thomas Markle replied that he could so long as he never raised his hand against her. So presumably he lived in a world where that kind of thing happened. Well, is that true? I mean, let's talk less about the world that Thomas Markle Sr. lived in and more about the fact that Thomas Markle Jr. did once get booked for allegedly putting a gun to his fiancée's head during a heated argument. So, yeah, I mean, you know, it's not a completely insane thing for the father of a man who got booked for something like that to say.

12:37It's not clear whether Vickers thinks that Harry was offended by it or, well, in fact, he says third and most likely reason is that she was afraid her father would say something that might ruin the relationship. So my gut instinct is that Meghan maybe was a bit ashamed of Thomas and was worried that her own carefully curated personal brand would collapse if Harry ever met Thomas Markle. That maybe, you know, there was perhaps even a longer thing for Meghan of her having projected one image of herself. That was actually hugely in contrast with that side of her family. like not just Thomas Markle, but the whole Markle clan are very, very different to the image that Meghan projects to the world.

13:24And I do, I cannot help but wonder whether she was a bit worried that it would kind of rip the mask off her if she took Harry out to see her father living this very isolated life out in Rosarito in Mexico, you know, having gone bankrupt. And that, yeah, she just felt like it wasn't a place that she could take Harry, but she also couldn't get Thomas, over to Britain or maybe even over to LA. So it's very, I would like, this is, do you know what? Of all the stories that Meghan hasn't told, the story that I would love to hear the most actually is Meghan's honest account of her whole childhood. And she has alluded to it in places and said little bits about it, but I still feel like there's stuff there that she gives little snippets here, little snippet here, a little snippet there.

14:13But it's very hard to put the jigsaw together and I would like to see a kind of a proper full account of what her whole childhood was like in a way where you can do things like match up dates because obviously her parents divorced at one stage she had you know points where you like her childhood looked different at different points but you know let's get back to the book so Vickers also wrote about this is a subject that's come up before in other books what quickness with second thought about Megan's wedding dress she didn't like the dress according to Vickers and thought it was too white and with ungainly shoulders.

14:45Not totally sure what he means by ungainly shoulders. And for what it's worth, I actually thought Meghan's dress looked fantastic. I think it's been suggested before that the Queen didn't think that Meghan should wear white because she was a divorcee. And that, as an argument, makes sense to me. For what it's worth, I don't actually think Meghan looked bad at all. I thought she looked great. I could picture somebody who, you know, the Queen is old school. She only attended church weddings. She didn't attend weddings that weren't at church. So given how old school the queen was i could see a world in which she viewed the whiteness of the dress as intrinsically tied to meanings about kind of purity and so on um that she might well have felt didn't apply to divorcees camilla for example didn't wear white when she married charles um so you know i could picture the queen being old school enough to think megan shouldn't have worn white but i actually thought the dress looked great as a dress uh so vickers writes that someone close to the monarch told me her attitude to the actual wedding it was you get on with it it's nothing to do with me so basically she just wanted to wash her hands with it a lot of this stuff sounds like it might be from lady elizabeth anson who was a very good friend of the queen's and her party planner and there's been stuff in fact actually it wasn't a book it was sally beddlesmith's um substack blog she talked about the fact that um lady elizabeth anson you know wasn't actually invited to help organize the wedding and um basically you know i think was trying to get an invite and Megan gave her the cold shoulder.

16:13So some of this feels a little bit like it's probably come from Lady Elizabeth Anson, but the source is not actually named. But interestingly, Hugo Vickers says that the Queen was much happier with Princess Eugenie's wedding to Jack Brooksbank also at St. George's Chapel. So same venue a few months later. And he writes, this was a happier wedding. It did not attract as much publicity. And the Duke of York, i.e. former Prince Andrew, was annoyed that it would not be filmed for the major network, so he persuaded a company to record it. The groom had been alarmed when Andrew insisted on a carriage procession through Windsor, afraid that no one would be there to cheer them.

16:51But Windsor loves the procession and there was a good crowd. And he adds that after the reception, the Queen went back to her room saying, what a lovely day, what a lovely couple. He also records some of his own thoughts at the time of Harry and Meghan's wedding. and Hugo Vickers wrote in his own diary, it will either be a huge success or a monumental failure. Meghan said it's a new chapter. How many chapters are there? Well, obviously quite a lot because people are still writing books about them and selling books on the basis of the quotes about them. And, you know, this book too, the serialisation was angled on what it said about the Sussexes, even though it's a book about Queen Elizabeth II.

17:31So lots of chapters, I think, is the answer to that question. But I did, of course, also say that there's some stuff in there about Andrew, which is quite interesting. So this is what Vickers says about Andrew. He writes, Andrew's problems caused the Queen considerable distress in the last years of her life. She was deeply concerned about his future. One idea developed in the last year of her life was to set up a foundation that Andrew could administer. So in other words, it sounds like she was starting to get a bit worried that he didn't really have anything to fill his time with having retired from royal life.

18:02and he writes, despite his car crash interview on Newsnight and other apparent revelations the Queen did not believe he had behaved improperly. It is fortunate that she did not live to witness the denouement so the denouement being obviously him being stripped of his titles and all the stuff that's come out in the Epstein files more recently so this is quite interesting and it does kind of explain why the Royal Family took so long to get to grips with the Andrew situation and to basically deal with it in a more effective way. Years, in fact, because, you know, clearly Andrew was the Queen's favourite son and she believed him.

18:39You know, she just simply believed his denials. And it is now absolutely crystal clear that Andrew's account to BBC Newsnight in 2019, in which he tried to rebut everything, was complete nonsense. You know, huge swathes of it were complete nonsense. And the Queen obviously believed that account. He had clearly managed to present a narrative, to her, a version of events that had her persuaded that he had simply been the victim of somebody who was chasing fame or money or something like that. But we now, it's really interesting, like the specific phrase there, did not believe that he had acted improperly.

19:17But we now have the emails in which Andrew messaged Gillian Maxwell asking her to find inappropriate friends. So even his own coded message to Gillian Maxwell said that what he was doing was inappropriate. because you can have a debate about whether Andrew broke the law based on what the law says and how the law applies to the specific situation. But that claim from Andrew way back in 2019 when he was being interviewed for the BBC Newsnight show that he, for example, he broke off the friendship with Jeffrey Epstein in 2010 because he was being too honourable and he wanted to do it face to face, that he'd never had sex with any woman associated with Jeffrey Epstein.

20:01These things have been hugely caught into question by the fact that Andrew continued to interact warmly with Epstein after 2010. We know that Epstein introduced him to a young Russian woman, for example, to have dinner with. He was asking Ghislaine Maxwell for inappropriate friends. We know all of them, even for those who really stubbornly refuse to believe Virginia's allegation and her account of what happened, there's so much else that we now have in black and white, the actual emails of, that shreds, basically, the narrative that he put forward to Newsnight. It just seems completely bonkers that anybody would have this view that he did nothing inappropriate.

20:48But obviously the Queen hasn't had a chance before her death to see all of that come out. I do think it's obviously hugely naive of her not to realise that there was obviously another side to her son than the one she knew. But, you know, she is a mother and he is her son. And, you know, she wouldn't be the first. Let's put it that way. In fact, I have sat, I used to do a lot of court reporting earlier in my career, and I have sat outside courtrooms and heard defendants talking to their families about the case against them. and absolutely yes, many, many a mother has chosen to ignore the very crystal clear evidence about her son's conduct, I can attest from first-hand experience.

21:33So that aspect is one we're going to be talking about a lot more, I think, as the years go by. If we do get some of the kind of documentation that tells us how Andrew got his job as a trade envoy back in the early 2000s, back in kind of 2000, 2001, because we know that King Charles opposed that move and we know that the Queen supported it and that's a big part of why he got that job. And obviously it was through the trade envoy job that he sent the emails to Jeffrey Epstein containing government documents that the British police are currently investigating criminally on suspicion of misconduct in public office.

22:09So it's a really interesting aspect to how the Epstein scandal happened, basically. and one we'll be talking about a lot more. And on that note, I'm going to take a quick break, but just a reminder to rate and review The Royal Report on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your favourite shows. And of course, we are now on YouTube, so if you're watching there, please don't forget to like and subscribe. And when I'm back, we have a new email from the Epstein Files, which contains a very dark and sinister and uncomfortable joke about Prince Andrew's daughters.

22:47Hello, listeners, and welcome back to the show. And there are still extraordinarily new emails being uncovered in the Epstein files that we either haven't seen before or maybe didn't get the attention they deserved, one of which is actually sent by a mysterious sender who, you know, they're redacted in the Epstein files for what reason, I have no idea. We think it's just a friend of Epstein's. But this is an email that was sent in March 2011. And it was a joke from this person to Epstein. And they sent a headline which said, Andrew sold daughters to pay Fergie debts. Now, the surrounding message says, when I read this, dot, dot, dot, then it's got the headline.

23:27And then it says, it caught me off guard. I laughed so hard I choked and shot snot out of my nose. Best one yet. So I don't know who sent that. Was it really a trafficking victim? I mean, that's the only plausible reason you could legitimately redact somebody's name. But does that sound like a trafficking victim, sending that to Jeffrey Epstein, of all people, as late in the timeline as 2011 after he's already been convicted for soliciting prostitution from a minor? I struggle to believe that that is going to turn out to be a child victim of Jeffrey Epstein. But there we go. So what's significant about this email?

24:06Well, I suppose it shows in just how low regard Jeffrey Epstein actually regarded Andrew and Sarah Ferguson. He obviously knew that he was basically squeezing them until the pipsqueak, that he was, you know, exploiting them. You know, this is what he does. He tries to own people. But what's important about this email? Well, basically, it shows that Jeffrey Epstein and his associates, whoever this person may be, held Andrew and Fergie in such low regard. You know, clearly the basis of this joke is that Andrew and Fergie were so desperate to pay off Fergie's debts that they would have done literally anything.

24:46It's like it was sent March 25, 2011. So like I said, that is in the timeline after Epstein had not only been convicted, but also served his time in prison. It is likely, in my opinion, a reference to a private eye front page that ran on March the 18th, 2011. So a couple of weeks earlier, which is a headline, the cover image of the whole magazine. It ran with the headline, Andy's friend rescues Fergie. And then it's got a picture of the whole York family. So Andrew, Sarah and the girls. And then there's a speech bubble coming out of Andrew's mouth saying Epstein is prepared to give you 15 ,000 pounds.

25:26and then Fergie, there's a speech bubble, replying, is that for Eugenie or for both of them? And so this was at a time when it had been just publicly revealed that Epstein had paid off£15 ,000 to a former staff member of Fergie's who she owed money to. So that story was big in the papers at the time. And way back then, Private Eye were joking about something that people have been talking about again more recently. And actually this front cover resurfaced recently on social media precisely because it is such an uncomfortable thought in light of everything we've been reading in the files. So, you know, it's crazy that one of Epstein's friends was sending him basically this front page in headline form and, you know, mocking Fergie for her utter desperation.

26:14And it's just absolutely crazy that they put themselves in this position and that Fergie created this situation with her and Epstein that compromised Andrew in this way. Now, obviously, this doesn't, you know, it's not an email of the kind of strength and power that is going to fundamentally change the outcome of any investigation or potential prosecution of Andrew. But it just, it really struck me that Epstein knew, you know, Epstein was laughing at them. Like if Sarah Ferguson was wantonly debasing herself, crawling on her belly to Epstein begging him for money, and he was just basically laughing at her behind her back with whoever this person was and laughing in such a sinister way.

26:57This joke was sent to Epstein after Epstein had been using Fergie to try to get the girls to escort his friends around Buckingham Palace. And then it's even there in the minds of the people around him the sinister possible final outcome of what Epstein's plan might have been And, you know, had he been able to do anything he wanted? You know, had Fergie just given him anything he wanted? You know, it doesn't take a genius to work out where Epstein would have wanted that situation to go. So it's a really, really horrible email. I think it was uncovered by the mail. That's certainly where I saw it.