Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s interview with Oprah Winfrey had everyone talking before it even aired – not least Piers Morgan, who called the thought of the interview ‘crass’.
The Good Morning Britain host was fuming after the interview was broadcast on CBS in America on Sunday night, and shocked viewers and co-host Susanna Reid when he said he didn’t believe Meghan when she said that she had suicidal thoughts.
The 52-year-old said: ‘I’m angry to the point of bawling over today. I’m sickened by what I just had to watch.
‘This is a two-hour trashathon of our royal family, of the monarchy and everything our queen has worked so hard for and it’s all been done while Prince Philip lies in hospital.
‘They trash everybody. They basically make out our Royal family are a bunch of white supremacists by this race bombshell. They didn’t name any which one it was, they just throw it out there so it could be anybody. Well, you better say it fast.’
Addressing the Duchess saying she ‘didn’t want to live anymore’, Piers continued: ‘Who did you go to? What did they say to you? I’m sorry, I don’t believe a word she said, Meghan Markle. I wouldn’t believe it if she read me weather report. The fact that she’s fired up this onslaught against our Royal family I think is contemptible.’
Piers has been accused of bullying Meghan and being obsessed with the star, having become one of the Duchess’s most vocal critics, whether on GMB, in his newspaper columns or on social media.
Their relationship stems back to 2015, when Meghan, then an actress on the show Suits, ‘slid into Piers’s DMs’ after he followed a number of the stars on the show.
The journalist told Access Hollywood: ‘She immediately direct messaged me, she slid into my DMs faster than a greyhound.’
Piers previously shared a DM he received from Meghan, in which she said she was a ‘big fan’, and the pair began messaging and emailing.
In 2016, when Meghan was flying over to watch Serena Williams at Wimbledon, she met Piers at The Scarsdale Tavern pub, with Piers saying: ‘We talked about life and the universe and Donald Trump and everything, her days as a Deal or No Deal suitcase girl. And I thought, what a delightful person.’
Meghan later left to go to a private member’s club – where she is believed to have met Prince Harry – and Piers said that was the ‘last I ever heard from her’.
He continued: ‘We’ve now seen dozens of other people say they too got ghosted, we all got frozen out. She had reached a loftier place and there was no room for people like us.
‘It raises a few alarm bells that she was prepared to just cut people. She did it to her ex-husband, she’s done it to almost all of her family.’
While Piers seemed peeved about Meghan ‘cutting him out’, he congratulated Harry and Meghan in November 2017 when they got engaged, writing a Daily Mail column titled: ‘Hearty congratulations, Harry, you picked a real keeper (even if your romance did destroy my beautiful friendship with the amazing Meghan Markle).’
In this, he wrote about their pub date, saying: ‘She seemed real, too; not one of those phony actress types so prevalent in California.
‘We discussed her biracial upbringing, highly significant now she will become the first non-white royal bride. ‘My dad’s Caucasian, my mother’s African-American,’ she said, ‘so I’m half-white, half-black. It caused me a lot of confusion when I was young because it’s not easy to be ethnically ambiguous in America. But I learned to embrace being a mixed-race woman.’
Piers still seemed to be on Meghan’s side in the run-up to the Royal wedding, as in May 2018, he said that her ‘foolish father’ Thomas Markle had ‘only himself to blame’ for missing his daughter’s big day.
However, things seemed to change just two months later, as Piers wrote: ‘If you’re truly a humanitarian, Meghan, then show some damn heart to your loving father before he succumbs to a broken one.’
Piers’ criticism of Meghan and Harry stepped up the following year and in 2020, the journalist called for the couple to be stripped of all their Royal titles.
One column called them ‘grasping, selfish, scheming Kardashian-wannabes’ after Harry and Meghan announced their intention to step down as senior royals, while another called them ‘the world’s most tone-deaf, hypocritical, narcissistic, deluded, whiny brats’ and ‘appallingly bitter, staggeringly self-obsessed, utterly deluded, and woefully tone-deaf laughing stocks’.
Piers also called Meghan’s baby bump shoot announcing that she is pregnant ‘cheesy’ and claimed that the couple don’t want privacy, instead wanting to use the media to promote themselves.
Meghan, on the other hand, has never publicly said anything about Piers.
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Harry and Meghan's Oprah interview: Key moments
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have spoken to Oprah Winfrey in a bombshell interview about their decision to step back as senior working members of the Royal Family.
Here are the key points from the interview, which UK viewers can watch at 9pm on ITV on Monday, March 8.
- Meghan says it was Kate who made her cry over flower girls, not other way round
- Meghan says Harry was told there were ‘concerns how dark’ Archie would be
- Harry and Meghan reveal the gender of their baby due in summer
- Meghan sobs as she says pressures of royal life drove her to the verge of suicide
- Prince Charles stopped taking Harry’s calls after he quit Royal Family
- Harry says Meghan saved him from being ‘trapped’ like Prince Charles and Prince William are
- Princess Diana would be ‘sad and angry about how this has panned out'
- Meghan and Harry share adorable new video of son Archie at the beach
- Harry confirms terrible rift with William and says their relationship is now just ‘space’
- Queen ‘ghosted Harry during Megxit talks and got aide to say she was too busy’