When Harry met Oprah, it was a post-wedding talk on non-royal future, author says

Meghan Markle supposedly barely knew Oprah Winfrey when she invited her to her spectacular May 2018 royal wedding, but that social connection proved useful as she and Prince Harry soon began contemplating a future outside the royal orbit, according to longtime royal author, Andrew Morton.

Six months after the wedding, Prince Harry secretly met with the talk show queen in a London hotel to begin discussing a future that didn’t involve them being senior working royals, Morton said in a recent episode of the Daily Mirror’s “Pod Save the Queen” podcast.

“Harry was having conversations in a London hotel with Oprah Winfrey back in November 2018, just six months after they’d been married,” said Morton, author of the blockbuster 1993 biography of Princess Diana, “Diana: Her True Story” and an upcoming book about Queen Elizabeth II.

“So, they were thinking about a different direction of travel pretty early on,” Morton said.

While still a working royal, Harry agreed to participate with Winfrey on producing “The Me You Can’t See,” a 2021 series on mental health for Apple TV+. He and Meghan also famously sat down with Winfrey in March 2021 for their blockbuster tell-all interview for CBS, in which they disparaged royal life and accused at least one unnamed member of being a racist.

If the Duke and Duchess of Sussex made professional connections with Winfrey to discuss non-royal options for their future, then the couple was successful in using their wedding as a networking opportunity, as editor and author Tina Brown has said.

In her book, “The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor, the Truth and the Turmoil,” Brown said the Sussexes didn’t know Winfrey, George and Amal Clooney and some of their other A-list guests, but they invited them anyway. The celebrity guests “were a portrait not of Meghan’s intimate circle but of the friends she most wanted to recruit” into her inner circle,” Brown wrote.

Meanwhile, Morton’s comments about Harry’s 2018 Winfrey meeting could raise questions about whether the couple really tried for nearly two years to make royal life work. It certainly suggests that an exit was on their minds sometime before their Oct. 2019 tour of South Africa, when they both admitted during a TV interview with friend and journalist Tom Bradby that they had been struggling with the pressure that came with being full-time representatives of the monarchy.

Their move for an exit is ironic, Morton said, because it appeared that the queen had positioned Harry and Meghan to have highly prominent and powerful roles in the monarchy, representing the royal family on the global stage.

“The irony is they had been given the keys to the first-class lounge when Prince Harry was given the position of Youth Ambassador to the Commonwealth,” Morton said. “This was effectively the Queen’s way of saying ‘you do the rest of the world, leave William and Catherine to do the U.K., where they will eventually be the Heads of State.’”

In the same interview, Morton said Harry saw his marriage to the American former TV actress as his way out of the royal family.

“They were thinking about living in New Zealand, and they even spoke to the Prime Minister of New Zealand about this,” Morton said. “So, they had all kinds of plots and thoughts for their future. It didn’t work out because, when it actually comes down to it, Prince Harry is cursed with charisma but hates being a prince, and I think that he saw Meghan as a way out. They didn’t have to leave the royal family in the way that they did, but they did.”

Shortly after their South Africa tour, Harry and Meghan said they were going to take a sabbatical from their royal duties though the 2019 Christmas holiday, which they spent with their baby son, Archie, in a waterfront mansion on Vancouver Island.

According to “Finding Freedom,” the sympathetic biography of the couple, it was here that they decided to leave their roles as senior royals and give up public funding for their offices, Vanity Fair reported. 

In the book, authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand said that Harry and Meghan sent an email to Prince Charles and the queen, explaining their decision to leave the U.K. and requesting an in-person meeting.

In January 2020, Harry and Meghan returned to the U.K. for a brief time. Relations between the Sussexes and the royal family exploded into a public mess when news of Harry and Meghan’s plans to leave royal duties leaked to a tabloid reporter. The Sussexes quickly scrambled to put their own spin on the departure by announcing on their defunct Sussex Royal Instagram account that they hoped to find a way to work part-time on behalf of the queen while pursuing outside commercial and media deals to become financially self-sufficient.

The queen put her foot down and said Harry and Meghan couldn’t do a half-in/half-out arrangement. Harry and Meghan left for North America, famously without any funding for their costly security. By March 2020, they had settled in California and have since tried to find their footing away from the royal family.

Harry still oversees his successful Invictus Games. Separately and together, Harry and Meghan have made statements in support of various causes, dipped their toes in U.S. politics and have reportedly worked to produce content to fulfill their multi-million obligations to Netflix and Spotify.