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British newspapers the Guardian and the London Times have named the two senior royals accused of discussing the potential skin color of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s first child, Prince Archie, before he was born.
As anyone with access to the internet may already know, the alleged “royal racists” are King Charles III and Catherine, Princess of Wales, aka Kate Middleton. It now seems inevitable that the names will be published by other British newspapers.
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The publication of the names comes after they were named by Piers Morgan in a live TV broadcast, the New York Post, which cited Morgan, and Morgan's Talk TV colleague Julia Hartley-Brewer, who named them during another broadcast Thursday.
The revelation of the identity of the two individuals represents a potentially damaging moment of crisis for the British royals, and the culmination of a two-year old game of Clue, triggered when Harry and Meghan told Oprah Winfrey in a 2021 interview that “concerns” had been raised by a senior royal about Archie’s skin color, but vowed never to reveal the identity of the person. Harry later said the incident was one of “unconscious bias.”
However, in his new book, Endgame, Omid Scobie, a royal journalist who has excellent contacts in the Sussex camp, said there were actually two people involved in making the comments.
He said that letters had been sent between Meghan and the king naming the individuals. Charles was said to be “horrified” by how Meghan had been left feeling by the situation, and suggested that Kate and husband Prince William should reach out to her to discuss it. That reportedly never happened.
In the English version of the book, Scobie did not identify the pair, but in a Dutch version, which was on open sale for over 24 hours, both names appeared. Scobie has denied responsibility for the naming, claiming it to be a “translation error”; the Dutch publishers described it as an “error.” Many, including Morgan, have pondered how the two names, and the words around them in the Dutch text, could have been mis-translated, yet be utterly absent from other editions of the book.
Scobie told ITV’s This Morning Thursday: “I have never submitted a book that had their names in it,” and vociferously defended his book as a portrait of the monarchy at a key crossroads of its being.
Scobie said the naming of the royals in the Dutch edition was “still being investigated right now. I wrote and edited the English version of the book with one publisher. That then gets licensed to other publishers. I obviously can’t speak Italian, German, French, Dutch or any of the other languages. So the only time you hear about the book is once it’s come out in the public domain.
“I am as frustrated as everyone else. The reality is, though, that this is information that is not privy just to me. Journalists across Fleet Street have known those names for a long time. We’ve all followed a sort of code of conduct when it comes to talking about it.”
However, a translator who worked on the book told the Daily Mail: “As a translator, I translate what is in front of me. The names of the royals were there in black and white. I did not add them. I just did what I was paid to do and that was translate the book from English into Dutch.”
Asked about Scobie’s claim the names were not in his work she said: “I don’t know why he would say that. I have been translating for many years. This is the first time anything like this has happened. This is not something I wanted to be involved in. This has been upsetting. I do not want to talk about it much more.”
However it came into being, the offending edition has now been pulped, but the identity of the two royals was widely disseminated on the internet after Piers Morgan broadcast their names on his Talk TV show Wednesday night.
Representatives of the two royals have been asked for comment by The Daily Beast. They have so far not responded. However, Buckingham Palace told the Guardian: “It is not something we are going to comment on.”
