Piers Morgan: Why I named the so-called royal racists
Omid Scobie has dished smears before as Harry and Meghan’s cheerleader — I had to act when a ‘mistranslation’ of his book Endgame made claims about Charles and Kate
Iwas watching This Morning on Thursday when I heard a startling claim involving me and what I apparently want to do to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. “He wrote an op-ed this week saying they should be burnt alive!” screeched the royal gossipmonger and chief Sussex lickspittle, Omid Scobie.
I did? Wow. That sounds like a very serious thing indeed, which should obviously lead to my instant cancellation and probable arrest for inciting violence against two beloved public figures.
There’s just one problem: I never said it.
In fact, I wrote this at the end of a column for The Sun: “We’re supposed to believe Meghan and Harry are keen to build bridges with the royals and even want to spend Christmas with them at Sandringham, which seems about as likely as me being invited up there to pull a festive cracker. I can’t speak for Charles, Camilla, William, or Kate, but if two close members of my family had spent the past few years trashing the rest of us on global media platforms, the only way I’d want to spend Christmas with them is if they were human chestnuts roasting on my open fire.”
So, I was talking — hypothetically, and clearly jocularly — about members of my own family, not Meghan and Harry.
But then facts aren’t Mr Scobie’s strong point. His new monarchy-trashing book Endgame is at the centre of a global firestorm after the Dutch version “accidentally” named the King and the Princess of Wales as the two people who, the Sussexes claimed, made racially charged comments about the potential skin colour of their baby son Archie.
I’ve been part of that firestorm too, after deciding to tell the British public the names on my TalkTV show, Piers Morgan Uncensored, on Wednesday night — and I’ll explain why I did it. But before I do, let’s examine the credibility of the heavily eyebrowed man whose book has triggered the latest scandal to engulf the royals.
Scobie says he’s feeling “frustrated” because someone else supposedly rewrote part of Endgame and inserted it into the Dutch version. Even more frustratingly, the mystery literary arsonist decided to torch his tome in the most incendiary possible manner, inserting the names of two of the most senior members of the royal family in passages that brand them racists.
It’s hard to think of more explosive, publicity-grabbing details that could possibly have been added to a manuscript. Scobie insists he knew nothing about the episode until news broke that Dutch journalists had read it in copies sent to them by the publishers there.
Nor had he ever written any draft of the book containing those offending paragraphs and names.
But the Dutch translator confirmed the names were on the pages of the manuscript she was told to translate. I’ve written a dozen books and never heard of anything like this. Speaking to myriad other authors this week, including the royal biographer Tom Bower, nor had anyone else I know.
So poor Omid Scobie seems to have become the first author in history whose book was secretly sabotaged en route to a printer in a random foreign country. What must make all this even more frustrating for him is that the two names erroneously published were reportedly the same ones cited by Meghan in her private correspondence with Charles after her Oprah Winfrey whine-a-thon.
Scobie writes about that correspondence in the English version of his book, saying he knows the names but can’t reveal them for legal reasons.
Predictably, within minutes of the journalists getting their hands on the Dutch version, which was also briefly on sale in the Netherlands, word of the names spread like wildfire. That raised a dilemma for the British mainstream media: should we report them? I decided we should.
First, because it seemed absurd to me that Dutch people should be privy to significant information about our royal family but British people would be prevented from knowing it too.
Second, because this whole farrago has gone on long enough and caused enough damage. Frankly, it’s time we were told exactly what was allegedly said by whom to who, when and where it was said, and in exactly what context. Otherwise, this deeply divisive, racially charged sore will continue to ooze its way into global public consciousness.
Third, because in reporting the names their identities can no longer be held over them as some kind of blackmail threat by the Sussexes, who have deliberately fuelled the furore by refusing to say who they are or what they said.
My own firm belief, which I’m sure will be shared by most of the British public, is that neither Charles or Kate ever made any racist comments about baby Archie, and that this is a sickening slur on the characters of two people who’ve spent their lives in public service advocating for racial equality and justice.
One of the reasons for my view is the way the initial claims have unravelled since March 7, 2021, when the Oprah interview aired in America.
At the time, I vociferously expressed my opinion on Good Morning Britain that I didn’t believe a word of the racism allegations. Not least because Meghan and Harry couldn’t even agree on what year they were supposed to have been uttered — she said it was when she was pregnant, he said it was before they got engaged — or in how many conversations. As a consequence of my incredulity, ITV told me I must either apologise to Meghan for disbelieving her or leave my job, so I left my job.
Two days later, Prince William angrily denied the royal family was racist, but his protestations did little to dilute the hugely damaging speculation. A strange sequence of events ensued.
The racism claims weren’t repeated in Harry and Meghan’s six-part Netflix documentary series about their lives. Nor in Meghan’s 12-part podcast series for Spotify. Nor in Harry’s 150,000-word autobiography Spare. It was as if the racist comments had never happened.
Finally, in January this year, Harry told ITN’s Tom Bradby that Meghan had never said the royals were racist. Instead, he downgraded their alleged crime to “unconscious bias” and attacked the press for falsely saying it was racism, which was as preposterously disingenuous as most of his attacks on the media.
But why did it take him nearly two years to clarify this? Why did he let Prince Philip and the late Queen die without hearing this clarification, having endured the appalling stigma of hearing their family branded racist by their own grandson and his wife? Oh, and why did he imagine the world would simply forget what we all heard with our own ears on Oprah?
I have some questions for Omid Scobie too. How did he know who Meghan named in her private letter to Charles? She denies involvement in Endgame but she said that about his last book Finding Freedom only to later admit in court — ironically after suing a newspaper for repeating information from a private correspondence with her father — that she briefed an aide on what to tell Scobie.
So I strongly suspect that either she, Harry or one of their friends must have told him the names, because it sure as hell wasn’t the King. Their damning silence this week hasn’t diminished my suspicions.
If my theory is correct, it means the Sussexes are still waging their vicious war on the royals, designed to denigrate the family’s reputation and terminally damage the monarchy.
The book itself is a travesty of so-called journalism penned by a man who can’t even be honest about his age. In 2020, Scobie told the Times journalist Andrew Billen he was 33 when he’s 38. And in an interview for The Sunday Times last week, he said he never uses private jets — until the interviewer said she’d seen a recent photo of him on his Instagram showing him on one. “OK, that was a private jet,” he admitted, “but that was only going from LA to Palm Springs. It was very short.” Only a little lie, then.
This matters because it goes to the heart of his credibility as an author. Endgame spews many largely unsubstantiated claims about the royals that once again paint Meghan and Harry as heroic, oppressed freedom fighters battling a cruel, antiquated and racist institution.
I never thought I’d see a worse defender of the indefensible than Comical Ali, Saddam Hussein’s ludicrous “information minister” during the Iraq War who boasted that American “infidels” were killing themselves “in their hundreds” at the gates of Baghdad, as TV viewers could hear US weaponry destroying Iraqi forces in the background. But Obsequious Omid makes Comical Ali seem like a bastion of veracity.
Scobie calls William a hot-headed, power-crazed schemer who colludes with the media, the Princess of Wales a vacuous, cold woman burning with jealousy about Meghan and too scared to do anything but pose for photos, and Charles a stuffy and inept old man so entitled he makes staff iron his shoelaces. All of which, I’m reliably informed, is a grotesque distortion of reality.
Scobie even lies about me, writing in the book that Queen Camilla and I “enjoy regular chats on the phone” when I’ve never had a phone conversation with Her Majesty.
Of course, there’s nothing new about the royals manipulating the media. Princess Diana was a master at it, though you’d never believe it from the new series of The Crown, which portrays her as an angelic, helpless victim of the beastly press.
I had a lot of contact with Diana in the last 18 months of her life, including a private lunch at Kensington Palace with her and William in which she spilled so many beans that I could have launched a rival to Heinz. She knew exactly how to exploit the media to suit her agenda.
When Charles threw a 50th birthday party for Camilla in 1997 while Diana was holidaying with the Fayeds during that last fateful summer, Mohamed Al Fayed called me from his villa to ask if our photographer (I was editor of the Daily Mirror) would be near the beach that morning. I could hear Diana in the background, issuing instructions to him, and she later came to the beach in a leopard-print bikini and began doing cartwheels, guaranteeing that the next day’s front pages would be full of pictures of her and not of Camilla’s big night.
But the big difference between Diana and the Sussexes, aided by their slathering, fork-tongued cheerleader Omid Scobie, is that while she always spoke up in support of the monarchy, they’re on a relentless mission to destroy it — while using their royal titles to enrich themselves by constantly invading the same privacy of their family that they profess to want to protect.
I don’t just find that “frustrating”, I find it as despicable as it is hypocritical.