- Royal fans are excited to watch Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's high-anticipated 90-minute sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey tonight, but experts say the special could be bad for the royal family.
- According to royal authors Pauline Maclaran and Penny Junor, Harry and Meghan's interview could be damaging for The Firm, just like previous royal tell-alls, including Princess Diana's 1995 BBC Panorama interview and Prince Andrew's disastrous interview about Jeffrey Epstein, have been.
- Junor also believes Harry will likely come to regret the interview, as Diana did after her own bombshell tell-all.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's highly-anticipated sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey airs tonight and it is sure to be a bombshell. While royal fans might be excited to sip on all of the royal tea Harry and Meghan care to serve up, some experts say the royal family has reason to be considerably less excited about the CBS special.
Harry and Meghan's interview with Oprah isn't the first time members of the royal family have agreed to televised tell-alls, but that's not to say the precedent is positive. Princess Diana famously opened up about the breakdown of her marriage to Prince Charles in a jaw-dropping tell-all on BBC Panorama in 1995 and, more recently, Prince Andrew gave an instantly-infamous interview about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein that was widely-regarded as a train wreck and led to his almost immediately stepping down as a working royal.
According to Pauline Maclaran, author of Royal Fever: The British Monarchy in Consumer Culture, Harry and Meghan's special with Oprah could be even more damaging to the royal family than past royal interviews, particularly in "tarnishing the royal mystique."
I think it’s a bigger danger than the Prince Andrew car-crash interview," Maclaran told The Associated Press, per Page Six. "I think that Meghan is going to get a lot of sympathy, particularly from American audiences, about her position being untenable."
Maclaran isn't alone. Page Six notes that royal author Penny Junor, who has penned several books about the royal family, including 2014's The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor, agrees that the Sussexes' Oprah interview will do more harm than good.
"It’s just such a mess," Junor said. "I don’t think there are going to be any winners in it."
In a new column for the Daily Mail, Junor elaborated on the issue, comparing the likely outcome of the Sussexes' interview to that of Diana's 1995 tell-all.
"I suspect that one day Harry will come to regret it, just as Diana did," Junor wrote. "As a former soldier, committed to putting duty and loyalty to Queen and country above all else, this looks like being a gross betrayal. A betrayal that will feed straight into the hands of those who would like to see the Monarchy abolished. It is hugely damaging for Harry, too. For him the Monarchy is not some quaint, outdated institution, as it is for millions of Americans looking forward to tonight’s revelations. For Harry, the Monarchy is family."
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