Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s explosive interview has become the topic of much frenzy lately for several reasons — it pointed out a much darker side of the British royal family than the one usually highlighted.
Markle and Harry accused the royal family of serious issues – racism and neglecting to provide for mental health care services while Markle was on the verge of suicide.
Prince William on Thursday defended the British royal family after his younger brother Harry and wife Meghan accused them of racism in a bombshell interview watched around the world. “We’re very much not a racist family,” William told reporters during a visit to a multi-racial school in east London.
The British Royal family, however – is embroiled in scandals – so how popular are its members?
2020 data from YouGov published on Statista showed that Prince William was the most popular member of the royal family.
When asked if they have a positive or negative opinion of 15 royals, Andrew came out at the bottom with a net favourability of -62% (6% positive minus 68% negative). The Duchess of Sussex is the only other royal with a negative net score from the survey. 32% had a positive view of her, 40% negative. Harry is still sitting on the positive side of the scale with +9%, made up of 41% positive, 32% negative.
The Duke of Cambridge, son of heir-to-the-throne Prince Charles, William had added that he had yet to speak to Harry in California since the interview first aired in the United States on Sunday. “No, I haven’t spoken to him yet, but I will do,” he said.
However, following Prince William’s denial of the Royal family endorsing racism, didn’t go down well on Twitter. Maybe the interview will change rankings?
This, however, wasn’t the first, or even second time, the British family has been involved in a controversy.
The abdication of Edward VIII, 326 days into his reign in 1936, remains the biggest scandal in modern royal history. It was over another American divorcee — socialite Wallis Simpson — who he stepped down to marry, sparking a constitutional crisis. Their union was deemed impossible while Edward was monarch and head of the Church of England, which at the time refused to remarry divorcees while their former spouse was still alive. Edward was the first monarch in the 1,000-year history of the British Crown to give up the throne of his own free will.
Heir-to-the-throne Prince Charles’ split from Princess Diana after 11 years of marriage caused a media sensation. She then rocked the monarchy by leaking shocking details of palace life to author Andrew Morton for his 1992 book “Diana: Her True Story — In Her Own Words”.
Then the queen’s second son Prince Andrew separated from wife Sarah Ferguson. Meanwhile Princess Anne, her only daughter, divorced her first husband Mark Phillips.
Diana died in a high-speed car crash in a Paris tunnel in August 1997 having been stripped of her royal status. For the week leading up to her funeral, the monarchy was rocked by an unprecedented outpouring of grief for the popular “people’s princess”. Anger mounted at the silence of senior royals, who were on holiday at the queen’s Balmoral estate in northeast Scotland.
Prince Andrew has been dogged by allegations he had sex with one of the teenage victims of deceased US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.