Royal expert suggests Meghan Markle’s ‘helplessness’ in infamous 2021 Oprah interview could have been learned from SAS royal kidnapping training

When Meghan Markle sat down with her friend Oprah Winfrey for a special talk show in March 2021, 50 million people around the world tuned in.

The normal girl from California still enthralled the public after she fulfilled every woman’s dream by marrying a prince in a lavish castle wedding a few years prior. 

But instead of learning about a fairytale happy ever after, the viewers discovered life in the Royal Family was apparently poisonous due to stuck-in-the-past elitism and racism.

Meghan claimed it was not the fantasy they had imagined but a nightmare she had no escape from. 

Chatting in the sun-kissed garden of a mansion, a heavily pregnant Meghan described in the 85-minute tell-all interview that the time she had spent in the family had been a nightmare from which she had barely survived.

Meghan related how she had to turn over her passport, driver’s licence, keys and other personal belongings when she moved into the cramped confines of Nottingham Cottage on the grounds of Kensington Palace.

‘I left the house twice in four months,’ she told Oprah, adding, ‘I couldn’t feel lonelier.’

Royal expert Robert Lacey wrote that throughout the interview, the Duchess presented a tone of pleading, which he described as ‘a convincing impersonation of helplessness’.

In his book Battle of the Brothers, he suggests Meghan could have learned her presentation tricks from a rather unexpected source – Her Majesty’s most feared special forces unit, the SAS.

Like all senior royals (other than the Queen) it was thought Meghan had spent time with the Special Air Service to undergo training on how to respond to all high-risk security scenarios, such as kidnapping, hostage situations and terrorist attacks.

At their headquarters in Hereford, the secretive SAS are expected to have put the actress through her paces with advice on how she could help herself in these situations.

According to the Sussex-friendly authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand in their semi ‘approved’ 2020 book Finding Freedom, during the mock kidnapping ‘Meghan was even taught how to develop a relationship with the enemy’.

A source told the authors the mock kidnapping had been ‘extremely intense and scary’ ordeal, but how it was an experience that ‘she was grateful to have gone through’.

Lacey poses the question that it could have been during these days with the shadowy unit that Meghan learned the useful skill of how to ‘deploy her self-pity to such dramatic effect’.

He continued: ‘Meghan would certainly offer a brilliant impression of a hostage begging for liberation on primetime television – and the world would come rushing to rescue her.’ 

Meghan acted in the interview as if she was completely innocent and out of her depth when she decided to sign up for royal life at 36 years old. 

She proudly confessed to Oprah Winfrey that she had not Googled or done any homework before joining, telling her ‘I did not do any research’. 

She said: ‘I would say I went into it naively.

‘I didn’t fully understand what the job was – what does it mean to be a working royal? What do you do? What does that mean… There was no way to understand what the day-to-day was going to be like.’

Meghan also complained to Oprah that the royal institution did not give her the total back-up she needed – ‘We weren’t being protected’ was her often repeated claim.  

Alongside her hostage-like video appearance, Meghan also found time to deliver a devastating assault on the institution of monarchy – as well as her in-laws.

She recalled watching the Little Mermaid cartoon and relating to Ariel, the mermaid who exchanged her voice for legs in order to marry her prince.

‘She falls in love with a prince and because of that she loses her voice.’ Oprah asked the now famous question, ‘Were you silent or silenced?’

‘The latter,’ Meghan dramatically replied.

She tearfully said the stress of royal life made her suicidal when she was five months pregnant and claimed that family members had asked ‘how dark’ Archie’s skin would be.

After the broadcast was finished, the series of bombshell claims were repackaged into clips – going around the internet, and therefore the world, in minutes.

However, the British people were sceptical of the claims and deplored the harm and pain that it had caused the Queen by reducing the thousand-year-old institution of monarchy to celebrity talk show fodder.

Eyebrows were also raised because Harry’s grandfather, Prince Philip, with whom he had always had a close relationship, was still in hospital with a pre-existing heart condition when it was broadcast. He died a month later. 

The UK tabloid press branded Harry and Meghan as ‘selfish’ and ‘nauseating’, causing Meghan’s YouGov popularity rating to drop from -14 per cent to -27 per cent following the interview, with Harry’s rating also going negative for the first time ever.

But around the world, including in Commonwealth nations like Canada and Australia, people were far more sympathetic upon hearing the accounts of Princess Diana’s son and his wife.

However, globally, there was nowhere this was more apparent than in the US.

Lacey details how the American people and media reacted following the show.

He writes how the feelings for some Americans were so strong that there were calls on social media to ‘finish what the American Revolution started’ and to ‘burn down’ Buckingham Palace and the monarchy.

It seemed her scared performance in the Oprah interview had done its job to garner sympathy there.  

The bombshell interview caused Buckingham Palace to go into ‘crisis mode’ with the three households representing the Queen, Prince Charles and William locked in discussions that lasted all day.

After sleeping on it, the Queen issued the following statement: ‘The whole family is saddened to learn the full extent of how challenging the last few years have been for Harry and Meghan.

‘The issues raised, particularly that of race, are concerning.’

The Queen then issued the memorable line: ‘While some recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately.’

She then finished the short statement: ‘Harry, Meghan and Archie will always be much loved family members.’

Nevertheless, the deep-rooted rift between Harry and William was also hinted at in the interview, with Harry saying the relationship needed ‘space’ but that ‘time heals all things, hopefully’.

However the Sussexes critics didn’t take well to Meghan’s decision to go on national television and attack the family she married into, especially when she was already estranged from most of her own.

To this day, the Oprah interview remains one of the most divisive royal interviews of all time. 

Perhaps if it wasn’t for the SAS training, it could have played out a lot differently.