A former aide of Princess Diana has given his take on the hotly anticipated upcoming interview of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle with Oprah Winfrey.
In an interview with CNN, Patrick Jephson, who worked as the private secretary for the late Princess of Wales spoke about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s rising hostility with the British royal family.
"Thirty years ago we were in a comparable situation where rifts were opening up within the royal family and it was starting to escalate,” he said, referencing Princess Diana’s tumultuous marriage and then split with Prince Charles over his extramarital affair with ex-girlfriend Camilla Parker Bowles.
"There were a lot of unhappy people involved then, I'm quite sure there are a lot of unhappy people involved now,” he went on to say.
"First and foremost, we should understand that this is a family rift. It has taken on a lot of the trapping of a big media PR story, but at the heart of this are real people really hurting and I hope that somewhere in the midst of the current back and forth somebody is putting down the seeds for eventual reconciliation, which has to come,” he added.
"The precedence for royal interviews of this kind are not very encouraging. Both Prince Charles and Princess Diana and more recently Prince Andrew have tried to put their sides of the story on TV through these sorts of interviews and in all cases, it has backfired,” he added.
The onetime most senior aide of the late People’s Princess, said that the Prince of Wales has "examples from his own history of how these things can be made worse, and how they can be made better."
"I hope that it will be intervention from all well-intentioned people to help Harry and Meghan settle in their new lives and help heal the wounds that arose through the way they departed," he said.
He was also asked to give his remarks on the Palace launching investigation into claims made by Meghan and Harry’s former staffers about the duchess ‘bullying’ them.
"This is the way in which, combined with social media, what is essentially a family squabble turns into something potentially much more damaging. It is a matter of judgment how both sides use the media,” he said.
"I hope some sort of investigation to establish how many factors went into creating this problem in the first place so that it can be avoided in future," he added.