GUY ADAMS asks what else doesn't stand up to scrutiny as BBC blasts Harry and ... trends now

In the first moments of his score-settling film, Prince Harry confidently informs viewers that ‘no one knows the full truth’ about the events that have led to his and Meghan’s estrangement from the Royal Family.

Then he leans into the camera to declare that, actually: ‘We know the full truth’.

What’s more, he adds: ‘The institution knows the full truth’. Oh, and come to mention it: ‘The media know the full truth because they’ve been in on it.’

It is, of course, impossible for these four statements, delivered by Prince Harry within a few seconds of each other at the start of what purports to be a factual documentary, to be true simultaneously. After all, the final three remarks are completely at odds with the first one.

That, however, is entirely in keeping with three hours of film that are riddled with contradictions, inconsistencies and apparent falsehoods.

Is the couple’s highly-partisan narrative the truth? Or is it, as one of their Hollywood chums once remarked, simply their version of the truth?

Netflix’s strange disclaimer

According to Buckingham Palace, the first major porkie crops up just 20 seconds into the first episode.

During the opening credits, Netflix introduces the documentary as ‘a first-hand account of Harry and Meghan’s story’ and declares that ‘members of the Royal Family declined to comment on the content within this series’.

In contrast, a senior Palace source said yesterday: ‘Neither Buckingham Palace nor Kensington Palace nor any member of the Royal Family were approached for comment on the content of the series. Nor will we be making any further comment on this nor any other aspect of it.’

A Netflix source later insisted the communications offices for the King and the Prince of Wales were contacted in advance and given the chance to react to Harry and Meghan’s ‘claims within the series’.

But Kensington Palace then responded by saying that they had an email from a third-party production company, not Harry and Meghan’s Archewell foundation or Netflix. The Prince of Wales’ aides then contacted the Sussexes and the streaming giant to verify if it was genuine, but got no reply.

A ‘blind date’ that wasn’t

Harry and Meghan first met thanks to a mutual friend, who decided to set them up via a ‘blind date’. That’s the version of events we‘ve always previously been told, at least.

On the day of their engagement, Meghan, for example, revealed: ‘Yes, it was definitely a set-up. It was a blind date.’ Harry added: ‘It was a blind date, for sure.’ Five years later, this heartwarming story has significantly evolved.

‘Meghan and I met over Instagram’ Harry now claims, saying he was just ‘scrolling through my feed’ on Instagram where a mutual chum had posted a video of Meghan. Finding her unusually attractive, he phoned the friend to say he was ‘dying to meet’ the actress.

Meghan played hard to get, though. She only agreed to be put in touch after vetting Harry via his Instagram feed. ‘Then we got each other’s numbers,’ Harry recalled during the opening episode of the Netflix documentary, which suggests that they shared multiple FaceTime calls.

‘We were just constantly in touch, and I went “Let’s meet!”’

Forced to propose in the UK?

The gospel according to Team Sussex has it that stifling royal protocol forced Harry to delay proposing to Meghan until she was in the UK.

‘I wanted to do it earlier, but because I wanted to ask permission from my grandmother I couldn’t do it outside the UK,’ he alleged.

In reality, while senior royals are indeed expected to receive consent from the monarch before getting engaged, there is absolutely no rule dictating where they need to be to propose. Harry’s brother, Prince William, proposed to his then-girlfriend Kate during a trip to the foothills of Mount Kenya in October 2010.

A fanciful royal engagement

As for the moment of their engagement, Harry has previously told the BBC that he proposed in the kitchen during a ‘standard, typical night’ in their cottage at Kensington Palace, with Meghan recalling: ‘We were just roasting chicken. Trying to roast a chicken. And it just was an amazing surprise. It was so sweet and natural and very romantic. He got on one knee.’ In episode two of the Netflix show, Harry reveals that he actually proposed in the garden outside the cottage, on a picnic rug surrounded by 15 electric candles.

Meghan not only had time to record herself calling up a friend named Jess to say ‘Oh my God, it’s happening!’ but was also able to shoot a souvenir video of the ‘joyful’ scene.

BBC anger over ‘reality show’ fib

On the day their engagement was announced, in November 2017, Harry and Meghan sat down for a 20-minute interview with the BBC’s Mishal Husain. Beamed around the world to hugely positive reviews, it was, on the face of things, a stunning PR success, cementing the couple’s popularity with the British public.

So do Harry and Meghan now look back fondly on the whole thing? They do not.

Netflix viewers are instead told that the interview was part of an ‘orchestrated reality show’ with the Duchess of Sussex claiming: ‘It was, you know, rehearsed.’ Later she adds: ‘We weren’t allowed to tell our story, because they didn’t want it.’ Harry agrees: ‘We are not allowed to tell our story. That’s true. That’s the consistency.’

It’s quite an allegation. And one which is vigorously disputed by the BBC. Ms Husain told Radio 4’s World at One yesterday that prior to meeting the couple at Kensington Palace: ‘We went and had a conversation with Harry and Meghan and two members of their team beforehand and we talked about what the interview would cover, what they felt comfortable sharing.

‘After that, we went and set up our cameras. They went away for a bit and did their photocall and when they came back we recorded a 20-minute interview.’

The then-director general of the BBC, Lord Hall, has issued a statement defending Ms Husain’s journalism. It says that Meghan’s allegation that the interview was ‘an orchestrated reality show’ is ‘simply untrue’.

Cynically doctored interview footage

In a dubious piece of editing, the Netflix documentary deletes the first 177 words of Harry’s reply to a question in which Ms Husain asked whether the couple’s ‘different backgrounds’ meant they would ‘represent something new’ for the Royal Family.

Harry’s actual response, when the BBC broadcast the full interview in 2017, was to nod in agreement, gushing at great length about how ‘everything was just perfect’ and saying ‘the fact that she’ll be really unbelievably good at the job part of it as well is a huge relief to me because she’ll be able to deal with everything else that comes with it – but no, we’re a fantastic team. We know we are. And we hope to over time try and have as much impact for all the things that we care about as much as possible.’