The Daily - Diana and Meghan

Episode Date: March 11, 2021

This episode contains references to suicide, self-harm and eating disorders.In 1995, Diana, Princess of Wales, made a decision that was unprecedented for a member of the British royal family: She sat down with the BBC to speak openly about the details of her life.On Sunday, her younger son, Prince Harry, and his wife, Meghan, told Oprah Winfrey of their own travails within the family.Today, we look at the similarities between these two interviews.Guest: Sarah Lyall, a writer at large for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: A quarter-century after Diana broke her silence about life among the British royals, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, did the same. Their stories were remarkably similar.The Sussexes have accused the royal family of failing to protect them, both emotionally and financially. Here’s what we learned from Meghan and Harry’s interview with Oprah Winfrey. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. In two explosive interviews, separated by a quarter century, Princess Diana and Meghan Markle forced the royal family to confront ugly truths about itself. My colleague, Sarah Lyle, on how in the process they encouraged British society to do the same.

It's Thursday, March 11th. Sarah, where were you in your career as a reporter when this now-famous interview with Diana, the Princess of Wales, first airs? So it was 1995, and I'd just moved to London from New York. I'd gotten married to a British person, and I'd been assigned by the paper to cover an interview that Diana, the Princess of Wales, wife of Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, was about to give on television about the state of their marriage and her relationship to the British royal family. And here's what you need to understand about what was going on at the time. Her marriage to Charles was in total disarray.

They had gotten married in 1981, but by this point, 14 years later, they were officially separated. She was still technically part of the royal family, but she was on the outside because she was officially separated from her husband. And the tabloids were obsessed. They were full of gossip from both sides about things like how badly he treated her and how badly she

behaved and her childishness and his coldness. So all of a sudden we got this news that Diana's going to give this interview to the BBC and set the record straight from her perspective. give this interview to the BBC and set the record straight from her perspective. And so what actually happens in this interview? I desperately wanted to work. I desperately love my husband. And I wanted to share everything together. And I thought that we were a very good team. Well, she starts telling this extraordinary story of how horrible her marriage had been. Well, we had unique pressures put upon us,

and we both tried our hardest to cover them up, but obviously it wasn't to be. She expected it to be a kind of fairy tale, and he was cold and distant and weird, and it wasn't just two people who didn't really get along who ended up drifting apart. Around 1986, your husband renewed his relationship with Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles.

Were you aware of that? Yes, I was. But I wasn't in a position to do anything about it. Her husband was already having an affair with his former girlfriend. What evidence did you have that their relationship was continuing even though you were married? A woman's instinct is a very good one. Do you think Mrs Parker Bowles was a factor

in the breakdown of your marriage? Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded. And the way she presented it in this interview was like, you just have to accept that a prince will have affairs and that's part of the deal you're getting into. And what else did she say in this interview? It's been suggested in some newspapers that you were left largely to cope with your new status on your own. Do you feel that was your experience? Yes, I do, on reflection.

Well, she talked about how lonely she had been. Here was a situation which hadn't ever happened before in history, in the sense that the media were everywhere, and here was a fairy story that everybody wanted to work and so it was it was isolating she also said that she self-harmed according to press reports it was suggested that it was around this time things became so difficult that you actually tried to injure yourself. Is that true? When no one listens to you or you feel no one's listening to you, all sorts of things start to happen.

And nobody was talking about that back then. So, yes, I did inflict upon myself. I didn't like myself. I was ashamed because I couldn't cope with the pressures. She had been very bulimic. I had bulimia for a number of years. And that's like a secret disease you inflicted upon yourself because your self-esteem is still low ebb

and you don't think you're worthy or valuable. And it's a repetitive pattern, which is very destructive to yourself. No one had really talked about it publicly before, no one of her caliber, of her position. For instance, you have so much pain inside yourself that you try and hurt yourself on the outside because you want help, but it's the wrong help you're asking for. People just didn't speak like that in England at the time. They just didn't talk about their problems. And when you marry into the royal family, you're meant to

just become a royal family member. You're not really supposed to have a personality of your own. You're not supposed to do things differently from the way they do them. You're not supposed to draw too much attention to yourself. I mean, she presents herself as being from a very different emotional mindset as them. It frightened them that she was unhappy. They don't really do unhappy in the royal family, and they certainly don't complain. And so by doing this interview, she's very publicly making the royal family confront what she's saying and her struggles with her mental health. And given that they tried to push it under the rug all this time, it was extremely upsetting to them

to hear it publicly aired like this. So she's not only describing a profound unhappiness, she's describing a profound unhappiness that comes in part at the hands of this pretty uncaring, unsympathetic royal family. And it's not trying to alleviate her pain, even as she is telling them that she is in such pain. Exactly. Sarah, how does this interview, which as you said, is quite uncharacteristic in the British

tradition and imagination, how does it land inside the UK when it airs in 1995? and imagination. How does it land inside the UK when it airs in 1995? It was completely shocking and it really divided people. I mean, people who were sort of establishment people, older people, men, you know, all sympathized with Charles and they sympathized with the notion of this long-running establishment monarchy not having to deal with outsiders criticizing them. They thought that the rudeness and the mischief of coming in and saying all these things was a horrible thing to do to your in-laws and a horrible thing to do to this institution that in some ways they felt was the glue that held society together. So in this version, she betrays the monarchy and by extension, version, she betrays the monarchy and by extension, a kind of fundamental aspect of British society.

Yes. And she's also whining in a way that Brits hate. They don't want to hear people talk about their problems. It really was all stiff upper lip, don't complain, you know, sit there with rain pouring on your head freezing and just say, you know, it was sunny five minutes ago. We got the best of the day. But a whole other segment of society, you know, younger women, people who were unhappy in love, people who had struggled with mental health issues, people who maybe had eating problems or other problems, all those people thought, well done you, you know, for speaking out. We sympathize with you. We think you're wonderful and you're a brave person for talking about yourself in this way. Of those two very divergent views of this interview, which one prevails? Well, I think both those strands were sort of buzzing around in people's opinions after the interview.

And as a result of the interview, the queen basically told the two of them they had to get divorced. It was unacceptable to have a married couple who were married, though separated, speaking in public like this about each other. So then the divorce lands Diana in this sort of weird limbo period because she's basically been kicked out of the royal family and feeling abandoned by them. They stripped her of her royal title so she couldn't be known as her royal highness anymore, which doesn't sound like a big deal, but was a big deal to her at the time. She didn't go around with royal security anymore. She was sort of out on her own. And then, of course, in 1997, just two years later, she's in Paris with her boyfriend

and ends up in a car speeding away from the paparazzi being chased and is in a terrible car accident. And both she and her boyfriend are killed. And that's when you saw this incredible moment in the history of modern Britain where all this emotion spilled out and they'd never been a country where emotion spilled out. Prime Minister, can we please have your reaction to the news? So can we please have your reaction to the news? I feel like everyone else in this country today, utterly devastated. And all of a sudden, people were weeping in the streets.

Everybody loved her. This morning, even by the time they came to change the guard at Buckingham Palace, the pavement outside was already a sea of flowers. And, you know, thousands of people came and left flowers at all the royal palaces, even the ones she didn't live at. They were leaving flowers in Buckingham Palace. I was looking at your bouquets there. Would you read what you've said on the card? What I've said on the card?

It's not just what you've done for us that makes us lovely so. It's all the joy of who you are, the friend who comes to know. It's a dreadful time, isn't it? It is, yeah. And people were so sorry. They said, you know, we didn't appreciate her when she was alive, and she was essentially killed by this family that was cold and unfeeling. And what ended up happening then was also extraordinary because the royal family never does anything that it hasn't done before.

It hates change. And so for the first few days after the death, they refused to make a statement. I mean, all these people here today are showing the strength of the nation. And she hasn't said anything, the Queen. And as for Prince Charles, well, I think there's not a lot he can say, really, is there? And the Queen's people were basically saying, no, we can't, you know, we would never do this. But the public opinion became so overwhelming. Today's statement from Buckingham Palace will be seen by some as a response to criticism

of the royal establishment's handling of Diana's death. Many had been contrasting the outpouring of popular grief and emotion with the silence and perceived detachment of senior members of the royal family. That they had to basically bow to public opinion and say that this woman had this profound impact on British society. Well, I wonder, Sarah, if you think that the emotion and the vulnerability that Diana openly showed in that interview, which is something that had been kind of anathema to the monarchy and kind of to British society until that interview, which is something that had been kind of anathema to the monarchy and kind of to British society until that moment, if that opened the door in a way for the public,

for British people to be so open with their grief and their anger at the monarchy once Diana dies. Absolutely. I mean, right after the interview, opinion was really divided. But it wasn't until she was killed two years later that the lines were drawn between people who felt that she had been misunderstood and treated badly. And if only anyone had listened to her, this wouldn't have happened.

And the other voices really got washed out. And there was a big feeling of collective grief in the country and an opening of the floodgates to people to talk about their emotions, not just sadness about what had happened to her, but also the sort of things she'd been talking about, mental illness, challenges in daily life, people's struggles, getting help, seeking therapy, talking about your problems, all these things that they hadn't really been allowed to do before.

So it feels like the image that Diana put forth in this unusual and very important interview with the BBC in some ways becomes the last word on this drama, and the last word ends up kind of swinging public opinion toward Diana and away from the monarchy. That's exactly right. And you saw that at her funeral where her brother got up and made a distinction between the way the royal family goes about things and the way Diana did and explicitly told her children, you know,

we want to raise you in the way your mother would have raised you, which is different. And then the question becomes, what effect does that have on her children? Her children were being raised by their mother. Their mother was dead. But public opinion had come around to this notion that her way of doing it was right, that her approach to the monarchy was right, that you should have compassion, that you should be emotional, that you should be more like a normal person and less like, you know, a person living in an ivory tower far away from real people. So they're raised with this image of their mother and the memory of their mother who they lost when they were young. I mean, Harry was only 12 years old. And it really felt like his relationship with his mother was one of the driving forces in his life as he moved forward. And her memory and what happened to her was very resonant with him when he

set about finding a wife of his own. and interestingly enough he had chosen someone who would end up emulating his mother in many ways and together when they themselves ran afoul of the customs of the royal family they sat down the way diana had done for a major television interview and lobbed grenades at the royal family. We'll be right back. Nearly two billion people around the globe watched their wedding. From the outside, it looked like something out of a fairy tale and appeared to signal a new day for the modern British monarchy. This couple represents everything people can celebrate. It's a wonderful fairy tale. They became one of the most talked about couples in the media. Then in January 2020,

there's been an almost shockingly quick turnaround. Harry and Meghan stunned the world when they decided to step back as senior members of the royal family. Meghan seems to have moved from Okay, so Sarah, it is now 26 years later, and you are watching another bombshell interview with another wife of a member of the royal family. Yes, and it was like history repeating itself, which of course is what Harry said throughout the interview that he was most afraid of when it came to his wife and the royal family and the media, that history would repeat itself. So it felt like deja vu to me. Tonight, for the first time, they tell their story.

Well, let's talk about that. How do Meghan and Harry describe their experience with the royal family in this interview? And let's start with Meghan. The night before, I slept through the night. And then woke up and started listening to that song, Going to the Chapel. And just tried to make it fun and light. And just tried to make it fun and light. Well, she characterized it as a situation where she went in with every hope and every happiness being married to Harry. But I think we were both really aware, even in advance of that, this wasn't our day. This was the day that was planned for the world.

Everybody who gets married knows that you are really marrying the family too. But you weren't just marrying a family. You were marrying a 1,200-year-old institution. You're marrying the monarchy. What did you think it was going to be like? I will say I went into it naively. But she described a family that was not sympathetic to her, that did not support her, that did not protect her. You know, there were several stories that compared headlines written about you to those written about Kate. Since you don't read things, let me just tell you what was said. And she especially brought up the press and how badly the press treated her and how, in her words, the royal family did nothing to correct the misapprehension that the press was propagating. I came to understand that they weren't willing to tell the truth to protect me and my husband.

And it was horrifying and lonely and confusing and depressing. And she talked about how she felt isolated. She felt constrained. So even, can I go and have lunch with my friends? No, no, no, you're oversaturated. You're everywhere. It would be best for you to not go out to lunch with your friends. I go, well, I haven't left the house in months. And she talked as if she were someone who had no life of her own anymore, who had to completely conform to this institution. I just didn't see a solution. And I just didn't want to be alive anymore. And that was a very clear and real and frightening constant thought.

And she said when she became more and more sad and depressed and suicidal, she asked for help and they said they couldn't help her. And I remember I went to the institution and I said that I needed to go somewhere to get help. And I was told that I couldn't, that it wouldn't be good for the institution. And that to me was very similar to what Diana said when she talked about her mental health struggles and how this family was not sympathetic to it. And so listening to it, I sort of thought, you know, had they not changed at all in 26 years? They were still, still had the same approach. Right. The parallels between Meghan and Diana from what you just described seem indisputable. I mean, almost startlingly so. How explicitly

in the interview do Meghan and Harry draw parallels to the situation with Diana? Harry talked about it a lot. You know, it felt like he was haunted by what had happened to his mother. The UK is my home. So, yes, I've got my own relationship that goes back a long way with the media. He focused more on the paparazzi element of it, on the tabloid element of it. You know, he talked about how badly his wife had been treated by the tabloids.

I asked for calm from the British tabloids. And he mentioned in the interview that he had pled with the tabloids on several occasions. Once as a boyfriend. When he was dating Meghan. Once as a husband. When they were married. And then Once as a boyfriend. When he was dating Meghan. Once as a husband. When they were married. And then once as a father.

To back off, to be nicer, to stop it, and they wouldn't listen to him. So I think from his point of view, it was as if what happened to his mother, he was seeing repeated right in front of his eyes all over again, and he would have thought that he could do something about that history, that he could intervene to change it somehow.

So when I asked the question, why did you leave? The simplest answer is lack of support and lack of understanding. And he was frustrated that he couldn't. Right. And frustrated not just with the paparazzi, but with his own family. The element of the interview that stuck with me was when Harry said that at one point, his own father wasn't returning his phone calls, and that he felt his entire family was being unresponsive in the face of a crisis in his own family. Yes, he was very upset about his family and how they had responded to Meghan, even from

the beginning of their relationship. He felt like they weren't open or sympathetic to her from the start. And even more important, he felt that they weren't being supportive of the struggles that she was going through in terms of her mental health and in terms of combating these narratives that she said were in the paper and were so harmful to her. You know, they didn't go in and correct these stories against her, which they could well have done, and they decided not to. And it really felt, watching that, that Harry was thinking about the past and hoping his family would have learned the lessons of what happened to his mother. And what happened to her was that she also didn't have the support of the family.

And it had been very hard on her. And I think he was worried that Megan would be abandoned in the same way as Diana was. And of course it had such terrible consequences, not just for his mother, but for him and his childhood, and it's reverberated throughout his life. And here I think he felt was a chance to write a different sort of history. And the old history was coming back all over again. So that makes me wonder, are Prince Harry and Meghan Markle right to see these parallels between her situation and Diana's? I think they are. I mean, I think for Harry, it's one of the dominant principles in his thinking. I think he's animated in many ways

by the memory of his mother and the desire to do better this time around. So I think for him, there was really no other way to look at this than as a parallel. And I think it was, you know, to the extent that they're both pretty good at PR, I think it was a really smart way of doing the interview because it did raise all these issues. It did make a historical through line right from this current interview back to this other one so many years prior. And it did very neatly set up this dichotomy between the two of them on the one hand and maybe the forces of history. And on the other hand, the royal family that refuses to change with the times. But of course, there are huge differences between this interview and the Diana interview.

I mean, starting with the fact that Diana was all by herself. She was a single person going against a whole institution by herself and disapproved of by every single member of that family. And here in Megan's case, we have her and Harry as a couple. I mean, the really revolutionary thing about what's happened this time is that Harry is on his wife's side against his own family. He's been steeped in that family and steeped in this notion of tradition and service and everybody does what the family wants. And yet he has chosen his wife over them. Right.

And then, you know, the really important thing that we haven't mentioned yet, of course, is race. Megan's race was a factor in this from the very, very beginning when she was hit with a wall of racist abuse from the tabloid press when she was going out with Harry. abuse from the tabloid press when she was going out with Harry and that continued as a sort of underlying strain throughout the whole history of their relationship with the royal family. In those months when I was pregnant, all around this same time, so we have in tandem the conversation of he won't be given security, he's not going to be given a title, and also concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he's not going to be given a title, and also concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he's born. What? And then the worst part, the most disturbing part of the interview was when she talked, and then later Harry talked a little bit about this notion of

members of the royal family or a member of the royal family overtly asking, what about when you have a child? You know, what color is the child going to be? As if there's this, you know, fear in the family that they won't have white children. Seeing Oprah's response when Oprah looked so incredulously, because it is, it's a horrible thing to hear from someone that people have spoken about them like that. You had described the reaction to Diana's interview as so forceful in all its forms. So how has the reaction been in the case of Meghan and Harry? Well, the interesting thing is before the interview came out, the royal family was obviously worried about it.

So they were sort of preparing, but I don't think they were anything like prepared enough for what actually happened. And so for a day, there was no response. I mean, they were sort of scrambling to see what would happen. And what was so fascinating to me, having observed them for so long, is the statement they gave showed they realized they had to do something. And it said, we take what she said, what they said about the race issue very seriously. And this is something we'll deal with in the family, but we're really sad to hear that they feel this way. So rather than doing what they might've done 20 years ago, 30 years ago, and just basically saying, you know, we don't accept any of this and they decided to leave or whatever,

you know, we don't accept any of this and they decided to leave or whatever, they issued a really quite humble for them statement was pretty amazing. So you saw real humility in the response from the royal family? Well, if it had come from anyone else, it wouldn't be humility. But for them, that's humility. I mean, any little thing they do, as I mentioned, that they haven't done before is like a seismic change for them. And they don't like doing things like this. So to break from their past behavior and to mention race like this, it reminds me of how Diana also forced the royal family through that interview to confront something that they hadn't talked about before, this notion of mental health. And whether or not they believe what either of these women said, they were forced to tell the public that they were taking it seriously. And that is a big deal.

And it goes further than the monarchy because the monarchy is sort of setting the tone here. It's the rest of society. monarchy because the monarchy is sort of setting the tone here. It's the rest of society. I mean, it's as if they're sort of waiting for license to discuss these things in a new way, especially with this issue. I mean, this extraordinary thing happened on British TV. It doesn't really matter what I think of Meghan Markle. What matters is the damage that she is accused of doing to the royal family. Where you have this sort of stuffy, old-fashioned establishment announcer named Piers Morgan, who'd been a huge, annoying critic of Meghan this whole time. On the issue of race, she has now got the whole of America, and the worst

of the world, frankly, looking upon the palace, the monarchy, the queen, everyone in the royal family as a bunch of racists. He's doing his program on Tuesday morning, obviously discussing the interview, when all of a sudden, another correspondent, Alex Beresford, who is biracial and was on the program to discuss all this, says, hold on a second, Piers, you've been banging on about Meghan in the most nasty way for ages. And I understand that you don't like Meghan Markle. You've made it so clear a number of times on this programme. We all know that you were friends with her

and then she cut you off and you've never gotten over that. She's entitled to cut you off if she wants to. Has she said anything about you since she cut you off? I don't think she has, but yet you continue to trash her. OK, I'm done with this. No, no, no. Sorry, no. Do you know what? That's pathetic. You can trash me, but yet you continue to trash her. Okay, I'm done with this. No, no, no. Sorry, no. Do you know what?

That's pathetic. You can trash me, mate, but not my own stuff. No, no, no. See you later. Sorry, can't do this. This is absolutely diabolical behaviour. So here's Morgan, who's, you know, an influential, powerful, big, obnoxious voice

in British TV, gets up and says, I've had it, I can't listen to this. And he stalks off his own set of his own TV show. He wasn't even a guest. He's the host. And he flounces out of the studio, sulks for a while, comes back in and they finish the segment. But all hell is breaking loose. People having watched him do this start complaining and tens of thousands of complaints are lodged. One of them apparently was from Meghan Markle herself, and he ends up being called in and yelled at by his boss.

He won't apologize, and he's basically forced out of his job. And he quits. And that, I promise you, would never have happened two weeks ago. In other words, this was an enough is enough moment. And it had been brought on by Meghan and by Harry doing that interview, saying what they said, and the monarchy signaling that they understood the severity of it. And that trickling down to a major anchor in British TV

getting pushed out of his job. Yes. You know, what Meghan and Harry were saying is that a lot of the criticism they had been hearing had racial undertones. That a lot of stuff that had happened wasn't because Meghan was just an outspoken woman, but because she was a woman of color.

And that's the narrative that has started to become more prominent in the British conversation right now. And it's again, it's a bit like what happened with Diana. Diana made it okay to talk about your feelings. And they forced people to confront issues around race. So it had an impact beyond what you thought it would. Just the way it was Diana. It was, you know, on one level you could have thought of it as sort of internal family gossip

and who really cares about the royal family. But it really changed society. Sarah, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you so much, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On this vote, the yeas are 220, the nays are 211. The motion is adopted. On Wednesday, Congress gave final approval to President Biden's nearly $2 trillion stimulus package,

a landmark piece of legislation intended to stabilize the economy and vastly expand the American social safety net. After passing in the Senate earlier this week, the legislation was adopted by the House of Representatives. Not a single Republican lawmaker voted for it in either chamber. This is one of the most consequential pieces of legislation we have passed in decades. After the vote, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer held a news conference outside the Capitol. Chuck Schumer held a news conference outside the Capitol. And you know we can show America that we can get things done to make their lives better. President Biden is expected to sign the legislation into law during a ceremony at the White House tomorrow.

Today's episode was produced by Nina Potok and Sidney Harper. It was edited by Dave Shaw, Rachel Quester, and Anita Botticello, and engineered by Dan Powell. Special thanks to Katie Weaver. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bavaro. See you tomorrow.