Prince Harry Explains Why He and Meghan Markle Won’t Renounce Royal Titles

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle stepped away from senior royal duties (meaning they are no longer working royals like Prince William and Kate Middleton) and have since spoken pretty openly about the toxicity within the family. Critics of the couple often—somewhat loudly—wonder why they are still using their Duke and Duchess of Sussex titles despite distancing themselves from the royals, and Anderson Cooper straight-up asked Prince Harry about it during their 60 Minutes interview on Sunday night. Ahem:

Anderson went on to ask why Harry and Meghan feel the need to be “so public” and “reveal conversations you’ve had” with Harry’s brother and father, and Harry explained that he’d tried to keep said conversations private.

“Every single time I’ve tried to do it privately, there have been briefings and leakings and planting of stories against me and my wife,” he said. “You know, the family motto is ‘never complain, never explain.’ But it’s just a motto. And it doesn’t really hold.”

Harry added, “So now, trying to speak a language that perhaps they understand, I will sit here and speak truth to you with the words that come out of my mouth, rather than using someone else, an unnamed source, to feed in lies or a narrative to a tabloid media that literally radicalizes its readers to then potentially cause harm to my family, my wife, my kids.”

As of now, the royals haven’t responded to Prince Harry’s memoir, but apparently they set up a casual “war room” at Sandringham.

“There were undoubtedly fears about what Harry was going to write, and in particular, they were worried about the highly personal moments of their lives being retold,” a source told Page Six of the meeting. “The King wanted to move ahead with the traditional ‘stiff upper lip’ attitude and follow in the Queen’s famous footsteps of ‘never complain, never explain,’ but the Prince of Wales argued that perhaps the family should, in fact, go on the offensive and release a statement, much in the same way he said, ‘We are very much not a racist family,’ but he was overruled by his father.”

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