16 January 2024 , 16:04
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Meghan Markle's so-called mouthpiece has hit out at new claims surrounding the naming of her and Prince Harry's daughter Lilibet.
It has been claimed that a royal aide said the late Queen was "as angry as I’d ever seen her" after the Sussexes said they had her blessing to call their daughter Lilibet. Royal author Robert Hardman, in his new biography of King Charles, tells how a member of staff recounted the former monarch's apparent fury following Harry and Meghan’s announcement in 2021 over the use of her childhood family nickname.
A spokesperson for Harry and Meghan insisted at the time that the duke spoke to his grandmother in advance and would not have used the name had the monarch not been supportive.
The Sussexes named their daughter Lilibet after Harry's late grandmother (Getty Images)However, Hardman writes: "One privately recalled that Elizabeth II had been 'as angry as I’d ever seen her' in 2021 after the Sussexes announced that she had given them her blessing to call their baby daughter ‘Lilibet’, the Queen’s childhood nickname."
He added Buckingham Palace 'rebuffed' attempts by Harry and Meghan to confirm their version of events. But now royal author Omid Scobie, who co-authored Harry and Meghan's glowing biography Finding Freedom and recent controversial royal book Endgame, has said none of the new claims about the name Lilibet are "doing the late Queen any favours".
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Taking to X, formerly Twitter, he wrote: "None of these Lilibet 'revelations' are doing the late Queen Elizabeth II any favours. Not only do they contradict details shared by the Palace with a cooperatively written biography in 2022 (see pic), they also depict the monarch in a way the public haven’t known her to be."
In the photo that accompanied his post, he shared pictures of press coverage from another royal book Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait, by author and Googlebox star Gyles Brandreth. In his book, Mr Brandreth wrote: "According to the Queen, Harry told her the Sussexes wanted to call the baby 'Lilibet' in her honour and she accepted their choice with good grace, taking it as the compliment it was intended to be.
"Others in the family found the choice 'bewildering' and 'rather presumptuous', given that 'Lilibet' as a name had always been intimately and exclusively the Queen's. Later, the Queen said: 'I hear they’re calling her Lili, which is very pretty and seems just right.'"
Lilibet was first used when Princess Elizabeth was just a toddler and unable to pronounce her own name properly. Her grandfather King George V would affectionately call her Lilibet imitating her own attempts to say Elizabeth. The sweet nickname stuck and she became Lilibet to her family from then on.
Harry and Meghan’s youngest child, now a princess following the accession of her grandfather, was born in California on June 4 2021. She arrived two months after the death of Prince Philip, the late Duke of Edinburgh and in the wake of controversial claims levelled at the monarchy by the Sussexes in their bombshell Oprah interview.
Other revelations in Hardman’s book include how Prince William saw Harry’s remarks in his Netflix documentary that male members of the family can be tempted to marry someone who fits the mould rather than someone they are destined to be with as "the lowest of the low". William viewed it as "Harry making a blatant attack" on his wife Kate.