THE most sensational royal interview of all time saw the Duke and Duchess of Sussex slam ‘racist’ Britain, the Royal Family and the Press.

Speaking to Oprah Winfrey in California, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle revealed all, while also highlighting the Duchess’ mental health struggles. Here is the astonishing transcript in full…

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Meghan and Harry sat down for a ‘nothing off limits’ interview with Oprah WinfreyCredit: CBS
OPRAH: We can’t hug, everybody is double- masked and has face shields. You look lovely. Do you know if you’re having a boy or a girl?

Meghan: We do this time. I’ll wait for my husband to join us and we can share that with you.

Oprah: That would be really great. Before we get into to it, I just want to make clear to everybody that, even though we’re neighbours, I’m down the road, you’re up the road, we’re using a friend’s place. There has not been an agreement, you don’t know what I’m going to ask, there is no subject that’s off limits and you are not getting paid for this interview.

Oprah: I remember sitting in the chapel — thanks for inviting me, by the way. I so recall this sense of magic. I never experienced anything like it. When you came through that door, you seemed like you were floating down the aisle. Were you even inside your body at that time?

Meghan: I’ve thought about this a lot. It was like having an out-of- body experience I was very present for. The night before, I slept through the night entirely, which is a bit of a miracle, and then woke up and started listening to Going To The Chapel, to make it fun and light and remind ourselves this was our day. We were both aware in advance of that this wasn’t our day, this was the day planned for the world.

The two-hour chat saw them lift the lid on the Royal Family and MegxitCredit: CBS
Oprah: Everybody who gets married knows you’re really marrying the family. 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?

Meghan: I would say I went into it naively because I didn’t grow up knowing much about the Royal Family. It wasn’t part of something that was part of conversation at home. It wasn’t something that we followed. My mum even said to me a couple of months ago, ‘Did Diana ever do an interview?’ Now I can say. ‘Yes, a very famous one’, but my mum doesn’t know that.

Oprah: But you were aware of the royals and, if you were going to marry into the royals, you’d do research about what that would mean?

Meghan: I didn’t do any research about what that would mean.

Oprah: You didn’t do any research?

Your Prince Harry and Meghan Markle questions answered

Meghan: No. I didn’t feel any need to, because everything I needed to know he was sharing with me. Everything we thought I needed to know, he was telling me.

Oprah: So, you didn’t have a conversation with yourself, or talk to your friends about what it would be like to marry a prince, who is Harry, who you had fallen in love with . . .  you didn’t give it a lot of thought?

Meghan: No. We thought a lot about what we thought it might be. I didn’t fully understand what the job was: What does it mean to be a working royal? What do you do? What does that mean? He and I were very aligned on our cause- driven work, that was part of our initial connection. But there was no way to understand what the day-to- day was going to be like, and it’s so different because I didn’t romanticise any element of it. But I think, as Americans especially, what you do know about the royals is what you read in fairytales, and you think is what you know about the royals. It’s easy to have an image that is so far from reality, and that’s what was so tricky over those past few years, when the perception and the reality are two different things and you’re being judged on the perception but you’re living the reality of it. There’s a complete misalignment and there’s no way to explain that to people.

Oprah: With every family things get serious when you’re brought in to meet the grandmother or the mother. The grandmother is the matriarch and, in your situation it’s the Queen.

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Oprah promised the Sussexes had no prior knowledge of what they would be askedCredit: ITV
Meghan: She was one of the first people I met. The real Queen.

Oprah: What was that like? Were you worried about making the right impression?

Meghan: There wasn’t a huge formality the first time I met Her Majesty The Queen. We were going for lunch at Royal Lodge, which is where some other members of the family live, specifically Andrew and Fergie, and Eugenie and Beatrice would spend a lot of time there. Eugenie and I had known each other before I knew Harry, so that was comfortable and it turned out the Queen was finishing a church service in Windsor and so she was going to be at the house. Harry and I were in the car and he says, ‘OK, well my grandmother is there, you’re going to meet her’. (I said) ‘OK, great’. I loved my grandmother, I used to take care of my grandmother. (He said) ‘Do you know how to curtsey?’ ‘What?’ ‘Do you know how to curtsey?’ I thought genuinely that’s what happens outside, that was part of the fanfare. I didn’t think that’s what happens inside. I go, ‘But it’s your grandmother’. He goes, ‘It’s the Queen!’

Oprah: Wow!

Meghan: And that was really the first moment the penny dropped?

Oprah: Did you Google how to curtsey?

Meghan: No, we were in the car. Deeply, to show respect, I learned it very quickly right in front of the house. We practised and walked in.

Oprah: Harry practised?

Meghan: Yeah, and Fergie ran out and said, ‘Are you ready? Do you know how to curtsey? Oh, my goodness, you guys’. I practised very quickly and went in, and apparently, I did a very deep curtsey, and we just sat there and we chatted and it was lovely and easy and I think, thank God, I hadn’t known a lot about the family. Thank God, I hadn’t researched. I would have been so in my head about all of it.

Oprah: (What) you’re sharing with us is that you were no more nervous as a regular person who goes to meet somebody’s grandmother.

Meghan: I had confused the idea. I grew up in LA, you see celebrities all the time. This is not the same but it’s very easy, especially as an American, to go, ‘These are famous people’. This is a completely different ball game.

(Cut to them and Oprah at their house)

Oprah: What are you feeling here (their home)? What’s the word?

Meghan: Peace.

Oprah: Peace?

Meghan: Yeah.

(Oprah narrates) The day after our interview, I stopped over to Harry and Meghan’s new home.

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Meghan said her 2018 royal wedding ‘wasn’t our day, this was the day planned for the world’Credit: Getty
Meghan: Hi, Guy (dog).

Oprah: Hi, Guy.

Meghan: Yeah, Guy’s been — Guy’s been through everything with me.

Oprah: Yeah, from the beginning, from the very first date, yeah?

Meghan: If Guy, I mean, I had him in Canada. I got him from a kill shelter in Kentucky.

Oprah: Yeah?

(In Harry and Meghan’s hen coop)

Meghan: Hi, girls!

(Oprah narrates) We put on wellies to feed the hens Meghan and Harry recently rescued from a factory farm. ‘I love your little designer house here. Archie’s chick inn. Oh, how cute is that.’

Harry: She’s always wanted chickens.

Meghan: Well, you know, I just love rescuing.

Oprah: So, this is a part of your new life? What are you most excited about?

Meghan: Whoop! You’re OK . . .

Oprah: What are you most excited about in the new life? What are you most excited about? Here, chick, chick, chick, chick.

Meghan: I think just being able to live authentically.

Oprah: Mm-hmm.

Meghan: Right? Like this kind of stuff. It’s so, it’s so basic, but it’s really fulfilling. Just getting back down to basics. I was thinking about it — even at our wedding, you know, three days before our wedding, we got married . . .

Oprah: Ah!

Meghan: No one knows that. But we called the Archbishop, and we just said, ‘Look, this thing, this spectacle is for the world, but we want our union between us’. So, like, the vows that we have framed in our room are just the two of us in our backyard with the Archbishop of Canterbury, and that was the piece that . . .

Harry: Just the three of us.

Oprah: Really?

Harry: Just the three of us.

Meghan: Just the three of us.

(Back to Oprah)

Oprah: You know, the wedding was the most perfect picture, you know, anybody’s ever seen. But through that picture that we were all seeing, behind the scenes, obviously, there was a lot of drama going on. And soon after your marriage, the tabloids started offering stories that painted a not-so-flattering picture of you in your new world. There were rumours about you being ‘Hurricane Meghan’.

Meghan: I hadn’t heard that.

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She said she didn’t research the Royal Family before she married HarryCredit: AFP and licensors
Oprah: OK.

Oprah: So, there were rumours about you being Hurricane Meghan, for the departure of several high-profile palace staff members. And there was also a story — did you hear this one? — about you making Kate Middleton cry?

Meghan: This I heard about.

Oprah: You heard about that. OK.

Meghan: This was . . . that was . . . that was a turning point.

Oprah: That was a turning point?

Meghan: Yeah.