We can trust royal reporters to bring us the truth

“It’s amazing what people will do when offered a huge amount of money.” So said Prince Harry, without a trace of irony, in episode three of the Netflix documentary that tells his, and his wife Meghan’s, “truth”.

Harry was talking about the stitch-up between his estranged father-in-law and the venal press which, in his view, makes up stuff about the royal family to sell newspapers.

In this series, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex reserved most of their hate – the rest is directed at the Windsors and Britain – for the press and, in particular, royal correspondents. And the tabloids. And the paparazzi.

All journalists are fair game, in fact, even the saintly Mishal Husain, who was indignant on the Today Programme on Thursday when the BBC’s royal man, Jonny Dymond, said Meghan described her post-engagement interview, with Husain, as an “orchestrated reality show”.

“We know recollections may vary,” said the presenter, echoing comments attributed to the Queen following the Sussexes’ Oprah Winfrey interview in 2021.

Harry and Meghan have been paid a reported $100 million for their six-part Netflix show – the final three episodes are released next Thursday – and needed to dredge up some dirt to justify the bounty.

Judging from the opening salvos, the royal attacks could have been worse – there were no specific allegations of racism, for example, although Britain itself was portrayed as a bastion of bigots.

Charles and Camilla, William and Kate will be worrying now about what is to come. But there were no holds barred in the opener when it came to the press.

Harry sometimes seemed to confuse the vile and often racist attacks against his wife on social media with mainstream news coverage.

He also conflated the treatment of Meghan with that of his late mother. But a lone – unseen – motorbike apparently following the couple’s limo in New York in one clip is no match for the kind of hounding Diana regularly endured.

Besides, much has changed in the past 25 years, including what reporters and photographers can and can’t do.

What has not changed, though, is the tenacity of the royal pack, their professionalism and, indeed, their veracity. A much-maligned lot, British royal correspondents have a peculiar beat: to focus on one family which, unlike footballers or celebrities or politicians, cannot answer back.

This has often led to accusations that they are inventing copy to sell newspapers. With Diana, the drip drip of extraordinary tales as her marriage crumbled – including the suicide attempts with a lemon slicer and throwing herself down the stairs – cast newspapers in a bad light.

The Palace blamed the stories on a circulation war but, as we now know, they turned out to be true. We also know more about Diana’s own collusion with favoured reporters and editors, and how she understood the press and skilfully manipulated journalists.

Far from what Harry calls invention, seasoned royal hacks, some of whom have covered the family for decades, rely on carefully cultivated Palace contacts, including members of the “firm”, to source their copy.

It can be a thankless task – remember how Charles dismissed the BBC’s Nicholas Witchell as “that awful man” and how Harry snapped at Sky’s Rhiannon Mills during his tour of South Africa in 2019.

But it would be counter-productive for papers to wage a campaign against the royal family. The idea that they were out to “destroy” Meghan, as the couple claimed, is nonsense, as is the bizarre – and completely contradictory – definition by Harry, to an American friend of Meghan’s, of a “royal expert.”

“It’s the same as a royal correspondent”, he said; papers give them that title for “legitimacy”. “Anyone can be a royal expert,” he goes on, “and they get paid for it!”

He then says that royal correspondents are “an extended PR arm of the royal family”. But if the press pack and the Palace were basically the same operation, why would papers – the Daily Mail (whose owner Harry is suing) comes in for special mention – seek to damage the royals?

Diana may have been, as her brother said at her funeral, “the most hunted person of the modern age”, but the tabloids were not intent on bringing her down. On the contrary, they championed many of her causes and their relationship was, thanks largely to her, symbiotic.

So was the papers’ approach to Harry and Meghan, with the couple’s press overwhelmingly positive, fawning even, while still exposing their faux pas. These exposés – for instance, on the wrecking of their green credentials with their jet-setting lifestyle – were factual reports, not fantasies.

In contrast, Harry and Meghan’s tirades against the tabloids are based on tenuous grounds. Chunks of the Netflix footage have already been unveiled as fake. For example, shots of allegedly intrusive press photographers were taken from non-royal events, such as a Harry Potter premiere.

More duplicitous was the use of headlines from US tabloids, like the National Enquirer, to castigate the much more regulated British press.

And then there were the outright porkies. The account of the interview with Husain, in which they said “we were not allowed to tell our story”, was refuted by the BBC star, who met the pair beforehand to discuss what they wanted to say. Who would you believe, Mishal or Meghan?

The Times’s royal reporter, who recounted that former Sussex staff were “seething with rage” over their misleading betrayal, is more credible than Harry and Meghan’s victim narrative, as is Nicholas Witchell’s contention, aired live, that the Sussex claims “do not stand up to proper and reasonable scrutiny”.

Harry and Meghan may have given us their truth. But for the actual truth, I’d trust the royal press pack any day.