CBS journalist Anderson Cooper claims Buckingham Palace officials made an urgent demand of the network before his interview with Prince Harry hit screens in the US.
The TV star led a chat with the Duke of Sussex, similar to ITV’s Tom Bradby’s interview on ITV, on Sunday night, ahead of today’s publication of his tell-all memoir, Spare.
Palace chiefs requested they be given access to the recording before it was aired, as writes the Mirror, a request which was denied.
Cooper said that the channel had “reached out” for a comment from Buckingham Palace, and he added: "Its representatives demanded that before considering responding, 60 Minutes provide them with out report prior to airing it tonight.
"It's something we never do".
Harry opened up in the 60 Minutes interview on the death of his mum, Princess Diana, in 1997, when he was aged just 12.
He admitted he’d looked at photos from the scene of her fatal crash in a Paris tunnel. He admitted he had been thankful to people who shielded him from the images when he was a youngster but said that he looked as an adult because he wanted “proof” of what happened.
The 38-year-old also said he always believed his mum would “reappear” and he’d wake up every morning wondering “maybe this is the day that she's gonna reappear".
And he claimed older brother William also had these "similar thoughts"
Elsewhere in the interview, Harry almost directly quoted his late mum when discussing his father's relationship with Camilla.
Diana famously discussed her husband's extra-marital relationship with Camilla during an interview with Martin Bashir in 1995 - delivering the immortal line: "There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded."
In his upcoming memoir, Harry writes how he and his brother begged their father not to marry Camilla in February 2005 - something the Duke of Sussex discussed with Anderson during their interview.
"She was the villain," he declared in the conversation. "She was the third person in their marriage. She needed to rehabilitate her image."
He was also asked by the reporter why he and wife Meghan Markle haven’t given up their royal titles, to which Harry replied: “What difference would that make?”.
And when Cooper said there seemed to be a lot of “complaining and explaining” from Harry and Meghan, the royal replied: “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 radicalises its readers to then potentially cause harm to my family, my wife, my kids.”
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