Prince Harry and Meghan Markle "completely underestimated" the realities of life out with the Royal Family, an author has claimed.
Royal author Tina Brown, who has just released her explosive book The Palace Papers, says the Duke and Duchess of Sussex underestimated how difficult life would be outside of the Firm.
The couple, who now live in California with their two children Archie, 2, and Lilibet, four months, stepped down as senior working royals in early 2020 to live a financially independent life.
Tensions have been high with the Royal Family and the Sussex's since their exit, as they have signed multi-million dollar deals with Netflix and Spotify but have released little content so far, writes the Mirror.
Speaking in a video interview with the Washington Post, Brown says they didn't know what it would be like without the Palace's advisors and PR team to help them.
She explained: "I think they both complete underestimate what it was going to be like without the Palace platform.
"However much they hated, and I think they really did, the constraints and the pettiness, essentially they conceived, of the Palace and the advisors - trying doing it without the Palace advisors, right?
"Because what the Palace does, of course, it has an amazing convening power, there's no one who won't take a phone call from Buckingham Palace or Kensington Palace, they've got a huge convening power.
"Every invitation in the world comes through that conduit and private secretaries can just sift and say what about appearing this, or why don't you do this?
"All of that is now gone and they have to have PRs do that for them and their judgement is not necessarily the best judgement.
"They are trying to leverage the royal brand and there is no PR who really knows how to do that better than Buckingham Palace or Kensington Palace."
Meanwhile, Brown also credited Meghan with giving Harry the "tools to leave" the Firm and said they were keen to capitalise on striking celebrity deals.
She added: " “I really think Harry wanted out, himself… Meghan gave Harry the tools to leave.
"She understood the world of agents and deals. I mean this wasn’t Harry’s world, but suddenly he had in Meghan a very worldly strategist who he decided to trust above all the other advisors.
“They wanted to be able to have a commercial arm to their activities… Meghan certainly saw deals that were there to be made that they had to leave on the table because they were royals… It was as if Meghan couldn’t resist everything that was on offer on the celebrity buffet.”
Brown's book The Palace Papers contains countless shocking allegations about the Queen and the rest of the royal family.
It covers everything from Prince Charles's unusual bathroom demands and requests that his shoelaces are ironed, to insight into the Duchess of Cambridge's difficult relationship with her sister-in-law, Meghan.
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