[imagesource: YouTube / Josh Pieters & Archie Manners]

According to ‘Royal insiders’…

A ‘source close to the Royal Family said’…

We’ve grown used to seeing stories with quotes attributed to unnamed sources, and whilst those that appear in the likes of The Daily Mail are probably rubbish, other outlets do have people on the inside who feed them information.

Then there is the entire industry around royal experts and commentators, who have built careers based on their knowledge of how the British Royal Family works.

Four of the latter have been taken for a ride by South African-born YouTuber Josh Pieters and his pal, Archie Manners, for a new video they’ve titled ‘We Proved Royal Experts Lie About Harry and Meghan’.

You may recognise Pieters from the prank he pulled on Katie Hopkins last year, when she was awarded the ‘Campaign to Unify the Nation Trophy’.

The first letters of which spell… well, you know.

Anyway, the four royal commentators featured are the Queen’s former press secretary, Dickie Arbiter, CNN royal commentator Victoria Arbiter, Majesty magazine editor Ingrid Seward, and commentator Richard Fitzwilliams.

They were duped into commenting on Meghan and Harry’s already infamous interview with Oprah, despite the interview not having aired yet, and all four admitting they had not seen it.

More from The NZ Herald:

The prank…duped the experts into agreeing to interviews about Meghan under the guise of a fake production company. They were paid appearance fees for the interviews – the amounts of which were undisclosed…

The prank didn’t end there. Pieters and Manners asked specific questions about the Oprah interview and pretended Meghan said that she would refuse the Covid-19 vaccine and pledged her support for a donkey sanctuary. And some of the experts fell for it.

Pieters told Insider: “We gave them facts, which weren’t facts, and they spoke about them as facts.”

Seward called Meghan’s sitdown with Oprah “an actress giving one of her great performances”, whilst Fitzwilliams said Oprah had given the couple an “easy ride”.

Remember, neither had seen anything from the interview, other than the promo clips that were released in the lead-up.

Here’s the full YouTube video:

Well, that is rather embarrassing.

When criticised, Fitzwilliams said that this sort of pre-record is frequently done for news stories, and there “is nothing whatever dishonourable in it”.

Manners responded by likening the responses to “asking a football commentator to give me 90 minutes of voice-noting on [a match they haven’t seen]”, adding that these ‘experts’ regularly shape public opinion towards members of the Royal Family.

Therein lies the rub – Meghan and Harry spoke about the relationship between the tabloid press and the Royal Family itself, and about the unspoken rules of engagement between them.

The couple has now broken those rules, and royal commentators are lining up to throw them under the bus.

Just swing past The Telegraph home page if you need a reminder of how the Duke and Duchess are being vilified.

Current headlines include ‘Harry and Meghan’s interview was a devastating insult to our monarch‘, ‘If the monarchy is really as bad as Harry and Meghan say, why don’t they give up their Royal titles?‘, ‘Meghan deserves an Oscar for that performance‘, and ‘The Sussexes did their duty – to Queen Oprah’.

[source:nzherald]