Prince Harry is today engaged in an extraordinary war of words with journalist Tina Brown, founding editor of The Daily Beast and a biographer of his mother, Princess Diana.
Brown has doubled down, she confirmed to The Royalist, on claims that Harry described his son Prince Archie as “my little Africa child” in a conversation with the late zoologist Jane Goodall.
Brown first made the incendiary claim in an interview with Katie Couric, saying she was told by Goodall—who died in October at 91—during a lunch engagement earlier this year that Harry had told her in turn that his son Prince Archie was “my little African child.”
Harry’s spokesperson angrily denied the comment was made, and accused Brown of lying. “The Duke of Sussex has never said anything remotely resembling what is being claimed,” they said. “Tina Brown knows exactly what she’s doing by inventing these words and attributing them to a highly respected woman who is deceased and unable to correct the record.”
Sources close to Harry told The Royalist that Brown was besmirching Goodall’s legacy by attributing comments to her that she could not corroborate or deny.
Brown stood by her comment, however, telling The Royalist that, “On Katie Couric’s podcast on Wednesday… I recounted what Jane Goodall said to me in June of this year about Prince Harry. She remembered affectionately Harry saying when Archie was born: ‘I want you to come and meet my African child.’ She actually said ‘Africa child,’ but I was speaking too quickly. Aside from that inadvertent mistake, everything else in Ms. Goodall’s conversation with me, I rendered accurately.”
A source in Harry’s camp then brushed off Brown’s clarification, saying, “Doubling down, but now clarifying ‘inadvertent mistakes.’ What else is she getting wrong?”
In Couric’s podcast, Brown framed the comment in the context of royal expectations regarding Harry’s future: “I’m told that the Queen always thought that Harry would go off and want to be out of the royal family. But they all expected him to go to Africa and become a person who focused on (the) conservation of animals in Africa and live a kind of off-the-grid life.
“Nobody expected him to go to Montecito and live the opposite of the off-the-grid life, which is the celebrity life. And I don’t think that Harry thought he was going to do that either.”
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