Late Queen’s ‘anger’ over claim by Harry and Meghan about naming Lilibet
Harry and Meghan publicly said the Queen had given her blessing for them to use her private childhood family nickname. ITV News' Lizzie Robinson reports
The late Queen was furious after the Duke and Duchess of Sussex claimed they had her blessing to call their daughter Lilibet, a royal aide has said.
In his new biography of the King Charles III, royal author Robert Hardman, tells how a member of staff said Elizabeth II was “as angry as I’d ever seen her" after the announcement.
Harry and Meghan publicly said she had given her blessing for them to use her private childhood family nickname.
The BBC later reported a Palace source said the Queen was not asked by the Sussexes whether they could use Lilibet.
But the Harry and Meghan's lawyers fired off legal letters to the broadcaster and other publishers, saying the claim was false and defamatory.
A spokesperson for the couple, at the time, insisted the duke spoke to his grandmother in advance and would not have used the name had the monarch not been supportive.
Hardman wrote however: “One privately recalled that Elizabeth II had been ‘as angry as I’d ever seen her’ in 2021 after the Sussexes announced that she had given them her blessing to call their baby daughter ‘Lilibet’, the Queen’s childhood nickname.”
He added Buckingham Palace “rebuffed” attempts by Harry and Meghan to confirm their version of events.
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“When the Sussexes tried to co-opt the palace into propping up their version of events, they were rebuffed,” he wrote.
It was once again a case of “recollections may vary”, Hardman wrote, in relation to the late Queen’s response to the couple’s allegations in their Oprah Winfrey interview, in his book Charles III, which is being serialised in the Daily Mail.
The naming of Lilibet did not feature in Harry’s controversial memoir Spare.
Other revelations in Hardman’s book include how the Prince of Wales saw Harry’s remarks in his Netflix documentary that male members of the family can be tempted to marry someone who fits the mould rather than someone they are destined to be with as “the lowest of the low”.
William viewed it as “Harry making a blatant attack” on his wife the Princess of Wales.
Lilibet was first used when Princess Elizabeth was just a toddler and unable to pronounce her own name properly.
Her grandfather King George V would affectionately call her Lilibet imitating her own attempts to say Elizabeth.
The sweet nickname stuck and she became Lilibet to her family from then on.
Harry and Meghan’s youngest child, now a princess following the accession of her grandfather, was born in California on June 4 2021.
She arrived two months after the death of Prince Philip, the late Duke of Edinburgh and in the wake of controversial claims levelled at the monarchy by the Sussexes in their bombshell Oprah interview.
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