A Spare for an Affair: Royals Used Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to 'Distract' From Prince William's Alleged Infidelity

Remember this old rumor? It's back.

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry's final year as working royals was allegedly filled with royal courtiers using them in the press to "distract" from Prince William's affair with Lady Rose Hanbury.

"Unfortunately, if a rumor's left to kind of do its own thing, it can run 20 laps around the world before you even think about what, how you want to kind of address it," Endgame author Omid Scobie dished.

In the spring of 2019, the then-Duke of Cambridge was accused by various sources of stepping out of his marriage to Kate, the then-Duchess of Cambridge. Lady Hanbury was, and according to several insiders, still is, friends with both the future king and queen. Although Scobie, who has now written two books that one analyst calls "Sussex manifestos," claims the rumors are "tabloid fodder," the scribe does feel senior royals worked to bury the stories.

"They never addressed it, so those rumors will never go away, even though there's no truth to suggest that they are true," he added. "I was very careful in the book to really focus on this, as the allegations against William, Kate's, and their fallout with Rose Hanbury."

The co-author of Finding Freedom continued: "For legal reasons, there are so many things that one can't go into, but I thought it was really important, even if a rumor is a rumor. And I really don't see proof that there is more to this than just a tittle-tattle, you know."

Scobie's main concern about that particular year before the Sussex duo launched their "Megxit" in January 2020, was that the late Queen Elizabeth II's royal court thrust spats such as the Princess Charlotte dress fiasco to the front pages.

"I thought it was really interesting to analyze how the palace dealt with that," Scobie observed. "The worst case scenarios that they feared would happen, you know, just those rumors themselves were going to have enough impact, negatively, on William's reputation."

Flash-forward to the spring of 2024, and the scribe claimed: "We still see them [the rumors] trend on Twitter on a regular basis ... that's something that's incredibly damaging, I think, for William. It probably looks even worse, actually, that there was a kind of willingness to throw Harry under the bus simply to make these things disappear."

The royal journalist-turned-bestselling author highlighted Prince Archie's birth in May 2019 as an example of how the royal machine allegedly pivoted stories away from William's infidelity. This era was, according to Scobie, when headlines about the future princes' skin color, and whether or not the senior royals would "accept him" began to circulate in the British press.

InStyle reported on Scobie's interview.