Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s “war” on the Royal Family since stepping down from royal duties has backfired spectacularly, a Washington-based commentator has claimed.

Nile Gardiner’s comments come as the Duke of Sussex plans to attend his father’s Coronation tomorrow without his wife and children.

Harry’s decision to come alone has sparked questions, with many royal observers suggesting Meghan feared a backlash with public sentiment increasingly turning against the Sussexes, polling suggests.

In his column for Fox News this week, Nile Gardiner claimed the seeds of the Sussexes’ downfall were sown when the couple sat down for an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021.

“They have in effect declared war on the royals ever since their nasty, mean-spirited 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, which may have played well with the Hollywood elite but went over like a lead balloon in the U.K,” the royal commentator wrote.

This view is backed up by a YouGov poll conducted shortly after the interview aired, which found 48 percent of Britons said they had a negative view of Harry, compared with 45 percent with a positive view – giving him a -3 net score.

It marked the first time attitudes had been more negative than positive towards him, said pollsters YouGov, and was a 15-point drop from 2 March of that year.

Meghan’s popularity nosedived after the interview, with only 31 percent of Britons holding a positive opinion of the Duchess of Sussex, while 58 percent of the survey’s 1,664 British respondents viewed her negatively.

This net rating of -27 plummeted from -14 in a little over a week.

The most incendiary claim to come out of that interview was that a member of the Royal Family had subjected Meghan to racism, a claim that engulfed the institution in a race row.

Asked by Oprah whether she believed the Royal Family allegedly hadn’t wanted their son Archie to be a prince “because of his race”, Meghan replied: “In those months when I was pregnant … we have in tandem the conversation of, ‘He won’t be given security. He’s not going to be given a title’, and also concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he’s born.”

Public sentiment appeared to go from bad to worse for the Sussexes following the release of their Netflix series in December, where the couple made further racism claims and attacked press intrusion.

A YouGov survey of 1,677 British adults conducted across December 7 and 8 days after their Netflix documentary dropped found Harry’s favourability rating has dropped 13 points in the UK, and Meghan’s by seven points.

But it was the release of Harry’s tell-all memoir Spare in January that appeared to sound the death knell on the Sussex brand.

In his autobiography, Harry made a host of controversial claims about members of the Royal Family, one of the most explosive related to his fraught relationship with his brother Prince William.

At one point, the Duke of Sussex claimed his brother physically attacked him.

Harry and Meghan have polled badly since the release of the Duke’s bombshell-ridden book.

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And not just in the UK – their support continues to decline stateside, polling shows.

Prince Harry was liked by 46 percent of Americans in the first quarter of 2023, down from 52 percent in the fourth quarter of 2022, according to a recent Newsweek poll.

“The harsh reality is that the Sussexes are almost completely isolated from the larger royal family and are practically pariahs in the eyes of much of the British public,” Gardiner claimed.

He added: “The king has extended an olive branch to his son by including him in the coronation, but there is absolutely no sign of any reconciliation between Harry and William.”

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