Meghan Markle was last night accused of ‘peddling conspiracy theories’ by suggesting comments made by Ann Widdecombe in the Celebrity Big Brother house were part of a plot to turn her into a ‘scapegoat’. 

Former Tory MP Ms Widdecombe, 75, was dragged into the furore after the latest trailer for Meghan and Harry’s Netflix documentary suggested Palace aides ‘fed’ negative stories about the couple to the media as a ‘distraction’ technique. 

The looming attack on The Firm by the Sussexes – expected to be unprecedented in nature – will be laid out in full from 8am today, when the second half of their six-part docuseries is finally released. 

In yesterday’s teaser clip, the Duchess of Sussex, 41, and her allies claimed there was a ‘war against Meghan’ that saw people briefed to tell unfavourable stories about her and the Duke, 38, in a bid to make damaging tales about other royals ‘go away’. 

Alongside the visuals appears a newspaper article on how Ms Widdecombe branded the Duchess ‘trouble’ during her stint on Big Brother in 2018. 

However the ex-politician said last night that Meghan is ‘paranoid’ if she believes she had been ‘briefed’ to make the comment. 

She told the Sun: ‘If she doesn’t believe that then she is deliberately peddling conspiracy theories which have no basis in fact. I did say it on Big Brother but it was not about race.

‘It was, in fact, that she was a moderately successful Hollywood actress who never lived in this country and didn’t know the first thing about the Royal Family and had already been divorced after two years of marriage.

‘Bearing in mind the challenge of marrying into royals I said she would be trouble, but social media went into a spin. How on Earth that has anything to do with Buckingham Palace, I can’t imagine.’

The claims made in the trailer yesterday were quickly declared by royal experts as ‘nonsense’, while one commentator said the series was clearly a ‘form of revenge’. 

In one clip, Meghan’s British privacy lawyer Jenny Afia insists she has seen evidence of the conspiracy against the Duchess before Lucy Fraser – real name Lucy Meadmore – a former PR manager who was a mystery figure until a week ago, says ‘Meg became this scapegoat for the Palace’. 

The Duchess herself also suggested she was made a scapegoat, adding: ‘You would see it play out. A story about someone in the family would pop up for a minute, and they’d go: ‘We’ve got to make that go away’.’ 

But Royal Editor for the Daily Mail Rebecca English said last night that only someone ‘utterly ignorant of the media’ would suggest that she would steer clear of a story about a royal family member in return for a disparaging tale about Meghan or Harry.

Writing in the Mail, she said she ‘never heard a negative word’ about the Sussexes until ‘at least six months after their marriage – and then not from anyone inside the palace walls.’ 

In fact, Ms English believed aides did all they could to keep up appearances when it appeared that ‘all was not well’ within the Sussex household. 

She added: ‘Staff, they insisted, were leaving for personal reasons or because they had an exciting new opportunity to pursue. Never because of Meghan.

‘Even when I personally witnessed her round on a member of her team, leaving this individual in tears of humiliation, I was told – with a straight-face – that it had merely been a ”security incident”.

‘I had stand-up rows with palace staff when I suggested they had been economical with the truth and my fact-checking calls regarding stories I intended to publish were met with open sighs of frustration.’

She also said she chose to omit Harry’s ‘frankly rude and unprofessional behaviour towards the press’ from her copy, as the 38-year-old’s ‘impressive charity work deserved to be the star of the show.’ 

She added: ‘The truth is that negative stories about Harry and Meghan only began to eek out when their behaviour became so obnoxious that it was impossible to hide,’ she wrote.

‘And that’s not something I expect you will hear about when today’s dramatic finale lands on Netflix.’

There were mounting calls overnight to see the evidence for the highly damaging claim, with one royal source declaring: ‘No one is taking lessons in honesty from them.’ 

Royal commentator Richard Fitzwilliams also called on filmmakers to back up claims made.

Responding to the trailer released yesterday, Mr Fitzwilliams told MailOnline it showed ‘how much of a coup for Netflix this docuseries is.’

He added: ‘The claim is that the Palace used Meghan as a ‘scapegoat’ so other damaging stories about other royals would go away.

‘So the question is, to benefit which royals and who knew about it? Which other members of the royal family were involved or were courtiers briefing without their knowledge?

‘William was named in an earlier trailer by Harry. This will be catastrophic for the relationship between the once close brothers.

‘What exactly is the evidence that backs up their claim that Meghan was ‘fed to the wolves’?

‘Essentially the claim is that the institution was working against them and using the media to discredit them with a barrage of negative articles. Her lawyer Jenny Afia says she has seen evidence. However what evidence will we be shown?’

He added: ‘This is undoubtedly a form of revenge. It remains to be seen after tomorrow’s series airs, if the royals will respond and if so, how.’ 

In yesterday’s trailer, Meghan, who said she was ‘fed to the wolves’ when she was in the UK, suggested that she would be used by Palace aides to divert coverage away from negative press for other royals.

She added: ‘There’s real estate on a website homepage, there is real estate there on a newspaper front cover, and something has to be filled in there about someone royal.’  

Her friend Lucy said: ‘Meg became this scapegoat for the Palace. And so they would feed stories on her, whether they were true or not, to avoid other less favourable stories being printed’. 

Meghan’s privacy lawyer Jenny Afia, a partner at Schillings, said: ‘There was a real war against Meghan and I’ve certainly seen evidence that there was negative briefing from the Palace against Harry and Meghan to suit other peoples’ agendas.’.

She added that negative press about Meghan’s estrangement from her father Thomas Markle was the ‘final straw’ for the Duchess. 

‘This barrage of negative articles about the breakdown of the relationship with her father was the final straw in a campaign of negative, nasty coverage about her’, she said.

Buckingham Palace has declined to comment.

In the first trailer for the second part of their lucrative tell-all Netflix documentary, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex talked about ‘institutional gaslighting’. It is assumed this is directed at the monarchy.

Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse in which a person is manipulated into questioning their own sanity and perceptions of reality.

The documentary makers also use a picture of Buckingham Palace and footage of the duke and Prince William at their grandfather’s funeral as Harry says: ‘They were happy to lie to protect my brother. They were never willing to tell the truth to protect us.’

Meghan adds dramatically: ‘I wasn’t being thrown to the wolves. I was being fed to the wolves.’

The first three episodes of Harry & Meghan – part of the Sussexes’ multi-million-dollar deal with Netflix – were streamed last week, with the final three hour-long episodes streaming from today.

The initial tranche covered the couple’s courtship and romance, but many were left deeply unhappy about the programme’s full-on assault on the late Queen’s Commonwealth legacy, with some saying it seemed as if the couple want to ‘bring down the monarchy’.

Harry also let rip with a string of sly digs at his family, particularly his father and brother, including the suggestion that they had married not for love but to a woman who fitted ‘the mould’.

But the clear suggestion was that the second part – covering the couple’s wedding, their subsequent falling out with William and Kate and acrimonious departure from the Royal Family – would be far more brutal for Buckingham Palace.

And it seems as if the gloves are well and truly coming off.

The new trailer starts with Harry saying: ‘I wonder what would have happened to us had we not got out when we did.’

Meghan adds: ‘Our security was being pulled, everyone in the world knew where we were’, before the film cuts to Harry recalling: ‘I said, “We need to get out here”.’

The trailer then flits to self-filmed footage of Harry – presumably flying from Canada to California in early 2020 – saying: ‘We are on the freedom flight.’

In 2019, the couple were given the Queen’s blessing to spend time in Canada, where they borrowed a friend’s mansion on Vancouver Island, ostensibly to have some ‘time out’ from the limelight.

In reality they were already plotting their departure, working on plans to create a ‘hybrid’ working model for themselves – earning money while conducting occasional royal duties – and even creating their own website.

The story continues with more of the misrepresentations that have characterised the couple’s Netflix project so far, with its use of ‘fake’ footage to illustrate media harassment of the couple.

Meghan talks about being ‘fed to the wolves’ accompanied by a photograph of her being supposedly hounded by a bank of photographers.

Except the picture was clearly taken when she flew by private jet to New York for a lavish baby shower when she was expecting her first child, Archie, accompanied by a team of taxpayer-funded police officers.

Even more inexplicably – and controversially – Harry is shown talking about how ‘they’ were happy to ‘lie to protect my brother’.

As he says this, the trailer cuts to footage of Buckingham Palace followed by a second sequence of himself and William at the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral in April last year. 

Given the juxtaposition of the statement and film, many have taken ‘they’ to refer to the Royal Household.

But on a slightly different trailer featured on the Netflix website, subtitles can be seen which instead read: ‘The British media were happy to lie to protect my brother. They were never willing to tell the truth to protect us.’

After this discrepancy was exposed on social media yesterday, the second trailer appeared to have been mysteriously taken down.

Harry’s words echo comments made by Meghan in their Oprah Winfrey interview last year, when she alleged that Kensington Palace aides had lied, saying: ‘I don’t know how they could expect that after all of this time we would still just be silent if there is an active role that the firm is playing in perpetuating falsehoods about us.

‘It was when everything started to really worsen that I came to understand that not only was I not being protected, but that they were willing to lie to protect other members of the family.

‘They weren’t willing to tell the truth to protect me and my husband.’

The trailer also includes a clip of an interview with Christopher Bouzy, a US tech entrepreneur who has set up a firm to track disinformation and harassment online – despite having posted a string of disparaging posts, particularly about the Prince and Princess of Wales.

He says: ‘They were actively recruiting people to disseminate disinformation’, but does not make clear who ‘they’ are.

Sources also point out that official Royal Family accounts have at times been forced to shut down their own public comment forums due to online abuse from the so-called ‘Sussex squad’ – the couple’s self-styled band of acerbic fans.

The trailer also includes a clip of Hollywood star Tyler Perry, who lent the Sussexes his Hollywood mansion when they first moved to the States. He says: ‘They just wanted to be free. They wanted to be free to love and be happy. I applauded that.’

This sets the film up for a series of pictures of the couple looking happy and relaxed – Meghan with a birthday balloon arch, Harry jumping in the ocean – juxtaposed with stock footage of printing presses and critical headlines.

Harry adds: ‘In order for us to be able move to the next chapter, you gotta finish the first chapter,’ as the footage – pointedly – moves to some of the couple’s wedding photographs featuring Harry’s late grandparents.

Alongside footage of Harry playing football in the garden of their US home with his children and mother-in-law, Doria Ragland, Meghan says: ‘It gave us a chance to create that home we had always wanted.’

Ironically the home subsequently depicted is Frogmore Cottage, the couple’s Windsor residence, when they returned for the late Queen’s Platinum Jubilee in June.

The house underwent a £2.4million programme of taxpayer-funded renovations which Harry and Meghan eventually paid back when they quit as working royals.

The photographs, which appear professionally taken, feature both their children Archie and Lilibet, who was making her first visit to the UK and celebrating her first birthday.

The children are both formally dressed, leaving some royal insiders to suspect they could have been taken after Lilibet was introduced to her namesake great-grandmother, the Queen.

It has been reported that they asked to take a photographer in with them but the Queen, who was, it is believed, distrustful of their motives, refused.

Royal sources believe Harry and Meghan got one of their favourite private photographers, Chris Allerton, to shoot dozens pictures for their documentary that has been years in the planning. They began filming their video diaries as far back as March 2020.

The trailer ends with a montage of pictures and video of the couple and their children looking happy and relaxed, as a contrast to the family they constantly criticise.

Harry says: ‘I’ve always felt as though this was a fight worth fighting for.’

Both Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace declined to comment.

It is understood that the royal households intend to wait until the entire series has been made available before they decide whether to respond to some of the couple’s more hurtful or damaging claims.

‘Palace leaked false stories about me to bury bad news’: Incredulity at Meghan’s most direct attack yet in final Netflix trailer

By Vanessa Allen and Rebecca English for the Daily Mail

The Duchess of Sussex’s allies claimed yesterday that Palace officials deliberately used her as a ‘scapegoat’ to deflect criticism away from other senior royals.

False stories and negative briefings against her and Prince Harry were given as part of a ‘war against Meghan’, she and her associates alleged in the latest attacks to emerge from the couple’s Netflix series.

Their lawyer Jenny Afia said she had seen evidence of ‘negative briefing from the Palace against Harry and Meghan to suit other people’s agendas’.

And the duchess’s friend Lucy Fraser, who attended the couple’s wedding, said the Palace had used the duchess as a scapegoat, adding: ‘They would feed stories on her – whether they were true or not – to avoid other less favourable stories being printed.’

But the Sussexes have failed to provide any evidence for these extraordinary claims by either Ms Afia or Ms Fraser.

The allegations were included in a new teaser for the Netflix series, ahead of the final three episodes released today. They appear certain to contain further incendiary claims as the duke and duchess continue to share their ‘truth bomb’ version of events.

In the latest trailer, Ms Afia said: ‘There was a real kind of war against Meghan, and I’ve certainly seen evidence that there was negative briefing from the Palace against Harry and Meghan to suit other people’s agendas.’ It was not clear whether any of the ‘evidence’ described by Ms Afia would be included in the latest episodes.

The duchess recounted seeing stories about her appear if there had been criticism of other senior royals. 

She said: ‘You would just see it play out. A story about someone in the family would just pop up for a minute, and they’d go, ‘We gotta make that go away.’ But there’s real estate on a website homepage, there’s real estate there on a newspaper front cover, and something has to be filled in there about someone royal.’ 

Royal sources condemned the claims of leaking false stories and negative briefings as ‘fanciful’. 

One well-placed source said: ‘The latest claims are absurd and show a level of paranoia that simply wasn’t – or isn’t – borne out by reality. The Sussexes’ team did nothing but fire-fight to protect them for three years, both in the run-up to and after their wedding. 

‘The suggestion that negative stories were deliberately leaked against Meghan as some sort of ‘war’ against her or to prevent stories about other members of the Royal Family being printed, is not just fanciful but untrue.’

Another pointed out that last year Meghan was herself forced to apologise to the High Court for failing to remember authorising a senior aide to brief the authors of the flattering Sussex biography Finding Freedom.

The couple have made a series of accusations about their treatment by the Palace and the media, with Meghan claiming she was ‘fed to the wolves’.

Ms Afia said the ‘final straw in a campaign of negative, nasty coverage about her’ had been a series of articles about the breakdown of Meghan’s relationship with her father, Thomas.

In a previous trailer for the tell-all documentary, Harry said Palace aides were ‘happy to lie’ to protect his older brother William, but would not tell the truth to protect him and his wife.

The six-part series, Harry & Meghan, forms part of the couple’s multi-million-pound deal with Netflix, which they signed after quitting as working royals.

It has been a global hit, but has seen the Sussexes facing calls for them to give up their titles.

Critics accused the couple of using the series to settle old scores and launch a disinformation campaign against the Royal Family and the media. Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace declined to comment.