Meghan Markle aimed a sly dig at the Royal Family as she claimed her son Archie narrowly escaped a fire.
Meghan was speaking on the first episode of her new Spotify podcast “Archetypes”, a series which promises to investigate "labels that try to hold women back".
During the first episode 'The Misconception of Ambition with Serena Williams', Meghan talks to the tennis star about the double standards women face when they are labelled “ambitious”.
At one stage during the podcast, the Duchess recounted how her son Archie narrowly escaped a fire in the room where he was supposed to be sleeping during the Sussexes’ tour of South Africa.
Meghan Markle
Dominic Lipinski
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry
Yui Mok
Archie’s then nanny, named only as Lauren, had taken the four-and-a-half-month-old with her downstairs instead while she went to get a snack when, meanwhile, the heater in the nursery caught fire.
Meghan said: “In that amount of time that she went downstairs, the heater in the nursery caught on fire.
“There was no smoke detector. Someone happened to just smell smoke down the hallway, went in, fire extinguished. He was supposed to be sleeping in there.”
Meghan told how she and Prince Harry had dropped their young son at the housing unit they were staying in for a sleep straight after arriving on their official tour, with Meghan and the Duke of Sussex leaving to carry out a visit to the Nyanga township, where the Duchess delivered a speech.
She said: “There was this moment where I’m standing on a tree stump and I’m giving this speech to women and girls, and we finish the engagement, we get in the car and they say there’s been a fire at the residence. What? There’s been a fire in the baby’s room."
Meghan added: “We came back. And, of course, as a mother, you go, ‘Oh, my God, what?’ Everyone’s in tears, everyone’s shaken. And what do we have to do? Go out and do another official engagement? I said, ‘This doesn’t make any sense.'"
She continued: “I said can you just tell people what happened? And so much optically the focus ends up being on how it looks instead of how it feels.
"Part of the humanising and the breaking through of these labels and these archetypes and these boxes that we’re put into is having some understanding of the human moments behind the scenes that people may not be aware of.
“Because we had to leave our baby and even though we were being moved into another place afterwards we still had to leave him and had to do another official engagement.”
