Royal Family set up 'war room' to deal with memoir's potential fallout

Senior royal family advisors reportedly established a de facto "war room" to handle any potential repercussions of Prince Harry's explosive memoir, Page Six can reveal.

As the royal family gathered to celebrate their first Christmas without Queen Elizabeth, top employees reportedly even spoke about the situation at Sandringham Estate.

Insiders claimed a strategy was developed to deal with the explosive revelations anticipated from Harry's book as well as from his Sunday interview with Anderson Cooper for CBS's 60 Minutes, which will be quickly followed by interviews with ITV, Good Morning America, and Stephen Colbert for The Late Show.

The royal family and their staff scrambled to come up with every anecdote they could think of for Harry to include in his book, and they were fully aware he would describe his altercation with William, where he claimed that William punched him into a dog bowl during a dispute about Meghan Markle.

"He broke my necklace by grabbing me by the collar of my shirt … I fell on the dog bowl, it broke under my back and the pieces scratched me," Harry wrote.

One highly placed insider told us: "There were undoubtedly fears about what Harry was going to write, and in particular they were worried about the highly personal moments of their lives being retold."

The insider added: "The King wanted to move ahead with the traditional ‘stiff upper lip’ attitude and follow in the Queen’s famous footsteps of ‘never complain, never explain’, but the Prince of Wales argued that perhaps the family should, in fact, go on the offensive and release a statement, much in the same way he said ‘We are very much not a racist family’, but he was overruled by his father."