Prince Harry told pranksters he felt "completely separate" from most of the royal family after being tricked into thinking he was speaking to Greta Thunberg.
The 35-year-old prince twice fell victim to notorious Russian jokers Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexey Stolyarov aka Vovan and Lexus after they called him at the house he was staying on Vancouver Island, Canada, on New Year’s Eve (31.12.20) and 22 January.
In the calls – which were recorded and published to YouTube and Facebook along with an animated cartoon of Harry and the 17-year-old climate activist – Harry admitted his and wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’s decision to quit royal life and move to North America hadn’t been "easy" but they were confident they’d made the right choice.
He said: "Um, it’s, that’s probably a conversation for another time, there’s lots of layers to it and lots of pieces to the puzzle.
"But sometimes the right decision isn’t always the easy one.
"And this decision certainly wasn’t the easy one but it was the right decision for our family, the right decision to be able to protect my son.
"And I think there’s a hell of a lot of people around the world that can identify and respect us for putting our family first.
"But, yeah, it’s a tricky one, but we will start a new life."
He also said: "I can assure you, marrying a Prince or Princess is not all it’s made out to be!"
Asked by the joker pretending to be Greta’s dad Svante if normal life was wore than being royal, he laughed and said: "Oh no, I think it’s much better.
"You forget, I was in the military for ten years so I’m more normal than my family would like to believe.
"But certainly being in a different position now gives us the ability to say things and do things that we might not have been able to do.
"And seeing as everyone under the age of 35 or 36, seems to be carrying out an activist’s role, gives us the opportunity to try and make more of a difference without being criticised."
The prince’s comment that he and Meghan – who have 10-month-old son Archie together – came after he was asked about Prince Andrew’s friendship with late billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
He said: "I have very little to say on that.
"But whatever he has done or hasn’t done, is completely separate from me and my wife. We operate in a way of inclusivity and we are focusing on community. And so we are completely separate from the majority of my family."
Harry was then asked about reports he and Meghan had been stripped of their titles, but he insisted it was simply a "technicality" and they weren’t out to "make money" from them.
He said: "No, no, again you mustn’t believe what you read, no one has stripped us of our titles.
"Because of a technicality within the family, if we are earning money separately from within the family structure, then we obviously have been asked not to use our titles in order to make money, which we would never do.
"But the press managed to jump on that to make it look like we had been stripped."
Harry also told the fake Greta he thought she could "outsmart" US president Donald Trump but he’d want to meet her to "look better" and urged her to get UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to "believe in" her, before explaining he and his wife decided against establishing their own charity in favour of promoting their humanitarian work and climate change campaigning in other ways.
He said: "I think at the moment, my wife and I, we were being directed towards starting a foundation but we actually decided there is probably enough foundations out there doing amazing work.
"And there’s a hell of a lot of money being passed around the world and there are so many problems but we thought we’d just take a moment and see if there was some form of other organisation or different entity we could create that could bring people together, rather than us just starting a foundation. We don’t think the world needs necessarily another foundation from us.
"So we are just taking a little bit more time to think about how we can use our platform and how we can use our voice to try and encourage real change and real difference as opposed to, you know, small incremental changes."
"As we all know, the world’s problems seem to be getting bigger and seem to be happening far quicker . . . I think the solutions are far quicker to enable as well, but there needs to be a real shift in mindset. We try and do our best."
Prince Harry tricked by Russian pranksters
