Prince Harry reveals real reason he won't let Meghan Markle return to the UK

Prince Harry has revealed the terrifying reason he won't bring his wife the Duchess of Sussex, to the UK, claiming he is worried about the threat of an acid attack.

Speaking during a new interview in Tabloids on Trial for ITV King Charles' youngest son said: "All it takes is one lone actor, one person who read this stuff, to act on what they have read, and whether that is a knife or acid… they are genuine concerns for me, they are one of the reasons I won't bring my wife back to this country."

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His comments come almost two years after Neil Basu, the outgoing assistant commissioner of specialist operations at Scotland Yard, told a Channel 4 documentary that "disgusting and very real" threats had been leveled against the pair.

"If you’d seen the stuff that was written and you were receiving it, the kind of rhetoric that’s online ... you would feel under threat all of the time," he said; Neil was in charge of royal protection before the Sussexes left the U.K.

"We had teams investigating it. People have been prosecuted for those threats," he concluded.

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In the sit-down interview with ITV News's Rebecca Barry, the Duke also claimed his desire to take legal action against newspaper publishers played a part in "destroying the relationship" with his family.

"Yeah, that's certainly a central piece to it," Harry said. "But that's a hard question to answer because anything I say about my family results in a torrent of abuse from the press. I've made it very clear that this is something that needs to be done.

"It would be nice if we did it as a family. I believe that, again, from a service standpoint and when you are in a public role, that these are the things that we should be doing for the greater good. But I'm doing this for my reasons."

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Harry moved his family to California in 2020. The Prince and Meghan live with their two children, Prince Archie, five, and three-year-old Princess Lilibet, in Montecito.

He settled his case against Mirror Group Newspapers in February 2024, after a judge concluded there was "extensive" phone hacking by MGN between 2006 and 2011, and "even to some extent" during the Leveson Inquiry into media standards.