Omid Scobie refuses to apologise over Endgame ‘error’ as Dutch translator breaks silence

Anna Pasternak’s review of Endgame:

Royal biographer Hugo Vickers says the writer has built his reputation on getting things wrong:

Endgame claims the names of the two royals were discussed in letters exchanged between the Duchess of Sussex and the King.

Media lawyer Mark Stephens called on the Sussexes to take legal action to prevent their distribution.

Mr Stephens said: “If Harry and Meghan are really interested in privacy, as they profess, it is pretty surprising that they haven’t sought an injunction to prevent this information being revealed further either by Omid Scobie or anyone else.”

The translator of the book’s Dutch version says the edition was a straight translation from English, and no names were added.

“The names of the royals were there in black and white. I did not add them,” they told MailOnline.

“I just did what I was paid to do and that was translate the book from English into Dutch.”

Author Omid Scobie has denied being close to Harry and Meghan but there is still speculation about whether the Sussexes helped him with Endgame.

The book asserts that the future of the monarchy is “in a crisis” and it is in a “fight for survival”.

Craig Doyle, co-host of the ITV1 show This Morning, said to Mr Scobie: “A lot of it feels like a bit of a hatchet job against the royal family.”

He asked what the writer’s relationship with Meghan and Harry was like, and Mr Scobie replied: “I’m not their friend, I’ve never sat down with Meghan privately for interviews, I’ve never exchanged information with Meghan, I’m not in their private world in any way whatsoever.”

“It’s not for me to apologise because I still want to know what’s happened,” Mr Scobie told Newsnight.

“The buck doesn’t stop with me because there are irresponsible people in this country who’ve broken the law and repeated names that should never have been repeated, should never have been named,” he said.

“The book I edited and signed off on did not have names in it.”

Mr Scobie said his book had been legalled and vetted, and the i-s dotted and t-s crossed.

He found out on social media that the names were in the Dutch edition.

He swore “on his life and his family’s lives” that it wasn’t a publicity stunt.

Mr Scobie said he had grown used to receiving death threats.

It had been exacerbated by “a lot of the nonsense” surrounding the book, he said.

Mr Scobie insisted he had never used the word “racism”.

He said Harry and Meghan were irrelevant to the story of the royal family and there wasn’t even a chapter on them in the book.

Omid Scobie denied the book’s being pulled from shelves in the Netherlands and the row over the names was a publicity stunt.