Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the victims of “disgusting and very real” threats before they stepped down as senior royals, it’s been revealed.

Outgoing Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner Neil Basu, who was previously in charge of royal protection, spoke about the Duchess of Sussex while giving his final interview in the job role.

He told Channel 4: “I’ve talked publicly for many years about the threat of extreme right-wing terrorism in this country.

“When I started in counter-terrorism in 2015, it was about 6 percent of our total workload. When I left 15, 16 months ago, it was over 20 percent of our workload.”

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Basu, who is Britain’s most senior officer of colour, added of the threats Meghan received, “If you’d seen the stuff that was written and you were receiving it, the kind of rhetoric that’s online, if you don’t know what I know, you would feel under threat all of the time.”

Basu added of whether they’d been convinced there had been a genuine threat to Meghan’s life on multiple occasions: “Absolutely. We had teams investigating it. People have been prosecuted for those threats.”

The former head of counter-terrorism policing in England first became an officer at the Met in 1992.

He insisted: “I speak about race because I know something about race because I’m a 54-year-old mixed-race man.”

Meghan and Harry stepped down as senior royals in March 2020 before moving to start a new life in California. They share two kids; Archie, 3, and Lilibet, 1.

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The pair have been open about the problems they faced within the royal family, with Harry comparing the media’s treatment of Meghan to his mother Princess Diana before her tragic death on August 31, 1997.

He told Oprah Winfrey in that much-talked about interview: “My biggest concern was history repeating itself. And I’ve said that before, on numerous occasions, very publicly.

“What I was seeing was history repeating itself. More perhaps, or far more dangerously, because then you add race in, and social media in. And when I’m talking about history repeating itself, I’m talking about my mother.”