“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.

Mr Scobie said the row over the names was “a frustrating experience for me for a book that I was extremely proud of” and that it had been “overshadowed by an event that has caused me a lot of frustration as well”.

“I’m looking forward to finding out more about it because the version I signed off on, that’s the book that is out there today and has no names in it,” he said.

Omid Scobie is appearing on Newsnight now. We’ll bring you the latest.

Former butler to Princess Diana Paul Burrell supported Morgan’s decision to identify the two royals accused of racism.

“The British public have a right to know which members of our royal family are being trashed by the Sussexes,” he told Piers Morgan.

Piers Morgan agreed to apologise if evidence of racism was produced.

However, he said he was confident no such evidence existed.