Meghan Markle has revealed how her son Archie narrowly escaped a fire in his bedroom where he was meant to be sleeping during their tour of South Africa with Prince Harry.

Speaking with pal Serena Williams on her new long-awaited Spotify podcast worth £18m, Meghan recalled the moment the Sussex’s first child escaped the nursery fire.

Archie’s nanny at the time, named Laura on the podcast, had taken youngster, who was four-and-a-half months old when the incident occurred, downstairs for a snack when a heater in the nursery caught fire.

Recalling the ordeal, Meghan said: "In that amount of time that she went downstairs, the heater in the nursery caught on fire. There was no smoke detector. Someone happened to just smell smoke down the hallway, went in, fire extinguished. He was supposed to be sleeping in there."

The Suits actress, who married Prince Harry in 2018, said the couple had dropped Archie at the housing unit where they were staying to sleep with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex leaving to carry out a visit to the Nyanga township.

She said: "There was this moment where I'm standing on a tree stump and I'm giving this speech to women and girls, and we finish the engagement, we get in the car and they say there's been a fire at the residence. What? There's been a fire in the baby's room."

Meghan added: "We came back. And, of course, as a mother, you go, 'Oh, my God, what?' Everyone's in tears, everyone's shaken. And what do we have to do? Go out and do another official engagement? I said, 'This doesn't make any sense'."