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Harry said he was often asked in America, his new home, “how could you ever forgive your family for what they’ve done?”
That royal family – by name in interviews – includes his father, King Charles III and his wife Camilla, and his brother Prince William and his wife Catherine, as well as their aggressive PR teams. The family treated press coverage as a zero-sum game, Harry said, and ditched them in part because they feared being overshadowed.
The 38-year-old prince offered what UK Special News called “unprecedented details about life inside and outside the royal family” in an exclusive interview with broadcaster Tom Bradby on Britain’s ITV.
Harry has repeatedly lashed out at his brother and father, who he has accused of essentially forcing him and Meghan to leave.
“I don’t recognize them right now and they don’t recognize me,” Harry said.
Harry said he loved his brother, the heir to the throne, but that William had always been competitive, often against him, in a “sibling rivalry” that continues today.
Harry revealed that William insisted, for example, that Harry shave his beard before his wedding, which the prince refused to do.
“I don’t think my father or my brother will read the book,” Harry said, nor will they watch Sunday’s TV interviews.
The royal family continues to refuse to comment on any of this.
At one point, Harry was asked by Bradby why he reveals the most intense, most intimate moments of his life and lays so much of the blame at the door of his family, while at the same time complaining about the intrusiveness of the British tabloids.
Bradby, who said he has been friends with Harry for 20 years, told the camera that Harry was burning his bridges and used a flamethrower against the royal family.
Charles is scheduled to be crowned in May. If Harry and Meghan are there, things will be awkward.
After the ITV interview, broadcast in the UK, Harry appeared on CBS in America, in an interview with Anderson Cooper on the show “60 Minutes”.
Along with further allegations that members of the royal family spoke out against Meghan in the British tabloid press, Harry also described the personal trauma of losing his mother, Princess Diana, in a car crash in Paris in 1997 when he was 12.
He told Anderson Cooper that for many years he didn’t believe she was dead and woke up every day thinking she might reappear. “I had high hopes,” Harry said.
When he was 20, he asked to see a police accident report, looking for proof that she had been in the car and that she had been injured. Investigators concluded that the driver, a hotel security officer, was drunk and speeding when their borrowed car crashed spectacularly into the Pont de l’Alma tunnel near the Eiffel Tower. Her friend Dodi Al Fayed was killed instantly. The princess died in hospital, although conspiracy theories are still alive today.
At the age of 23, Harry visited Paris and asked his driver to take him to the scene of the accident. “I wanted to see if it was possible, driving at the speed that Henri Paul was driving, to lose control of a car and crash into a pole, killing almost everyone in that car,” he told 60 Minutes.
Diana was chased by paparazzi on the day of the accident. In his book, Harry writes, “the last thing Mum saw on this earth was a flashbulb.”
He is due to reveal more on Good Morning America on Monday. On Tuesday, he’ll likely do the same — with more jokes, presumably — on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
Harry’s memoir will be published on Tuesday. It follows six hours of the Harry and Meghan documentary series, produced by the couple themselves, which aired on Netflix last month.
Last week, British media obtained leaked copies of his Spanish-language memoir, Spare, and distributed the highlights.
These include Harry’s claim of killing 25 Taliban fighters; his story of losing his virginity in a field behind a pub aged 17; and his account of a 2019 kitchen confrontation with his older brother after Prince William called Meghan “difficult”, “rude” and “abrasive”.
Harry’s interviews with handpicked talent, Meghan’s podcasts, the Netflix documentary series, and now his memoir are Harry and Meghan’s attempts to take control of the narrative of their break with the House of Windsor — and profit from it. This causes strong emotions in Britain.
Many Brits say they’ve heard enough from Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex. But advance sales have put Harry’s book, scheduled for official release on Tuesday, at the top of Amazon’s bestseller list.
The Harry-hating tabloids here are going crazy over the story, and social media in Britain is abuzz with dueling hashtags about the couple’s pros and cons.
The latest poll, carried out by YouGov on Thursday and Friday, continues to find public support for austerity in Sussex over the past six years.
Just 23 percent of Britons have a favorable opinion of Meghan, down from 49 percent in 2017, the year of their engagement. Support for Harry is 26 percent, down from 81 percent in 2017.
The decline is sharpest among the over-50s in Britain, who tend to be more supportive of the monarchy overall. Younger people in Britain seem more supportive of Harry and Meghan; more than 40 percent still have a positive opinion of them.
“It was never meant to be,” Harry told ITV. “The leak and the planting.”
The prince said, “I want a family, not an institution.” But, he claims, his family “feels it’s better to keep us kind of villains.”
He said: “They have shown absolutely no desire for reconciliation.”
In his 60 Minutes interview, Harry told Anderson Cooper that he was “probably a bigot” before he started dating Meghan, that he was “incredibly naive” about how the British tabloids would spin the relationship. He said the “racial element” of the couple’s relationship was “skipped right over”.
Harry was asked why he went public with complaints against his father and brother. He said people really don’t understand how the palace’s PR teams work against each other.
“Every time I tried to do it privately, there were briefings and leaks and stories being planted against me and my wife,” he said.
In his book, Harry said his story and his life had been “sacrificed” on Camilla’s “PR altar”. Harry said Camilla leaked private conversations to the press. “They could only have been leaked by one other person present,” said Harry, who was Camilla.
Harry claimed that William and his wife never got on with Meghan “from the beginning” and that they bought into the “stereotype” of her as a divorced, biracial American actress.
“You know, the family motto is ‘never complain, never explain,’ but that’s just a motto.
“They’ll feed or talk to the correspondent,” Harry said. “And that reporter will literally be spoon-fed information and write the story.” And at the end of that they will say they have approached Buckingham Palace for comment.
He continued: “But the whole story is commentary from Buckingham Palace. So when for the last six years we’ve been told, “We can’t make a statement to protect you.” But you do for other family members. It becomes – it becomes a moment when silence is betrayal.
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