[ad_1]
IIt’s been a tumultuous week for Prince Harry and his upcoming memoir Spare it hasn’t even been officially released yet.
Against the backdrop of tabloid leaks and illegal copies of the book accidentally ending up in Spanish bookstores, Spare has already been scrutinized for shocking revelations and made global headlines before it officially hit shelves on Tuesday. That’s the landscape in which three pre-recorded interviews of Harry discussing his book were released on Sunday night.
Read more: Spare may be the biggest bombshell of the royal memoirs. But he is not the only one
The first interview aired at 9pm in the UK on Sunday with ITV correspondent Tom Bradby hosting the conversation. At times, Bradby played devil’s advocate and channeled the voices of his critics by asking Harry tough questions, but the royal played it safe by repeating many of the same stories he had shared in previous interviews. The Duke has maintained a razor-sharp focus on the “briefings, leaks and plantings” that take place between the royals and the British press, and has expressed a desire to leave behind his true narrative as a historical artefact.
Harry broke the news in another interview that day with Anderson Cooper 60 minutes, this time pointing the finger specifically at Queen Camilla, who he claims has traded incriminating stories about other royals to the press to boost her image. He went on to highlight how the palace’s relationship with the toxic British tabloids affected his mother, Princess Diana, and later his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.
Here’s everything we learned about the royal establishment, British media and Harry’s personal relationships from his various book interviews.
Harry insists he never called his family racist
Prince Harry explained his understanding of the term “unconscious bias” and how he believes it differs from racism, delving into the controversy surrounding Lady Susan Hussey, William’s 83-year-old godmother and longtime housewife.
Hussey, a former lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II, apologized and resigned from her position in December after repeatedly asking Ngozi Fulani, the black head of a British charity, where she was “really” from in a lengthy encounter at a Buckingham Palace event to deal with domestic violence. Prince Harry said the row was a “very good example of the environment” within the royal institution.
“After our interview with Oprah, they said they were going to bring in a diversity king. That didn’t happen. Everything they said would happen didn’t happen,” he added. The royal emphasized that he never called his family racist; he said he simply pointed out their unconscious biases that they could work on.
Prince Harry went on to say that he and Meghan Markle “loved” Hussey and that he was delighted to hear that Fulani had been invited to the palace to discuss what had happened.
“She meant no harm at all,” he said of Hussey’s comments. “But the response from the British press and from people online because of the stories they wrote was appalling.”
William tried to stop Harry from keeping his beard at his wedding
In a more unusual encounter, Harry tells Bradby that William objected to keeping facial hair for his wedding, even though the Queen, his late grandmother, had given him permission to keep his beard for the 2018 ceremony.
When Bradby asked what the disagreement was really about, Harry said: “I think a lot of it has to do with – I mean I call it heir/backup, but also big brother/younger brother. There’s a level of competition there.”
Read more: Prince Harry’s bitter feud with his older brother William has a centuries-old history
He added: “And again, as I was writing this, I remembered that William himself had a beard and this grandmother and other people who had to say told him he should shave it off.” The Duke then said he explained to the grandmother si that his beard feels like a “shield for his anxiety” and that’s the reason for the different standard.
Harry believed his mother might still be alive
Harry was 12 years old when his mother, Princess Diana, died in a car accident in Paris while being chased by the paparazzi. For many years as a teenager, the young prince believed that his mother might still be alive and had simply disappeared to escape the pressures of public life. “I just refused to accept that she was gone. Part of “She would never do this to us,” but also “It’s all part of a plan.” He says he would discuss that hope with William, who had similar thoughts. He believed that someday “She will call us and we will go and join her.”
It wasn’t until Harry was 20 years old and asked to see pictures of the car crash that killed Princess Diana that he gave up his fantasy of seeing his mother again. He made the tragic realization while looking through the photos that the last thing his mother saw before she died was a camera flash.
Harry experiments with drugs to help with his grief
At first, Harry says he dealt with his grief through alcohol, marijuana and cocaine. He believes his military career saved him from spiraling out of control.
As an adult, Harry experimented with other types of drugs in a much more controlled environment. He says he used psychedelics to deal with grieving his mother, including ayahuasca, psilocybin and mushrooms, all in a controlled space.
“I would never recommend that people do this recreationally, but if you’re doing it with the right people, if you’re going through tremendous loss or grief or trauma, then these things have a way of working as medicine,” he said. “For me, they wiped the windshield, the windshield, the misery of the loss.”
Harry says Camilla ‘sacrificed’ him on her ‘personal PR alter’
That’s what Cooper said during the interview Spare was particularly sharp when it came to portraying Harry’s stepmother Camilla, now Queen Consort. As boys, William and Harry directly asked their father not to marry Camilla. “We thought it would do more harm than good, and if he was with him now, surely that was enough,” he told Cooper. “We wanted him to be happy.”
But Harry was wary of Camilla partly because her reputation was so tarnished in the British press. Harry’s father, King Charles, admitted he had a multi-year affair with Camilla while he was married to Harry’s mother, Diana. Diana once said of Camilla: “There were three of us in this marriage so it was a bit crowded.” Harry claimed Camilla had to work to make herself more attractive to the British people after this revelation – and claims she would have traded secrets for other royalty with the press to do so.
“The need for her to rehabilitate her image made her dangerous because of the connections she made in the British press. And there was an openness on both sides to trade information,” he said in the interview. “And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her about to be queen consort, there were going to be people or bodies left on the street because of that.”
According to Anderson Cooper, Harry wrote in the book that Camilla “sacrificed me for her personal PR shift.”
The royals did not invite Harry on a plane to rush to the Queen’s deathbed
He was in London last September for a charity event when the palace announced that Queen Elizabeth II, his grandmother, was under medical observation in Scotland at Balmoral Castle. “I asked my brother, I said, ‘What are your plans? How are you getting on with Kate? And then a few hours later, all the family members who live in Windsor and Ascot got on a plane together, a 12-, 14-, maybe 16-seater plane … I wasn’t invited.”
By the time Harry reached Balmoral himself, the Queen had died.
Harry says he’s doing interviews to connect with his family
Even before the book was published, Harry faced criticism for airing his family’s dirty laundry instead of working out his problems with them privately. When Cooper challenged Harry on this, Harry stated that writing a book and conducting honest interviews was the only way he knew how to reach his family.
“Every time I tried to do it privately, there were briefings and leaks and stories being planted against me and my wife,” he said. “Trying to speak in a language you might understand, I’m going to sit here and tell you the truth with the words that come out of my mouth instead of using some other, unnamed source to feed lies or stories to the tabloid media, which literally radicalizes its readers to potentially harm my family—my wife, my children.”
Harry and Meghan are ready to apologize and reconcile
It is hard to imagine that Harry and William will ever share the close relationship they have had since the publication of Spare. The book describes, among other things, a physical confrontation between the two brothers, which ended with William grabbing Harry by the collar and knocking him to the ground before asking him to keep the incident a secret. Harry confirmed in the interview that he hasn’t spoken to his father or brother in ‘quite a while’
Meanwhile, Harry continues to feel burned by the palace’s silence on matters that personally concern his family. Cooper brought up an article in a British tabloid The sun written by a TV presenter, in which the author says he dreamed Meghan was walking naked on the streets of Britain, with excrement thrown at her. The palace did not react to the disturbing piece. “There comes a time when silence is betrayal,” Harry said.
The Duke of Sussex said he “can’t see” himself returning to life as a full-time royal, but maintained the “ball is in their court” in terms of a personal reconciliation. “We will apologize publicly for anything we’ve done wrong.”
More must-reads from TIME
[ad_2]
Source link