Prince Harry: For Years I Didn’t Believe My Mother, Princess Diana, Died In A Car Crash

LONDON – Prince Harry, the memoirist and estranged son of the House of Windsor, launched a full broadside against Buckingham Palace on Sunday night, appearing in more interviews to promote his new book, “Spare,” claiming his family, especially his stepmother, Camilla, now the queen consort, actively feed negative stories to the press about him and his wife, Meghan.

Harry said he is 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 the interviews – includes his father, King Charles III and his wife Camilla, and his brother Prince William and his wife Catherine, and their aggressive PR teams. The family treated press coverage as a zero-sum game, Harry said, and dumped on them in part because they feared being outshined.

The 38-year-old prince offered up what the U.K. news special called “unprecedented detail on life in and outside of the royal family,” in an exclusive interview with broadcaster Tom Bradby, on ITV in Britain.

Repeatedly, Harry railed against his brother and father, who, he charged, essentially forced him and Meghan away.

“At the moment I don’t recognize them, as they don’t recognize me,” Harry said.

Harry said he loved his brother, the heir to the throne, but that William was always competitive, often against him, in “a sibling rivalry” that continues today.

Harry revealed that William insisted, for example, that Harry shave off his beard before his wedding, which the prince refused to do.

“I don’t think my father or brother will read the book,” Harry said, nor watch Sunday’s TV interviews.

The royal family has continued to decline to comment on any of this.

At one point, Harry was asked by Bradby why he was revealing the most intense, most intimate moments of his life and laying so much of the blame at his family’s door, while at the same time complaining about the intrusiveness of the British tabloid press.

Bradby, who said he has been friends with Harry for 20 years, said on camera that Harry was burning his bridges and had deployed a flamethrower against the royal family.

Charles is set for coronation in May. If Harry and Meghan are there, things will be awkward.

After the ITV interview aired in Britain, Harry appeared on CBS in America, in an interview with Anderson Cooper for the show “60 Minutes.”

Alongside further accusations that members of the royal family spoke against Meghan in the British tabloid press, Harry also described the personal trauma of losing his mother, Princess Diana, in a Paris car crash in 1997, when he was 12 years old.

He told Anderson Cooper that for many years he did not believe she was dead, and woke each day thinking that she might reappear. “I had huge amounts of hope,” Harry said.

When he was 20, he asked to see a police report about the crash, seeking proof that she was in the car and that she was injured. Investigators concluded that the driver, a hotel security officer, was drunk, and traveling at speed when their borrowed car wrecked spectacularly inside the Pont de l’Alma tunnel near the Eiffel Tower. Her partner, Dodi Al Fayed, was killed instantly. The princess died in a hospital, although conspiracy theories live on today.

At 23, Harry visited Paris and asked his driver to take him to the scene of the accident. “I wanted to see whether it was possible driving at the speed that Henri Paul was driving that you could lose control of a car and plow into a pillar killing almost everybody in that car,” he told “60 Minutes.”

Diana was being hounded by paparazzi on the day of the accident. In his book, Harry wrote: “the last thing Mummy saw on this earth was a flash bulb.”

Today, he is scheduled to reveal more on “Good Morning America.” On Tuesday he will likely do the same – with more jokes, one assumes – on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”

Harry’s memoir will be published on Tuesday.

Last week, the British media got hold of leaked copies of his memoir “Spare,” in Spanish, and have been doling out the highlights.

They include Harry’s claim of killing 25 Taliban fighters and his account of a kitchen confrontation in 2019 with his older brother, after Prince William called Meghan “difficult,” “rude” and “abrasive.”

Harry’s interviews with handpicked talent, Meghan’s podcasts, his documentary series, and now his memoir are Harry and Meghan’s attempt to seize control of the narrative of their rift with the House of Windsor – and to profit from the same. It’s sparking strong emotions in Britain.

Many Britons claim they have already heard enough from Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex. But presales have put Harry’s book, scheduled for an official release Tuesday, at the top of Amazon’s bestsellers.

The Harry-hating tabloids here are going nuts on the story, and social media in Britain is filled with dueling hashtags on the pros and cons of the couple.

The latest polling, conducted by YouGov on Thursday and Friday, continues to find public support for the Sussexes shrinking over the last six years.

Just 23 percent of the British public have a positive view of Meghan, down from 49 percent in 2017, the year of their engagement. Support for Harry is at 26 percent, down from 81 percent in 2017.

The decline is most steep among those over 50 in Britain, who tend to be more supportive overall of the monarchy. Younger people in Britain appear more supportive of Harry and Meghan; more than 40 percent still hold positive views of them.

“It never needed to be this way,” Harry told ITV. “The leaking and the planting.”

The prince said, “I want a family, not an institution.” But, he claimed, his family “feel as though it’s better to keep us, somehow, as the villains.”

He said, “They’ve shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile.”

In his “60 Minutes” interview, Harry told Anderson Cooper he was “probably bigoted” before he began dating Meghan, that he was “incredibly naive” about how the British tabloids would spin the relationship. He said “the race element” of the couple’s relationship had been “jumped on straightaway.”

Harry was asked why he went public with complaints about his father and brother. He said people don’t really understand how the palace PR teams work against each other.

“Every single time I’ve tried to do it privately, there have been briefings and leakings and planting of stories against me and my wife,” he said.

In his book, Harry said that his story and his life had been “sacrificed” to Camilla’s “PR altar.” Harry said Camilla dished up private conversations to the press. “They could only have been leaked by the one other person present,” Harry said, which was Camilla.

Harry claimed that William and his wife never got on with Meghan “from the get-go,” and that they bought into “a stereotype” of her as a divorced, biracial American actress.

“You know, the family motto is ‘never complain, never explain,’ but it’s just a motto.

“They will feed or have a conversation with the correspondent,” Harry said. “And that correspondent will literally be spoon-fed information and write the story. And at the bottom of it, they will say that they’ve reached out to Buckingham Palace for comment.”

He continued, “But the whole story is Buckingham Palace commenting. So when we’re being told for the last six years, ‘We can’t put a statement out to protect you.’ But you do it for other members of the family. It becomes – there becomes a point when silence is betrayal.”

(c) 2023, The Washington Post · William Booth, Rachel Pannett