Across two interviews, Prince Harry defended his decision to write an autobiography and said he hoped for “accountability” from his family
After extraordinary extracts from his forthcoming autobiography, Spare, leaked last week, Prince Harry spoke to ITV in the UK and CBS in the US on Sunday night to set out why he wrote the book – and what it would take to reach a reconciliation with his family. Here are some of the key details.
Prince Harry framed the decision to write an autobiography as a last resort, driven by the failure of the royal family to hear his concerns, in particular over alleged briefings to the tabloid press. And he suggested that it was a reclamation of his life story.
“38 years of having my story told by so many different people with an intentional spin and distortion – it felt like a good time to own my story,” he told ITV’s Tom Bradby. “I have … [been] doing everything that I can privately to get through to my family. And the thing that is the saddest about this, Tom, is it never needed to be this way. It never needed to get to this point.”
He told CBS’s Anderson Cooper that “none of anything that I’ve written … is ever intended to hurt my family” but the book should squash “this idea that somehow my wife was the one that destroyed the relationship between these two brothers”.
He said on ITV that criticism of his decisions to write it were misplaced: “I’m not sure how honesty is burning bridges. Silence only allows the abuser to abuse.”
The gut-wrenching discussion of the trauma of his mother’s death, and its very long aftermath, started with a passage from the book: his father sitting on his bed, putting his hand on his knee, and calling him “darling boy” as he broke the news. Harry told Bradby that he had very few memories from before that day: “I lost a lot of memories on the other side of this mental wall, which I think is so relatable for so many people who’ve experienced loss … that inability to be able to drag the memories back over.”
He told CBS that he didn’t believe Diana was dead “for a long time”, and talked about his continued belief that the role of the paparazzi in causing the accident has not been fully acknowledged. “Everybody got away with it,” he said.
“I love my father. I love my brother. I love my family,” Harry told ITV. “I always do.” Nonetheless, his criticisms of their handling of the rift in the family were stringent: “Going back to the relationship between certain members of the family and the tabloid press, those certain members have decided to get into bed with the devil, to rehabilitate their image,” he said.
It was hard not to link those lines to other allegations that, for example, there had been a refusal to correct claims that Meghan had made Kate cry ahead of Meghan and Harry’s wedding when “they were more than happy to put out statements for less volatile things”.
Harry also said on CBS that when the Queen was dying, he had not been invited on a private flight taking other family members to her bedside at Balmoral. By the time he arrived separately, she was dead.
Easily the weirdest feature of the ITV interview was an in-depth discussion of the politics surrounding his wish to keep his beard for his wedding to Meghan (above) – either telling evidence of the monarchy’s obsessive desire to control even the smallest details of his life, or of a disproportionate grudge over a deeply trivial matter, depending on your sympathies.
He prevailed in the end. “Writing this, I remembered that William had a beard himself, and granny [the Queen] and other people were the ones to tell him that you have to shave it off,” he said. The difference in his case, he said, was that his beard was representative of “the new Harry – almost like a shield to my anxiety … and I think William found it hard.” He added: “Hopefully those beard people out there will go, yeah no, I fully get that.”
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Therapy’s influence on Harry’s thinking came through again and again. When reflecting on his claims of being physically attacked by his brother, he told ITV: “I can pretty much guarantee today that if I wasn’t doing therapy sessions … I would have fought back 100%. But I didn’t, because I was in a more comfortable place with my own anger.”
In another apparent reference to the value of a process he started seven years ago, he said: “I have put in a lot of work and effort into resolving my own trauma from many, many years ago, and I will continue to work on that. And I think other people within my family could do with that support as well.” He said on CBS that the therapeutic use of psychedelics had helped “clear the windscreen … the misery of loss”.
He told Bradby, “I’m very happy, I’m very at peace. I’m in a better place than I’ve ever been … I’m in such a good headspace now.”
Harry cast his ongoing legal battles with parts of the press over alleged phone hacking and other invasions of his privacy as a patriotic crusade. “If I can’t continue to serve my country while based in the UK … then I will continue to serve my country from abroad,” he said. “Changing the media … [that’s how] I am going to try to make a difference.”
He came back repeatedly to the idea that his family and the press have a toxic, and symbiotic, relationship. “My family have tried to control it for years, and they still try to control it … But it’s something they don’t want to change because it benefits them.” He told ITV: “What people are starting to understand now is that a royal source is not an unknown person. It is the palace specifically briefing the press, but covering their tracks by being unnamed.”
On CBS, Harry spoke of Buckingham Palace’s failure to condemn a column by Jeremy Clarkson in the Sun about Meghan, in which Clarkson said he was “dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain”: “There comes a point where silence is betrayal,” he said.
Despite his book’s many incendiary revelations and allegations, Harry insisted that his primary goal was reconciliation with his family. “I want reconciliation,” he told Bradby. “But first, there needs to be some accountability.” Later, he told CBS, he was “trying to speak a language that perhaps they understand”.
He said on ITV that he “100%” believed reconciliation was still possible, but that “they feel as though it’s better to keep us somehow as the villains”. Such an outcome could have a remarkable impact, he said: “I genuinely believe, and I hope, that reconciliation between my family and us will have a ripple effect across the entire world.”