Prince Harry speaking during an interview with ITV's Tom Bradby for the programme Harry: The Interview. Photo / PA via AP
It has been a cycle of unprecedented royal revelations in the past few hours. With allegations in recent days all stemming from “a leaked extract from Prince Harry’s memoir Spare”, today they came straight from the Prince’s unabated mouth via two explosive television interviews.
And it appears no member of his family has been left unscathed by his candid, heartbreaking and damning accusations.
Prince Harry’s first highly anticipated sit-down aired with ITV journalist and long-time friend Tom Bradby. Here he claimed members of the royal family plant and leak stories to the UK’s tabloid media, issued an attack he believed was “not scathing” about his stepmother, Queen Consort Camilla - that was to come later - and revealed the true gravity of losing his mother as a 12-year-old: the ongoing grief, guilt and long-held denial that she was really gone.
The second interview with Anderson Cooper, a 60 Minutes special on CBS, saw the prince double down on his accusations about Camilla, reveal further details about the incident where William attacked him and discuss the hurtful move that meant he missed the chance to see his grandmother, the Queen, before she passed.
In both interviews aired today, Harry spoke openly about his drug use and the relief it brought him amid his grief.
With two more interviews - one with Good Morning America and another with Stephen Colbert - due to be released in the coming days, the Herald looks at the most shocking claims and allegations made by Prince Harry so far.
In what may be the most shocking allegation to be made by Harry in his bombshell television interviews he likens behaviour by certain family members to that of “abusers”.
The comment came after Bradby asked the Duke of Sussex if speaking out about his and Meghan Markle’s experience will burn bridges with the family.
Harry replied, “I’m not sure how honesty is burning bridges. You know, silence only allows the abuser to abuse. Right? So I don’t know how staying silent is ever gonna make things better. That’s genuinely what I believe.”
Earlier in the interview the prince said that “certain members” of the royal family “decided to get in the bed with the devil” - in reference to the tabloid media - to “rehabilitate” their image.
Little has really been known about the personal relationship between Prince William, Harry and their stepmother, Camilla. But it appears it has likely never been an easy one following Harry’s comments about the Queen Consort today.
Last week a leaked extract from Harry’s book revealed he and William “begged” King Charles not to marry Camilla. Now, his interviews have shed light as to why.
“He didn’t answer. But she answered. Straight away. Shortly after our private summits with her, she began to play the long game.” he said. “A campaign aimed at marriage, and eventually the Crown, with Pa’s blessing we presumed.”
Harry continued to claim accurate details from private conversations with his stepmother soon ended up in the press.
One of those conversations took place in 1998 between Harry, William and Camilla which led to the prince accusing her of leaking information to the media.
In Harry’s interview with Cooper, he echoes his mother’s infamous point about the woman who “crowded” her relationship with Charles.
“She was the third person in their marriage”, said Harry. After his mother died, Camilla had work to do. “She needed to rehabilitate her image.”
He goes as far as calling her a “villain” whose determination to leak of stories to the press made her “dangerous”. He believes, he tells Cooper, her “connections” with the media would end up with “people or bodies left in the street”.
Recalling the moment he was told by his father, King Charles of her death at Balmoral Castle, while still a child, Harry tells Bradby: “I began silently pleading with Pa, or God, or both, “No, no, no.”
He said his father looked down before explaining: “There were complications. Mummy was quite badly injured and taken to hospital, darling boy.
“He always called me darling boy, but he was saying it quite a lot now.” Adding, “His voice was soft. He was in shock, it seemed. ‘Oh, hospital?’ “Yes, with a head injury.”
He remembers his father telling him: “They tried, darling boy. I’m afraid she didn’t make it.”
Harry then noted how, as a parent, he has compassion for his father having to sit with the knowledge that Diana had died and having to figure out how he was going to tell his two young sons.
Harry told Cooper he’d had a hard time accepting the death of his mother, Diana, and believed it may have been part of some elaborate “plan”.
“For a long time, I just refused to accept that she was gone,” he told 60 Minutes.
“Part of, you know, she would never do this to us, but also part of, maybe this is all part of a plan.”
Cooper replied: “You really believed that maybe she had just decided to disappear for a time?”
“For a time, and then that she would call us and that we would go and join her, yeah,” the Duke replied.
“How long did you believe that?” Cooper asked.
“Years. Many, many years. And William and I talked about it as well. He had similar thoughts.”
Cooper then said: “You write in the book, ‘I’d often say it to myself first thing in the morning, Maybe this is the day. Maybe this is the day that she’s gonna reappear’.”
“Yeah, hope. I had huge amounts of hope,” the Duke replied.
And, often, before he woke up, he would see his mother in his dreams.
In his memoir, Spare, Prince Harry recalls seeing his mother in his dreams and saying “Mummy, Mummy, is that you?”
Prince Harry tells Bradby: “I refer to it as post-traumatic stress injury because I’m not a person with a disorder. I know I’m not.”
Harry confessed to his interviewers that “it still hurts” when he thinks about the photographers who chased his mother down on that fateful night.
Cooper says: “You write in the book, ‘I hadn’t been aware before this moment,’ talking about looking at the pictures of the crash scene, ‘that the last thing Mummy saw on this earth was a flash bulb’.
“The pictures showed the reflection of a group of photographers taking photographs through the window, and the reflection on the window was them,” said the Duke.
Harry also revealed he went through files on his mother’s death to look for “proof”.
“Proof that she was in the car. Proof that she was injured. And proof that the very paparazzi that chased her into the tunnel were the ones that were taking photographs - photographs of her lying half dead on the back seat of the car.
“All I saw was the back of my mum’s head - slumped on the back seat. There were other more gruesome photographs, but I will be eternally grateful to him for denying me the ability to inflict pain on myself by seeing that. Because that’s the kind of stuff that sticks in your mind forever.”
While there was much speculation that Harry had learned about the Queen’s death through the media, he addressed something perhaps even more damning in his second interview.
He told Cooper that prior to his grandmother’s passing, he had contacted William to synchronise travel details to get to Balmoral where she was in poor health and would eventually die.
“I asked my brother, I said ‘what are your plans, how are you and Kate getting up there?’
“And then a couple of hours later all of the family members that live in the Windsor and Ascot area were jumping on a plane together, a plane with 12, 14 maybe 16 seats.
“I was not invited.”
By the time Harry arrived at Balmoral, the Queen had died.
Earlier he’d told Bradby: “The day that she died was just a really, really horrible reaction from my family members.
“And then by all accounts, well certainly from what I saw and what other people probably experienced, was they were on the back foot and then the briefings and the leaking and the planting.
“I was like ‘we’re here to celebrate the life of Granny and to mourn her loss, can we come together as a family?’ but I don’t know how we collectively – how we change that.”
The swirling rumours and alleged “red mist” around William was cleared when Harry told Cooper about a fight he had with his brother in 2019 that quickly turned physical.
In the book Spare, Harry claims the Prince of Wales, “grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and … knocked me to the floor”.
He says the attack left him with visible injuries to his back.
“It was a build-up of frustration, I think, on his part,” recalls the Duke.
“It was at a time where he was being told certain things by people within his office. And at the same time, he was consuming a lot of the tabloid press, a lot of the stories. He had a few issues, which were based not on reality.
“I was defending my wife and he was coming for my wife - she wasn’t there at the time - but through the things that he was saying, I was defending myself.”
“And we moved from one room into the kitchen. And his frustrations were growing, and growing, and growing. He was shouting at me. I was shouting back at him.
“It wasn’t nice. It wasn’t pleasant at all. And he snapped. And he pushed me to the floor.
“He knocked me over. I landed on the dog bowl.
“I cut my back. I didn’t know about it at the time. But he apologised afterwards. It was a pretty nasty experience.”
Cooper asks if William told Harry not to tell anyone about the altercation.
“Yeah, and I wouldn’t have done. And, I didn’t until she [Meghan] saw on my back. She goes, ‘What’s that?’ I was like, ‘Huh, what?’ I actually didn’t know what she was talking about. I looked in the mirror. I was like, ‘Oh s***’. Well, because I hadn’t seen it.”
Harry told 60 Minutes he has used psychedelic drugs to deal with grief. That they “cleared the misery of loss” he carried for his mother.
“You write in the book about psychedelics, Ayahuasca, psilocybin, mushrooms,” says Cooper.
“I would never recommend people to do this recreationally,” says the Duke.
“But doing it with the right people if you are suffering from a huge amount of loss, grief or trauma, then these things have a way of working as a medicine.
“What did they show you?” asks Cooper.
“For me, they cleared the windscreen, the windshield, the misery of loss. They cleared away this idea that I had in my head that I needed to cry to prove to my mother that I missed her. When in fact, all she wanted was for me to be happy.”
Harry revealed while his relationship with Meghan faced scrutiny from Prince William and Kate, his brother “never tried to dissuade” him from marrying her.
It is understood William did hold “some concerns” from early on, warning his little brother that “this was going to be very hard”.
Harry told Bradby he didn’t fully comprehend what William was saying but speculated that his brother might have been foreshadowing the intense media reaction that was to come.
The Duke of Sussex alleged there was “a lot of stereotyping that was happening” about Meghan from William and Kate, admitting he was “guilty of that as well, at the beginning”.
The stereotype? The “American actress”.
“Some of the things that my brother and sister-in-law – some of the ways that they were acting or behaving definitely felt to me as though unfortunately that stereotyping was causing a bit of a barrier to them really sort of, you know, introducing or welcoming her in.”
A dominant theme in Harry’s memoir is the impact the death of his mother, Princess Diana, had on him as a child and still does as an adult.
Alongside his grief, he was left with a father in Charles, suddenly navigating life as a single parent.
In an extract from Spare, read out during his ITV interview, Harry says, “He’d always given an air of not being quite ready for parenthood: the responsibilities, the patience, the time.
“Even he, though a proud man, would have admitted as much. But single-parenthood? Pa was never made for that. To be fair, he tried.”
To read more of the claims Harry made during his ITV and CBS interviews click here.
- Prince Harry and CBS’ Anderson Cooper, 7pm on THREE and THREENOW
- Prince Harry and ITV’s Tom Bradby, 7.30pm on TVNZ 1 and TVNZ+
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