Prince Harry: Princess Diana Would Be ‘Heartbroken’ Over William’s Behavior

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Prince Harry thinks his mother Princess Diana would “be heartbroken about the fact that (Prince) William, his office were part” of feeding negative stories to the media about him and Meghan.

“I think she’d be sad... she would be heartbroken that it’s ended up where it’s ended up,” Harry said of what he thought Diana would make of the breakdown of the brothers’ relationship.

William broke a longstanding “pact” between the brothers to not let their offices fight or brief the press against each other, Harry told Good Morning America’s Michael Strahan Monday.

“The people that he employed broke that,” Harry said of the pact. “But again, within the family, it’s hard because you are led to believe that if you don’t play the game, that you will be destroyed. And again, I’m the one who’s proving that that is true, right? Chose not to play the game, but they’re trying to destroy me.”

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Harry also said he could never “get out” of the royal family, even if he also cannot imagine being a working royal again.

“I can’t ever get out, and I’m incredibly aware of my position,” he told Strahan. “I’m incredibly grateful for the life that I’ve had and continue to live. But there's no version of me being ever able to get out of this. I was stunned that my family would allow security to be taken away, especially at the most vulnerable point for us.”

However, he did not think it would ever be possible to be a working royal again, because “third parties” would make such a thing impossible and “unsurvivable.”

Of accusations he was selling out his family by airing so much dirty laundry in public, Harry said that “the only way to correct mistruths is writing something in one place." He “fully accepted that writing the memoir was "feeding the beast.”

“I have thought about it long and hard,” Harry said of the question whether Spare would make royal relations worse. “And as far as I see it, the divide couldn’t be greater before this book.”

Harry also said he believes William is jealous of his position as “the spare.”

“I have more freedom than he does, right?" Harry said of being the “spare,” rather than the heir. “So his life is planned out for him. I have more flexibility to be able to choose the life that I wanted.”

“If we can get to the point of reconciliation, that will have a ripple effect across the world,” Harry said. “[The press] pitched the Waleses, which Kate and William are now, against the Sussexes, me and my wife. They always pitched us against each other," Harry said. “They pitched Kate and Meghan against each other.”

When asked whether press reports of Kate and Meghan fighting affected their actual relationship, Harry replied, “Without question.”

“If you read [the press coverage], it very much feeds into how you function, operate, and behave. Without question,” Harry said. “But the moment you don’t read it, you can live a truly authentic life.”

Harry said it was “simply not the case” that Meghan made Kate cry over the issue of bridesmaid dresses in the run-up to her and Harry’s wedding.

Harry spoke about a talk he had with William in 2017 at Diana's graveside on the 10th anniversary of his mother’s death. William told him he had felt Diana’s presence in his life, and thought she was now with Harry.

Harry said he had learned, through meeting Meghan, about his own “unconscious bias.” If not “learned and grown from,” this can lead to racism, Harry said, adding the royals needed to learn the same.

“I think the same process that I went through regarding my own unconscious bias would be hugely beneficial to them. It’s not racism, but unconscious bias if not confronted, if not acknowledged, if not learned and grown from, that can then move into racism. We all want to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.”

There had been an “enormous missed opportunity” by not accepting Meghan into the royal family. “Representation is what she said to me, right from the beginning… Me as a privileged white man didn’t really understand what she was talking about.”

Harry said the late Queen Elizabeth was not angry at his decision to step down as a working royal. “My grandmother and I had a very good relationship. It was never a surprise to anybody, least of all her. She knew what was going on. She knew how hard it was. She never said to me that she was angry. I think she was sad that it got to that point.”

Harry said he “without question” takes some of the responsibility for the breakdown of his relationship with his royal relations. But he said, “What people don't know is the efforts that I've gone to [in order] to resolve this privately, both with my brother and with my father.”

“I don’t think that we can ever have peace with my family unless the truth is out there,” he told Strahan. “There’s a lot that I can forgive, but there needs to be conversations in order for reconciliation, and part of that has to be accountability.”

After calling Queen Consort Camilla “dangerous” in his interview with 60 Minutes, Harry said he had “a huge amount of compassion” for her being “the third person in my parents’ marriage”—repeating his mother's infamous soubriquet for Camilla.

“We haven’t spoken for a long time. I love every member of my family... we’re perfectly pleasant with each other. I don’t see her as a wicked stepmother,” but rather as “someone who married into this institution and done all she can to improve her image for her own sake.”

On the allegations of racism made against the British media towards Meghan, Harry said: “My wife is not visibly Black, but that’s the way she is.” The way she has been written about was “incredibly relatable to everybody of color,” Harry said.

Harry repeated that he was worried about “history repeating itself” when it came to Meghan suffering a similar fate to Diana.

“There has always been this competition between us weirdly,” Harry said of his relationship with William. “Again, I think it really plays into, or is played, by the heir/spare.”

“I hope that we will be joined at the hip again,” Harry said of reconciling with William. “Because, you know, if there’s something that will terrify the British press more than anything, it’s William and I being aligned.”

The fresh revelations followed two blockbuster interviews on U.S. and U.K. television on Sunday night, in which Harry spoke of not being invited on the royal plane north the day Queen Elizabeth died, his drug-taking, grief, his anger of how he and Meghan had been treated, his lifelong fury with the media, and his fractured relations with his father and brother.

Harry told Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes that Queen Consort Camilla had been “dangerous” in plotting her ascent within the royal family, especially with her alleged dealings with the British media. Harry said Camilla had “left bodies in the street.”

In the memoir, Harry writes of his stepmother Camilla campaigning in the British press for acceptance after Diana’s death: “I even wanted Camilla to be happy. Maybe she'd be less dangerous if she was happy.”

“She was the villain. She was the third person in their marriage. She needed to rehabilitate her image,” Harry told Cooper of Camilla’s position after Diana had died.

Asked by Cooper how Camilla was dangerous, Harry replied, “Because of the need for her to rehabilitate her image,” which made her dangerous “because of the connections that she was forging within the British press. And there was open willingness on both sides to trade off information. And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her, on the way to being Queen Consort, there was gonna be people or bodies left in the street because of that...

“If you are led to believe, as a member of the family, that being on the front page, having positive headlines, positive stories written about you, is going to improve your reputation or increase the chances of you being accepted as monarch by the British public, then that’s what you're gonna do.”

Meanwhile, Harry told Tom Bradby of ITV in the U.K. that the royal family were “abusers” who had got “in bed with the devil” by cooperating with the media—and he could not remain silent in the face of “distortions” of the truth in his first solo interview Sunday night on British television.

However, Harry, who insisted he is now happy, also told ITV’s Tom Bradby that he loved his brother Prince William and father King Charles, speaking tenderly about them and saying he wanted to reconcile with them, and “100 percent” believed “forgiveness” could happen.

Asked how he could expect to reconcile with them despite having “taken a flamethrower” to family bridges, Harry said, “Well they’ve shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile up until this point. And 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.”

Harry also said he felt “very at peace” and had “never been happier,” despite fleeing his “home country” with wife Meghan Markle and son Archie “fearing for our lives,” at the time of their so-called “Megxit.”