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Prince Harry has gone on the offensive against his brother, Prince William, in the latest episodes of his Harry & Meghan Netflix documentary released Thursday.
A friend of William’s already told the Daily Beast this week that the relationship between England’s future king and Harry was “over” and that the new episodes wouldn’t “make a great deal of difference.” But it’s hard to see how Harry’s latest remarks about William can do anything other than deepen the divide.
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In one episode, Harry describes a high-stakes meeting convened at Sandringham to discuss his and Meghan’s future involvement with royal life in January 2020, in which Harry said he tried to negotiate going forward in a “half-in, half-out” arrangement with the royal family.
“It became very clear, very quickly that that goal was not up for discussion or debate,” Harry says. “It was terrifying to have my brother scream and shout at me and my father say things that just simply weren’t true and my grandmother, you know, quietly sit there and take it all in.”
“I think from their perspective, they had to believe that it was more about us and maybe the issues that we had as opposed to their partner—the media—and themselves and that relationship that was causing so much pain for us,” Harry adds. “They saw what they wanted to see.”
After the meeting, Harry says he was informed that a story had run saying he and Meghan wanted to leave royal life because William had “bullied” them out. Despite the furious row that had indeed taken place, he was told that a joint statement would be issued in his and William’s name slamming the report. “I couldn’t believe it,” Harry said, adding that no one asked his permission to include his name on the statement. “I rang [Meghan], and I told her, and she burst into floods of tears because in four hours they were happy to lie to protect my brother, and yet for three years they were never willing to tell the truth to protect us.”
The new insight came as the couple detailed the drama and backstabbing around their departure from the royal family in their Netflix show.
Harry said the Sandringham summit was deliberately arranged for a day when Meghan would be back in Vancouver with Archie.
“Imagine a conversation, a round table discussion about the future of your life when the stakes are this high. And you as the mom and the wife—and the target in many regards—aren’t invited to have a seat at the table,” Meghan said.
Harry added: “It was clear to me that they planned it so you weren’t in the room.”
Harry also claimed his father’s office leaked a private letter outlining the couple’s hopes for the future, written before the split became public.
Harry said he called Charles in December 2019 with a plan to move to Canada, where they were then staying, and Charles responded, “Can you put it in writing?”
Harry said he initially demurred but then said he would, sending messages on three consecutive days.
He said, “In one of those I said that if it didn’t work out we would be willing to relinquish our Sussex titles if need be. That was the plan.”
It was when this detail appeared in newspaper reports that Harry says he realized the letter had been leaked.
“It became clear that the institution had leaked the fact that we were going to be moving back to Canada,” Harry said.
“The key piece of this story that made me aware that the contents of that letter between me and my father had been leaked was that we were willing to relinquish our Sussex titles. That was the giveaway. I was like, wow, our story, our life, literally got taken from underneath us.”
Harry said that far from “blindsiding” the queen, their plan was “years in the making.”
He said, “In 2018, we’d already talked about perhaps moving to New Zealand. And that never transpired. And then, at the beginning of 2019, we discussed the whole concept of us moving to South Africa, supporting charities, organizations in Africa… the palace signed off on us moving to South Africa. So my father’s office knew about it, my brother’s office knew about it, and my grandmother’s office knew about it. No one else knew. It was very much an internal document. Then it was leaked to the Times newspaper.
“Then that whole plan was then scrapped. Because it’s now become a public debate. Once plans like that become public debates, nine times out of ten, it’s going to fail.
“By the time I was speaking to my father from Canada, the family and their people knew that we were trying to find a different way of working for a minimum of two years.”
Harry also details in the show how he believes he was blocked from making his case directly to the queen when the couple flew back to the U.K. from Vancouver Island in Canada in January 2020.
He said: “Before we left, I spoke to my grandmother, and told her, ‘We’re coming back on the 6th, and I would love to come and drive up and come and see you.’ She knew that we were finding things hard. I’d spoken to her many times about it. She told me she had no plans for the week.”
Meghan said: “So we were flying back from Vancouver straight to Heathrow and right as we’re getting on the plane, this urgent, urgent message comes through to H saying, ‘You are not allowed to see Her Majesty.’”
Harry said the queen then told him, when he expressed surprise that she was now too busy to see him, “Yes, I didn’t know I was busy. I’ve been told that I’m busy. I’ve been told that I’m busy all week.”
Meghan adds: “I remember looking at H. I mean, my gosh, this is when a family and a family business are in direct conflict. Because they’re blocking you from seeing the queen. But really what they’re doing is blocking a grandson from seeing his grandmother. Later that afternoon, we found out that this story was coming out. Somehow, the tabloids knew about this proposal… His dad said, ‘Put it in writing.’ And he did, and just five days later it was on the front page of a newspaper.”
Meghan claimed that part of their decision to leave the U.K. was based on the fact that “the pack of the royal rota” was based in London, adding: “If we’re not there, you cannot cover what we’re doing.”
She suggests their message to the royal family was: “You guys can be on all of the front pages, exactly as you want it.”
Harry also spoke about seeing his family on their last engagement, the Commonwealth Day service in March 2020.
“It’s like living through a soap opera where everybody else views you as entertainment,” he said. “I felt really distant from the rest of my family, which was interesting because so much of how they operate is about what it looks like rather than what it feels like. And it looked cold but it also felt cold.”
Asked if he misses anything about “the institution,” Harry said, “Yeah, I miss the weird family gatherings when we’re all sort of brought together under one roof for certain times of the year. I miss the U.K., I miss my friends. I’ve lost some friends in this process as well.”
Harry also makes the incendiary accusation that the press offices of the different senior royals trade negative stories to protect their own principals. He says: “If the comms team want to be able to remove a negative story about their principal, they will trade and give you something about someone else’s principal.”
The Daily Beast has never received such an offer of a deal from any royal press office in over a decade of covering the royal family.
Harry adds: “You can always say, ‘I didn’t know about this,’ or, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, this would never happen, are you suggesting I condone this?’ Like, ‘No—but what I am asking is, have you done anything to stop it?’”
Harry says he and William vowed they would never work against each other, but he says William broke the deal. “To see my brother’s office copy the very same thing, which we had promised the two of us would never ever do, that was heartbreaking.”
Harry then said that after a Remembrance Day event in the early days of their marriage, they came down to breakfast to find Meghan on the front pages after attending an event with other royals including the queen. Harry said Meghan said to him, “It’s not my fault.” Harry said he replied, “I know. And my mum felt the same way.”
The episode then cuts to a clip from Diana’s Panorama interview in which she says that her husband, Charles, became jealous of her popularity during their tour of Australia. Prince William has previously requested the interview never be aired again, after it was revealed that interviewer Martin Bashir used underhanded methods to secure it, so its inclusion in a show co-produced by Harry is in itself a provocation.
Diana says, “With the media attention came a great deal of jealousy.” Another paid employee, James Holt, who is executive director at the Archewell Foundation, then comments, “Some people in the institution around the family started to see that this new couple could destabilize the power dynamics. Whether actively talked about or not, the aim was to put them in a box or make them irrelevant.”
Harry says that he struggled speaking to his family when he came home for his grandfather’s funeral, saying, “It was hard. Especially spending time having chats with my brother and my father who just were very much focused on the same misinterpretation of the whole situation. So none of us really wanted to have to talk about it at my grandfather’s funeral. But we did.
“And I’ve had to make peace with the fact that we’re probably never going to get genuine accountability or genuine apology. My wife and I, we’re moving on. We’re focused on what’s coming next.”
