Prince Harry has launched a bitter attack on his family, accusing the royals of showing “no willingness to reconcile,” and saying, “it never needed to be this way” in an interview to promote his forthcoming memoir, Spare.
“They feel as though it is better to keep us somehow as the villains,” Harru said in a trailer for the sitdown with British journalist Tom Bradby released by ITV on Monday.
It is unclear who “they” refers to, and it could be the media, whom Harry and Meghan have accused of conspiring with the family to work against them.
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However much of the rest of the trailer refers unambiguously to his family, with Harry telling Bradby, “I want a family, not an institution” and “I would like to get my father back. I would like to have my brother back.”
The tone of the trailer is likely to be greeted with weariness by courtiers in the U.K. who firmly blame Harry and Meghan’s very public trashing of his family for escalating the feud.
The release of the ITV trailer came just hours after CBS released trailers for an interview with Harry on 60 Minutes. Both ITV and CBS’s interviews will be screened on Sunday, Jan. 8, two days ahead of the book’s publication.
Harry suggested to Cooper he had no choice but to go public, saying, “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… 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 claimed. “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. But the whole story is Buckingham Palace commenting.
“There becomes a point when silence is betrayal,” he added.
Buckingham Palace has not responded to either trailer.
Few details have emerged about the highly anticipated book, although this weekend it was reported that the biography is so harsh about his brother Prince William that some believe the two may never reconcile. A source told The Sunday Times: “There are these minute details, and a description of the fight between the brothers. I personally can’t see how Harry and William can reconcile after this.”
The book will go into detail about the effect of Princess Diana’s death, it is believed, with the source telling The Sunday Times: “The overall impression is that this is a man who has never recovered from the trauma of his mother dying so young, and then along comes Meghan and he projects on to her a parallel with Diana.”
The suggestion that Harry could save his harshest words for William will come as little surprise after his damning criticism of his brother in the Netflix documentary series Harry & Meghan. Harry said that at the “Sandringham Summit,” where the terms of his exit from the family was established, “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 quietly sit there and sort of take it all in.”
It seems unlikely Harry’s latest salvo will lead to any reconciliation, with the royals regarding Harry publicly denouncing them as unforgivable treachery.
A friend of William and Kate’s previously told The Daily Beast, in the wake of the Netflix show: “It’s hard to imagine how devastating the last three years have been for William. The brothers were so close, they had such an incredible bond. It’s impossible really to express what a massive, terrible, ongoing headache this has been for William in the past few years.
“The family blames Meghan for it all, really. They absolutely fucking hate her, basically. It’s a huge disaster.
“Growing up, the brothers were so close. Harry would do anything to be with William. They lost their mum, and their dad was really disengaged, so they had this incredible, incredible bond. Everyone knew it.
“And then Meghan came along. Everyone warned him off her but he wouldn’t listen, and she just ripped him away. The bond is gone, completely gone and this film is just the latest betrayal. William really, really, really hates both of them now.
“It’s really toxic and destructive for all of them. At the end of the day, they are a family, and their whole family life has been ruined by Meghan. You can’t imagine how bad it really is.”
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