Two words lie at the heart of Prince Harry’s rift with his older brother Prince William according to a new excerpt from the new biography Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family, serialized in the Sunday Times.
According to the authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand, William ‘pissed Harry off’ when he referred to Meghan as ‘this girl’ during a brotherly chat and cautioned his younger brother not to rush into things.
“Don’t feel you need to rush this,” William told Harry, according to their sources. “Take as much time as you need to get to know this girl.”
Scobie and Durand write, “In those last two words ‘this girl’ Harry heard the tone of the snobbishness that was anathema to his approach to the world. During his 10-year career in the military, outside the royal bubble, he had learnt not to make snap judgements of people based on their accent, education, ethnicity class or profession.” They add, “Harry was pissed off… that his brother would ask such a thing.”
As Vanity Fair revealed last year, the deepening rift between the royal brothers came to a head during a conversation between William and Harry around the time Harry proposed to Meghan in October 2017. I was told by a source exceptionally close to William that he had sat down to urge Harry not to rush into things, something that hurt and offended an already sensitive Harry.
“It’s fair to say that William had reservations about Meghan from the very beginning. He was certainly concerned about how quickly the romance was moving and about Harry rushing into things. He told him to take his time,” the source recalled. “What made it very hurtful for Harry is that he has always given William his full support particularly with Kate. Not everyone adored Kate Middleton in the beginning. Some of William’s friends were snobbish about Kate, but Harry gave her the thumbs up from the outset and he expected the same loyalty back from William.”
What might have been well-intended brotherly advice not only fell on deaf ears but backfired so stupendously it led to the biggest royal fall out in recent times. At one stage last year Harry and William were not on speaking terms for only the second time in their lives.
According to Finding Freedom, Harry, who was once close to his niece and nephew Prince George and Princess Charlotte, stopped going round for family visits to the Cambridges’ apartment at Kensington Palace and spent less time with Prince Louis than any of the other children because of the fall out with William.
Loyalty is a subject explored at length in Finding Freedom, the sensational new royal biography which claims to present Harry and Meghan’s version of the past 18 months.
According to excerpts published this weekend the Sussexes felt they had no choice but to quit the royal family in part because they felt stifled and patronized by courtiers who they believed had a vendetta against them.
With clear echoes of the past, Harry and Meghan complained to friends who spoke to the authors, that the palace ‘men in grey suits’ who Harry’s mother Princess Diana so famously clashed with were out to get them too.
On Friday, royal biographer Andrew Morton tweeted, “Take out Harry and insert Diana and you have Groundhog Day. Men in grey. Popularity. Recklessness. Jealousy. Finding Freedom is like entering the Windsor time machine.”