Buckhingam Palace is braced for further revelations ahead of the publication of Prince Harry’s bombshell book next week.
Clips have already been released from two separate interviews — one with ITV and the other with US broadcaster CBS News — and more are expected to follow before they are broadcast in full on Sunday. The book, called Spare, will be published next Tuesday.
The royal told ITV interviewer Tom Bradby he “wanted his father and brother back” while a clip from the US saw him criticise the palace over an alleged failure to defend him and wife Meghan before they stepped down as senior royals. He also said he would not return as a full-time royal.
The palace declined to comment on the trailers but royal sources said the family were “completely exhausted” with the “stream of misinformation” coming from the Sussex camp.
A royal insider told the Daily Mirror: “It all feels very repetitive. Harry’s constant sniping is rather draining and he knows full well it is highly unlikely they will engage in a tit-for-tat battle of words.”
In a series of clips from the duke’s ITV conversation, Harry, right, said: “It never needed to be this way”, and refers to “the leaking and the planting” before adding: “I want a family, not an institution.” He also says “they feel as though it is better to keep us somehow as the villains” and “have shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile”, although it is unclear who he is referring to.
Filmed in California where he now lives, ITV said Harry: The Interview will go into “unprecedented depth and detail” about his life in and outside the royal family.
Mr Bradby, a former royal correspondent and current presenter of ITV News at Ten, is a friend of the Sussexes and interviewed them for a documentary about their 2019 Africa tour. Harry also spoke to CBS’s Anderson Cooper of “betrayal” by Buckingham Palace. In an extract from that interview he says: “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. The family motto is ‘never complain, never explain’, but it’s just a motto.
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“They (Buckingham Palace) will feed or have a conversation with a correspondent, and that correspondent will literally be spoon-fed information and write the story, and at the bottom of it, they will say they have reached out to Buckingham Palace for comment. But the whole story is Buckingham Palace commenting. So when we’re being told for the last six years ‘we can’t put a statement out to protect you’, but you do it for other members of the family, there becomes a point when silence is betrayal.”
CBS has described the full interview as “revealing” and Harry’s book as “explosive”. It is expected to detail his disagreements with his brother William, and comes after he claimed in his Netflix documentary that William broke a promise never to leak stories or brief against one another.
