Just a week away from his memoir’s release, Prince Harry is once again sharing his side of the story, telling a broadcaster in the United Kingdom that he wants to repair ongoing tension with his dad and brother.
In an interview with ITV, the Duke of Sussex says his troubled relationship with the Royal Family “never needed to be this way,” but that his family have “shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile.”
ITV’s interview is set to air Jan. 8, two days ahead of the release of the Duke’s much-anticipated memoir, Spare.
Although ITV’s interview trailer has been geoblocked in Canada, clips are circulating online, in which the prince mournfully expresses how he wishes he could make amends with his closest family.
“I would like to get my father back; I would like to have my brother back,” he says.
“I want a family, not an institution.”
“They feel as though it is better to keep us somehow as the villains,” he adds.
Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, are fresh off the release of their Netflix documentary, Harry & Meghan, in which they shared intimate details about why they walked away from their duties as senior working royals in 2020 to carve out a new future in the United States.
Their decision to leave, they said in the six-part docuseries, was fuelled by a rabid tabloid press that seemed set on destroying Markle by any means possible. They also accused the Royal Family’s press offices of being in cahoots with family members, saying that it wasn’t uncommon for secrets to be leaked to the press in order to spin coverage or paint certain family members in a more favourable light.
In a separate interview with 60 Minutes‘ Anderson Cooper, also set to air Jan. 8, Harry says Buckingham Palace refused to protect and support him and Markle, while at the same time sharing information with the media that would undermine their image.
“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 comes a point when silence is betrayal,” he told journalist Anderson Cooper.
Harry’s book, Spare, will be released Jan. 10 and is anticipated to share even more details of his falling out with William.
Publisher Penguin Random House has called it “a landmark publication full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief.”
In Harry & Meghan, Harry said it was “terrifying” to have William “scream and shout” at him during an emergency meeting to discuss the Sussex’s future in the family.
Buckingham Palace has not commented on the Netflix series, Harry’s memoir, or the upcoming ITV and CBS interviews.
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