Prince Harry, in a 60 Minutes interview in connection with the release of his memoir this week, described an incident in early 2019 when tensions with Prince William boiled over to the point that his brother pushed him and he cut his back as he got up a dog bowl fell on the floor.
There were already tensions surrounding Harry’s wife Meghan Markle, who has become the target of British tabloids. The confrontation took place at Harry’s cottage in Kensington Palace.
“It was a buildup of frustration, I think, on his part,” Harry told Anderson Cooper. “It was at a time when he was being told certain things by people in his office. And at the same time he consumed a lot of the tabloids, a lot of stories. And he had some problems that weren’t based on reality. And I defended my wife. And he came because of my wife – she wasn’t there at the time – but through the things he said. I defended myself. And we moved from one room to the kitchen. And his frustrations grew and grew and grew. He yelled at me. I yelled at him. It was not nice. It wasn’t pleasant at all. And he snapped. And he pushed me to the ground.”
“It was quite an uncomfortable experience,” he said.
Harry said he cut his back, although he didn’t immediately notice the injury. Prince William apologized but asked him not to tell anyone. But Meghan saw the cut on his back.
“She says, ‘What is that?’ I thought, ‘Huh, what?’ I didn’t actually know what she was talking about. I looked in the mirror. I was like, ‘Oh shit.’ Well, because I had never seen it, I hadn’t seen it,’” Harry said.
The interview was Harry’s first with a US outlet ahead of Tuesday’s release of his book, Spare. ITV interviewed him earlier on Sunday and he will also appear on Good Morning America and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
He claims that Buckingham Palace was responsible for the leak to the British tabloids and likens the press there to the dragons of Game of Thrones.
“It all started with them lying against my wife on a daily basis, to the point that my wife and I had to flee our country, my country.”
Harry also described being in London for a charity event last September and learning that Queen Elizabeth was seriously ill. But he wasn’t invited on a plane with other family members to visit the Queen before she died. Instead, he came to Balmoral alone. But when he got there, she was already dead.
When he arrived he said: “I went into the hall and my aunt was there to greet me. And she asked me if I wanted to see her. I thought about it for about five seconds and I was like, ‘Is that a good idea?’ And I was like, ‘You know what? You can – you can do this. You – you have to say goodbye.’ Um, so I went upstairs, took off my jacket and went in and just spent some alone time with her.
“She was in her bedroom…I was very happy for her. Because she ended her life. She had completed her life and her husband was – waiting for her. And the two will be buried together.”
He told Cooper that he hadn’t spoken to his brother or his father, King Charles, for “a while.” When asked if he could see himself ever becoming a full-time member of the royal family again, he said: “I can’t see that happening.”
But he said he was open to a reconciliation. His concern, he said, was that every conversation was leaked to the press.
“The ball is all theirs but, you know, Meghan and I have continued to say that we will openly apologize for anything we did wrong, but every time we ask that question, nobody tells us the specifics or something like that,” he said. “There has to be a constructive conversation that can take place privately and hasn’t leaked out.”
At the end of the segment, Cooper said 60 Minutes reached out to the Palace for comment, but they demanded to see the report before replying, “which we never do”.
The interview took up two 60-minute segments, something normally reserved for “big gets”.
In the first paragraph, Harry described trying to come to terms with the loss of his mother, Princess Diana, in 1997. He was only 12 at the time, and he said that for years until he was in his 20s, it was believed that she might still be alive. In the book, he wrote, “I often said to myself first thing in the morning, ‘Maybe today is the day. Maybe that’s the day she’ll reappear.
“For a long time I just refused to accept that she was gone … she would never do that to us, but also part, maybe it’s all part of a plan.”
He added, “For a while, and then she would call us and we would go to her.”
He said William also shared “similar thoughts” following the loss of her mother. But the two brothers didn’t have a close relationship after Diana’s death. According to Cooper, Harry wrote in the book that it was his father who informed him of his mother’s death, telling him there had been an accident and that: “You tried, darling. I’m afraid she didn’t make it.”
He wrote in the book, “Pa didn’t hug me. Under normal circumstances, he wasn’t very good at showing emotion. But his hand fell on my knee one more time and he said, ‘It’s going to be fine.'”
When he was 20, Harry asked to see the police report on the accident and photos of the scene. He said it was then that he discovered that “the last thing Mom saw on this earth was a flashbulb.”
“The images showed the reflection of a group of photographers taking pictures through the window, and the reflection on the window was — they were,” Harry told Cooper.
“It was obvious to us as kids that the British press was complicit in our mother’s plight and I had a lot of anger inside that thankfully I never expressed to anyone,” Harry said. “But I’ve been drinking a lot. Because I wanted to numb the feeling, or distract myself from it like…whatever I was thinking. And I would, you know, do drugs too.”
Harry also had critical things to say about Camilla the Queen Consort. He told Cooper that he and his brother asked their father not to marry them because they “didn’t feel it necessary.”
“We thought it would do more harm than good and that just being with him now would be enough. Why go so far when it’s not absolutely necessary? We wanted him to be happy. And we saw how happy he was with her. So at the time it was ‘okay,'” he said.
But he wrote that Camilla “would be less dangerous if she were happy.” He told Cooper that she was “dangerous” because she felt the need to rehabilitate her image.
“That made her dangerous because of the connections she forged within the British press,” Harry said. “And there was an open willingness on both sides to share information. And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her on her way to the queen consort, people or corpses would be left in the streets because of it.
The full 60 minute segment is here.