- Valentine Low’s new book about the royal family, Courtiers, is out in the UK on Thursday.
- In an excerpt published in the Chron, Low writes about the rift between Prince Harry and Prince William.
- Harry turned down a crisis meeting with William in 2019, reports Low.
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The Duke of Sussex declined to meet with the Prince of Wales after opening up about their chasm in a TV documentary, according to a new royal book.
According to an excerpt from Valentine Low’s ‘Courtiers’ published in the Chron on Sunday, Prince William requested an emergency meeting with his brother after Prince Harry said on the ITV documentary ‘Harry and Meghan’ that they were ‘up different ways”. An African Journey”, in November 2019.
“Part of this role and part of this job, this family, the pressures she’s under, things inevitably happen,” Harry said in the documentary.
“But look, we’re brothers, we’ll always be brothers,” he added. “We are certainly on different paths at the moment but I will always be there for him and as I know he will always be there for me.
Valentine Low is a royal correspondent who has reported on the royal family for the Times of London since 2008, according to his profile on the Times website. In his role, he has traveled overseas with the Queen, Prince and Princess of Wales and other members of the Royal Family.
In Low’s book, published in the UK on Thursday, he said William used WhatsApp to message Harry and ask to meet up the day after the documentary aired.
“This has thrown Harry and Meghan into a tailspin. What do you want them to do?” Low wrote, adding that Harry was initially scheduled to meet before he found out William needed to inform his private secretary to sort out his schedule.
“He was so concerned that Williams’ team would leak the visit to the press that he preferred not to see his brother than risk it being in the papers. For anyone who knew what was going on, this was heartbreaking,” Low wrote.
“It highlighted the dysfunction at the heart of so many royal relationships and how members of the royal family so rarely pick up the phone to speak directly to one another. Instead, they communicate through the apparatus around them. And the result is distrust and division,” he added.
Low also reports that William and Kate Middleton’s team felt that Harry and Meghan were trying to overshadow their tour of Pakistan, which coincided with their documentary’s release.
“William and Kate’s team were apparently not happy and saw it as a deliberate attempt to keep the couple out of the headlines. Relations between the two households became quite strained,” Low wrote.
Representatives for the Duke of Sussex and the Prince of Wales did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.