Why Harry found out about the Queen’s death from the BBC
Harry wrote in Spare that he received no response from William when he texted him to find out how his brother was planning to travel from England to Scotland on September 8, 2022 to be with their ailing grandmother in Balmoral , so he booked his own flight with British Airways and went alone. When they landed, Harry checked his phone: he saw a text message from Meghan telling him to call as soon as possible and the BBC News notification that the queen had died.
While he was in the air, according to Endgame, his team tried to get the palace to wait to publish the obituary until Harry had been personally informed by the family.
They had to “literally beg to wait for his plane to land,” a close family source told Scobie, “and they reluctantly agreed to withhold the statement for a while.” But Harry’s plane had to be canceled due to stormy weather circled for a while, and during that time the palace sent out the release.
According to Scobie, any subsequent reports attributed to palace sources that said Charles broke the news to Harry before the world found out, or at least tried to call him, were just the royals trying to save face. (Harry also made no mention of such attempts in Spare.)
“They could have waited a little longer,” a friend of Harry’s told Scobie, “there would have been nothing on the whole, but no one respected that at all.”