Prince Harry spoke about his upcoming memoir, “Spare,” for the first time on American television 60 Minutes Interview with Anderson Cooper. Some of the revelations of their conversation were as follows.
Harry was 12 when his mother, Princess Diana, was killed in a car accident in Paris. It was August 1997, and Harry was at Balmoral Castle in Scotland with other members of the royal family. In his book, Harry described the moment his father, Prince Charles, woke up to what had happened.
“In the book you wrote,” he says, “they tried, dear boy. I’m afraid he didn’t do it.” These phrases stick in my mind like darts on a board, ‘you say,'” Cooper said. “Did you cry?”
“No. Not a single tear then,” Harry said. “I was shocked, you know? Twelve years old. Sort of – 7 in the morning, 7:30, early in the morning. Your dad comes in, sits on your bed, puts his hand on your knee and tells you, ‘There’s been an accident.’ I couldn’t believe it.”
“You wrote in the book,” Cooper said, “that Pa didn’t hug me. He was great at showing emotion in normal situations. But his hand fell on my knee again and he said, ‘This is going to happen. All right.’ But after that nothing went well for a long time.”
“No, nothing was right,” Harry said.
Harry writes in “Spare” about how he reacted in the days and years after the death of his mother, Princess Diana, in 1997. He told Cooper how he didn’t believe Diana was dead.
“For a long time, I refused to accept that she was—she was gone,” Harry said. “You know, he’d never do it with us, but part of it, maybe it’s all part of the plan.”
“You really believe,” Cooper asked, “that he might have decided to disappear for a while?”
“For a while, and then he’ll call us and we’ll go and join him, yes,” said Harry, who was 12 when his mother died.
Harry says he sought help from a therapist seven years ago and reveals he still tries more experimental treatments to deal with the grief he feels from his mother’s death.
“You write in a book about psychedelics,” Cooper said. “Ayahuasca, psilocybin, mushrooms. They were really important to you.”
“I don’t recommend people entertain this,” Harry said. “But doing it with the right people, if you’re suffering from a great deal of loss, grief or trauma, these things have a way of working as medicine.”
“Did they show you something,” Cooper asked. “What did they show you?”
“For me, they took away the pain of the windscreen, the windscreen, the loss,” Harry said. “They took away this idea in my head – that my mother – that I had to cry to remember my mother. When really, she wanted me to be happy.”
Prince Harry was in London for a charity event last September when the palace announced that Queen Elizabeth II was under medical supervision at Balmoral Castle in Scotland.
“I asked my brother—I said, ‘What’s your plan? How are you and Kate getting up there?’ And then, a few hours later, you know, all the family members who live in the Windsor and Ascot area jumped on the plane together,” Harry said. “A plane with 12, 14, maybe 16 seats.”
“You weren’t invited on that plane?” Cooper asked.
“I wasn’t invited,” Harry said.
By the time Harry reached Balmoral himself, the Queen had died.
Harry wrote that when he introduced Meghan Markle to his family in 2016, her father liked her at first. But her brother, Prince William, was skeptical.
The rest of the family, Harry told Cooper, were uncomfortable as well.
“From the beginning, before they had a chance to get to know her,” Harry said. “And the UK press jumped on that. And here we are.”
In his book, Prince Harry’s portrayal of his stepmother, Camilla, now Queen Consort, is perhaps the most significant. She married then-Prince Charles in 2005, although the two were romantically involved for decades. Princess Diana famously called Camilla the “third person” in her marriage, and Prince Harry hasn’t forgotten it.
He was portrayed by the tabloids as a “villain,” Harry told Cooper. “She was the third person in their marriage. He needed to restore his image.”
“Both you and your brother directly told your father not to marry Camilla?” Cooper asked.
“Yes,” Harry said. “We didn’t think it was necessary. We thought it would do more harm than good, and if he’s with his person now, that—sure enough. Why go away when you don’t have to? We wanted him to be happy.” . And we saw how happy he was with her. So, at that point, ‘OK.’
“It was a build of frustration – I think, on his part. It was at a time where he was being told certain things by people within his office,” Harry said. “And at the same time, he was consuming a lot of tabloid press, a lot of stories. And he had some issues, which weren’t based on reality. And I was defending my wife. And she was coming for me. The wife. She wasn’t there at the time, but Through what he said. I was defending myself. And we went from one room to the kitchen. And his frustration grew, and grew. He was yelling. At me. I was yelling back at him. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all. And He snapped. And he pushed me to the ground.”
“Did he knock you over?” Cooper asked.
“He knocked me over. I ended up in the dog bowl,” Harry said. “I cut my back. I didn’t know it at the time. But, yeah, he– he apologized later. It was a very bad experience.”
Although Harry and William seemed inseparable to the outside world growing up, the two have been living separate lives since their mother’s death.
“Even when you were in the same school, in high school,” Cooper told Harry, “your brother told you, ‘Pretend we don’t know each other.’
“Yeah, and it hurt at the time. I didn’t understand the meaning of it. I was like, ‘What do you mean? We’re in the same school now,'” Harry said. “Like, ‘I haven’t seen you in years, now we get to hang out together.’ He’s like, ‘No, no, no, we don’t know each other when we’re in school.’ And I took it personally. But yeah, you’re absolutely right, you hit the nail on the head. Like, we had a very similar traumatic experience, and then we—we dealt with it two different ways.”
60 Minutes has reached out to Buckingham Palace for comment. Palace representatives asked that we provide them with our report before airing it, which 60 Minutes could not do before they would consider commenting.
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