Prince Harry mourned his “us-against-the-world bond” with Prince William and was left feeling “displaced” when the Waleses’ family expanded following the births of their children, according to a leading royal author.
With Prince William spending more and more time with his Middleton in-laws, Prince Harry felt cast out from their close-knit “family unit”, the Mirror reports.
Author Tina Brown cited a former aide who said that the brothers’ “relationship hadn’t been the same since William married Kate”, in her book The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor, the Truth and the Turmoil.
She added that the distance between them grew following the birth of Princess Charlotte in 2015.
Brown wrote in her book: “Though they were still ‘incredibly close, living next door to each other [at Kensington Palace], sharing the same office, and hanging out an awful lot,’” but claimed Harry “mourned his us-against-the-world bond with William”.
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She added: “Harry felt displaced by their bougie family unit, and couldn’t understand his brother’s obsession with his Middleton in-laws, whose Bucklebury world bored Harry to tears. The [Waleses] had become a tight unit, and William a full-on Windsor country bumpkin.”
“On weekends when he wasn’t chez Middleton, he was tramping the grounds of Anmer Hall, the red-brick Georgian mansion on the Sandringham Estate that the Queen gave the couple as a wedding present, wearing a flat cap and tweed jacket like his ‘turnip toff’ Norfolk farmer friends.”
The author continued: “For his part, William felt that Harry’s unabated Jack the Lad behaviour was getting tiresome.
“He was less amused than the British public by either the strip billiards debacle in Las Vegas or Harry’s ceaseless boozy nightclub forays with his rowdy friends. His younger brother’s recklessness exasperated him.”
She claims the influence that the Middleton family had on the Prince of Wales cannot be emphasised enough – with Prince William praising them for the way he was welcomed into the fold.
Referring to what the Princess of Wales provided her husband, Joe Little, Managing Editor of Majesty Magazine told the Express: “I would say, in terms of William, she brought her family.
“William fitted into the Middleton family very quickly and they took to him as a future son-in-law.
“I think also a bit of stability and grounding and a bit of normality that William perhaps wasn’t too familiar with when growing up because clearly his parents’ marriage was facing difficulties when he was a child and he was very aware of that and eventually their marriage disintegrated.
“With the Middletons, he got stability and a bit of normality, so for that William will forever be grateful.”
