Prince Harry has described feeling “hurt” when he joined Eton – because his older brother said to him “pretend we don’t know each other”, he claims. The Duke of Sussex, 38, revealed details of his time at school during an interview with CBS, aired in the US. In a narrative which ties into the book title – the notion of an heir to the throne and a ‘Spare’ – Harry recalled his disappointment at William not wanting to hang out with him at secondary school.
Speaking to Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes, the Duke of Sussex says he took William’s apparent rejection of him “personally”.
Cooper prompted: “Your brother told you, ‘Pretend we don’t know each other’.
To which Harry replied: “Yeah, and at the time it hurt. I couldn’t make sense of it. I was like, ‘What do you mean? We’re now at the same school. Like, I haven’t seen you for ages, now we get to hang out together.’
“He’s like, ‘No, no, no, when we’re at school we don’t know each other.’ And I took that personally.”
Of his memoir Spare, to be released on Tuesday, Harry said it “squashes the idea that somehow my wife was the one that destroyed the relationship between these two brothers”.
He told Cooper: “None of anything that I’ve written, anything I’ve included is ever intended to hurt my family.
“But it does give a full picture of the situation as we were growing up, and also squashes this idea that somehow my wife was the one that destroyed the relationship between these two brothers.”
The CBS interviewer noted that while the public believed William and Harry were “inseparable” they were actually living “separate lives from the time [Diana] died”.
The prince also discussed his rivalry with William in an interview on ITV with Tom Bradby in the UK. He said seeing his own children interact helped him understand his relationship with William a bit more.
Harry said “the gap between me and William is very similar to Archie and Lili, and to see Lili obsessed with Archie, and Archie like ‘No, no Lili, I need my space, I need my space,’ now I get it.”
More to follow…
