It feels like we’ve been talking about Russell Myers’ royal book for a full month, but that’s because it was released in the UK in February, and it’s coming out in America next week under the title William and Catherine: The Monarchy’s New Era. True to form among royal biographies, no matter which royal is supposedly being discussed, the books always end up being about Prince Harry and Meghan. Well, in a new excerpt, Myers discussed Prince William’s long-running jealous antics around every single one of Prince Harry’s interests, passions and advocacy. In Spare, Harry wrote about William’s fury that Harry, a veteran of war, formed Invictus and worked on veterans issues. William was also furious that Harry does charity work in Africa. Harry wrote that William shrieked “Africa is MINE!” Well, William felt similarly about the military and veterans.
William and Harry’s rift has been one of the defining stories of the monarchy for the past decade, alongside Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor being cast into the wilderness. Meghan clearly played a major part, according to both the Sussex narrative and the pro-royal counter argument, but Harry has also been at pains to stress there were issues before she came along.
The book describes how early in their careers as working royals, William wanted to pursue projects that would have a clear impact, rather than simply showing up for good causes. This gave rise to a divide and concur philosophy in which he believed they should each pick areas that were important to them and focus on those issues. However, the two brothers both wanted to work on conservation in Africa and also with the military, sparking conflict on both issues.
In relation to the military, the tension came from the fact that William felt he had a claim as a future commander-in-chief of the British Armed Forces, once he became king, while Harry wanted to build on the bond he developed with the military community through his tour of Afghanistan.
Myers quotes a palace source who said that “Harry was put out,” and added: “He felt he was having to play the little brother role again, and basically wanted to tell his brother to get lost, to put it mildly, but that’s not the sort of thing you can do when your brother is the future king. But it did hurt him, having fought for his country, especially in such a place as Afghanistan. He felt he had the right to be p***** off that he was essentially being told he couldn’t step on William’s toes when it came to the military.”
Myers also touched on the brothers’ competitiveness over Africa, a subject Harry discussed in his book Spare.
“It was an area that William felt a deep passion for,” Myers wrote, “it connected his love of the countryside to the wider environment, and was somewhere he could use his profile to push for change. Again, Harry regarded this as confrontational.”
“You don’t just get Africa,” the book quotes Harry as telling William during a meeting at St. James’s Palace. “Ed Perkins, who served as press secretary to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry from 2012 to 2014, felt that something was emerging in the brothers’ relationship that went beyond sibling rivalry,” Myers wrote. Perkins said: “We had to sit them down and say, ‘Listen, you have to help each other, be on the same team.’”
Harry also described tension with William over his desire to pursue good causes operating in Africa in passages of his own memoir, Spare. He said there was “one small problem: Willy. Africa was his thing, he said. And he had the right to say this, or felt he did, because he was the heir. It was ever in his power to veto my thing, and he had every intention of exercising, even flexing, that veto power. We’d had some real rows about it.”
Harry said that “One day, we almost came to blows in front of our childhood mates,” after a friend asked why they could not simply both work in Africa. “Willy had a fit,” Harry wrote, “flew at this son for daring to make such a suggestion. ‘Because rhinos, elephants, that’s mine!’ It was all so obvious. He cared less about finding his purpose or passion than about winning his lifelong competition with me.”
While I think we do a good job of documenting William’s rage, pettiness, stupidity and jealousy, what gets lost in many of these conversations about William vs. Harry is how poorly served they both were by staff, especially senior staff, the so-called gold-standard advisors and courtiers. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that by the time William and Harry reached their 30s, their offices should have been split up. I remember saying that long before Harry even started dating Meghan as well, because it was obvious back then that Harry needed his own stand-alone office. A truly forward-thinking courtier would have sat down with Harry and William and said “let’s split up your offices and your issue profiles, and we’ll also select certain areas where you can work together.” Instead, it looks like the courtiers’ big plan was to keep Harry and William attached professionally forever, because Harry was always supposed to “help” the Scooter King. It also looks like absolutely no one was capable of telling William to stop acting like such a brat.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
