Prince Harry is currently doing a press tour in anticipation of his memoir release on Tuesday, most recently sitting down with Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes” in an interview broadcast Sunday night to defend the book’s existence.
The Duke of Sussex has been at odds with the British press for years, but in more recent months he’s shifted some of the blame for his troubles to members of his own family, including King Charles, Prince William, and now stepmother Camilla, the Queen Consort. Harry insists that he’s been forced to speak out in defense of himself and his wife, Meghan Markle.
In “Spare,” the 38-year-old former working royal said that Camilla needed to revamp her public image and did so at his expense.
“She was the villain. She was the third person in their marriage,” Harry told Cooper of his stepmother. “She needed to rehabilitate her image.”
“You and your brother both directly asked your dad not to marry Camilla?” Cooper asked.
“Yes,” Harry replied. “We didn’t think it was necessary. We thought that it was gonna cause more harm than good and that if he was now with his person, that surely that’s enough,” he said. “Why go that far when you don’t necessarily need to? We wanted him to be happy. And we saw how happy he was with her. So, at the time, it was, ‘OK.'”
“That made her dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press. And there was open willingness on both sides to trade of information,” the Duke of Sussex continued. “And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her, on the way to being Queen consort, there was gonna be people or bodies left in the street because of that.”
In “Spare,” he wrote that Camilla “sacrificed me on her personal P.R. altar.”
“If you are led to believe, as a member of the family, that being on the front page, having positive headlines, positive stories written about you, is going to improve your reputation or increase the chances of you being accepted as monarch by the British public, then that’s what you’re gonna do,” Harry added in his interview with Cooper.
During the interview, he said he was one of the “bodies” sacrificed to improve her reputation. It took decades for the public to accept Camilla as Charles’s wife as he had cheated on Princess Diana with her.
Harry also mentioned the British royal family “trading” stories during the Netflix docuseries “Harry & Meghan” when he discussed how royals would share secrets about different family members to avoid stories about themselves getting published.
“The level of planting from other members of the Royal Family means in my mind they have written thousands of books,” he told Tom Bradbury during an ITV interview, which also aired on Sunday night. “It got to the point where we had to leave. The distorted narrative is that we wanted to leave to make money but that’s not the case, we would have stayed for a life of service.”
He went on to describe how “some members of the Royal Family who have got in bed with the devil,” which in this case was the British media.
When the Duke of Sussex was asked if he was “pretty consistently scathing” about Camilla and the British press, Harry said, “Scathing? There’s no part of any of the things that I’ve said are scathing towards any member of my family, especially not my stepmother. There are things that have happened that have been incredibly hurtful, some in the past, some current.”
Prince Harry’s highly anticipated memoir, “Spare,” will be available on January 10.