Request denied. Prince Harry revealed that he and Prince William asked King Charles III not to marry Queen Consort Camilla — but their father ignored their wishes.
“She was the villain. She was the third person in their marriage. She needed to rehabilitate her image,” the Duke of Sussex, 38, explained to Anderson Cooper during his 60 Minutes interview, which aired on CBS Sunday, January 8.
Princess Diana famously referred to Camilla, now 75, as “the third person” in her marriage, and Harry claims she was trying to fix her public reputation ahead of the 2005 nuptials.
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“We didn’t think [getting married] 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,” Harry recalled. “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.’”
In his memoir, Spare, the Invictus Games founder wrote: “I even wanted Camilla to be happy. Maybe she’d be less dangerous if she was happy.” Cooper, 55, asked how exactly she’d been “dangerous” at all.
“Because of the need for her to rehabilitate her image,” Harry said. “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. 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, which will hit shelves on Tuesday, January 10, Harry recalls how he allegedly learned that a “gung-ho” member of Charles’ team “devised and launched a new campaign of getting good press” for his father and stepmother. The positive message about the king came “at the expense of bad press” for both princes.
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“They’ve done this to me for the last time,” William told Harry during their alleged phone call, adding that he “wasn’t going to take it anymore.”
The BetterUp CIO wrote that when William confronted their father, he tagged along for “moral support,” but things quickly turned sour.
“Pa instantly got upset. He began shouting that Willy was paranoid. We both were,” Harry recalled. “Just because we were getting bad press, and he was getting good, that didn’t mean his staff was behind it.”
In his interview with ITV’s Tom Bradbury, which also debuted on Sunday, Harry alleged that the “relationship between certain members of the family and the tabloid press” has gotten out of hand. “Those certain members have decided to get in the bed with the devil to rehabilitate their image,” the prince said.