Prince Harry has been candid about how fatherhood has changed his outlook on life since welcoming son Archie and daughter Lilibet with Meghan Markle, and now, his kids are teaching him something about his dynamic with brother Prince William.
“The gap between me and William was very similar to Archie and Lili,” the 38-year-old prince explained in his ITV interview on Sunday, January 8, referring to his 3-year-old son and 19-month-old daughter. “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. … I get how irritating the younger sibling can be to the older sibling.”
Shutterstock
Harry details his ups and downs with William, now 40, in new memoir Spare, out Tuesday, January 10, beginning from their arguments as kids and how they coped with the death of their mother, Princess Diana, differently.
“But in the moment of the time, I didn’t really grasp that. I didn’t really realize it,” Harry continued on Sunday. “But yes, I’ve always loved my brother. And I think what would be quite shocking or surprising to people is that after our mother died, we were on different paths. Right? Two individuals who experienced a very similar traumatic experience, but dealt with it in two very different ways.”
Harry and William were 12 and 15, respectively, when Diana died in 1997. In Spare, the former military pilot writes about his older brother distancing himself from his brother when they were in high school.
“I couldn’t make sense of it,” Harry told Anderson Cooper in a 60 Minutes interview, which also aired on Sunday. “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.”
The two siblings have been on the outs for years and Harry’s recent confessions in his Netflix series, Harry & Meghan, and in his book — the Duke of Sussex also details a physical fight with the Duke of Cambridge and arguments over Harry and Meghan’s royal exit — aren’t helping things, per sources.
“My brother and I love each other. I love him deeply. There has been a lot of pain between the two of us, especially the last six years,” Harry told Cooper, denying that he meant to be “cutting” while writing about William’s hair loss in the book. “None of anything I’ve written — anything that 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.”
Harry, however, maintains that he isn’t trying to hurt his family and hopes that there could be peace down the road.
“The ball is very much in their court, but, you know, Meghan and I have continued to say that we will openly apologize for anything that we did wrong, but every time we ask that question, no one’s telling us the specifics or anything. There needs to be a constructive conversation, one that can happen in private that doesn’t get leaked,” Harry said on Sunday. “This all started with them briefing, daily, against my wife with lies to the point of where my wife and I had to run away from my country.”
Buckingham Palace denied to comment on Harry’s book or various interviews promoting Spare.