A different type of fight. Prince Harry detailed an alleged physical altercation with brother Prince William in Spare — and he saw a new side to his older sibling in the heat of the moment.
“What was different here was this level of frustration, and I talk about the ‘red mist’ that I had for so many years — and I saw this ‘red mist’ in him,” the Duke of Sussex, 38, says in a new clip from his TV interview with presenter Tom Bradby, which airs on Sunday, January 8. “He wanted me to hit him back, but I chose not to.”
Harry outlined his feud with William, 40, in a passage of Spare, which hits shelves on Tuesday, January 10. The BetterUp CIO alleges that the brothers argued about Harry’s wife, Meghan Markle, with William supposedly calling her “difficult,” “rude” and “abrasive.”
Prince William and Prince Harry. Martin Meissner/AP/Shutterstock
“He set down the water, called me another name, then came at me. It all happened so fast. So very fast,” Harry — who moved to California with the Suits alum, 41, in 2020 after stepping back from their senior royal roles — claimed in Spare. “He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor. I landed on the dogs’ bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out.”
The Archewell cofounder — who referred to the Prince of Wales as his “archnemesis” elsewhere in the memoir — conceded that William seemed apologetic after the alleged incident. “’We’d had a million physical fights in our lives,’ I told [my therapist]. ‘As boys, we’d done nothing but fight. But this felt different,’” Harry wrote.
The two sons of King Charles III and late ex-wife Princess Diana have been at odds since 2019, shortly before Harry and Meghan left their posts as senior working royals. Months earlier, William and Harry separated their formerly joint households. (Harry, Meghan, William and his wife, Princess Kate, had previously been dubbed the “Fab Four” due to their frequent group appearances.)
“Part of this role and part of this job, this family, being under the pressure that it’s under, inevitably stuff happens,” the former military pilot said in 2019’s Harry & Meghan: An African Journey documentary. “But look, we’re brothers, we’ll always be brothers. We’re certainly on different paths at the moment but I’ll always be there for him and as I know he’ll always be there for me. … We don’t see each other as much as we used to because we’re so busy, but I love him dearly.”
The Duke of Cambridge, for his part, has not publicly addressed the sibling rift or responded to the claims laid out in Spare. The Invictus Games cofounder even noted in his Harry & Meghan Netflix docuseries that he doesn’t foresee an apology coming from his brother or their 74-year-old father. In a clip from an upcoming Good Morning America appearance, Harry revealed how he thinks Diana would react to their estrangement.
“I think [our mother] would be sad,” he said in a teaser released on Friday, January 6. “I think she’d be looking at it long-term to know that there are certain things that we need to go through to be able to heal the relationship.”
Prince Harry’s ITV interview airs in the U.K. on Sunday, January 8, at 9:00 p.m. BT and his 60 Minutes appearance airs in the U.S. via CBS at 7:30 p.m. ET.