In US interview to promote book, Duke of Sussex also points finger at Camilla but says she is not an ‘evil stepmother’
Prince Harry has described how he “can’t ever get out” of the royal family, but he does not believe it will ever be possible for him and the Duchess of Sussex to return to the UK as working royals.
In his latest TV interview to promote his autobiography Spare, the Duke of Sussex continued to point the finger at Camilla, the Queen Consort, over allegations he had been “sacrificed on her personal PR altar”.
Asked on Good Morning America if the couple could return to the royal fold, he said he did not think “it’s ever going to be possible”.
“Even if there is an agreement, or an arrangement between me and my family, there is that third party that is going to do everything they can to make sure that isn’t possible,” he told host Michael Strahan, implying he was referring to the media and competing royal press offices. “Not stopping us going back, but making it unsurvivable.”
He said he believed his late mother would be heartbroken over the rift that has developed between him and his brother William, the Prince of Wales. “I think she would be sad … I think she would be heartbroken.”
He insisted his late grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, was not upset at him wanting to step down as a working royal. “She knew what was going on. She knew how hard it was. I don’t know whether she was in a position to change it,” he said.
He added: “She never said to me that she was angry. I think she was sad it had got to that point.”
Of the royal family, he said: “I can’t ever get out and I’m incredibly aware of my position. I’m incredibly grateful for the life that I’ve had and continue to live. But there’s no version of me being ever able to get out of this.”
Harry has attacked what he alleged was Camilla’s attempts to “rehabilitate” her image in several interviews, after she was cast as the “third person” in his parents’ marriage. But he told Strahan he also sympathised with her, saying she was not an “evil stepmother”.
Strahan read an extract from Harry’s book critical of Camilla. “In a funny way I even wanted Camilla to be happy. Maybe she’d be less dangerous if she was happy.”
Another excerpt said: “I have complex feelings about gaining a step-parent who I thought had recently sacrificed me on her personal PR altar.”
Asked what Camilla had “done” at that point, Harry replied: “I have a huge amount of compassion for her, you know. Being the third person within my parents’ marriage and she had a reputation, or an image, to rehabilitate. Whatever conversations happened, whatever deals or trading was made right at the beginning, she was led to believe that that would be the best way of doing it.”
He said they had not spoken in a “long time” but were “perfectly pleasant” to each other when they did meet. “She’s my stepmother,” he said. “I don’t look at her as an evil stepmother. I see someone who married into this institution and has done everything that she can to improve her own reputation and her own image for her own sake.”
In a previous separate interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Harry had said Camilla’s willingness to forge relationships with the British press made her “dangerous” and there would be “bodies left in the street because of that”.
He told ABC he was “stunned” that public funding of security for him and his family was withdrawn after he left Britain.
In his interview with ITV on Sunday, Harry denied he and Meghan had called an unnamed member of the royal family racist after they questioned what skin colour their son Archie might be. He said it was “unconscious bias”, but not racism.
More viewers watched BBC One’s Happy Valley than tuned into the ITV interview according to overnight figures.
Harry: The Interview drew an average TV audience of 4.1 million while Happy Valley, which started at the same time, had an average audience of 5.3 million.
On racism, he told ABC the royal family should modernise by getting rid of “unconscious bias” that can “move into racism”.
In a separate interview with CBS on Sunday, Harry was asked, given their criticism of the royal family, why not renounce their titles of Duke and Duchess of Sussex. He replied: “What difference would that make?”
