Prince Harry: I felt guilt meeting mourners after Diana’s death

Read More

The Duke of Sussex has described the guilt he felt while walking outside Kensington Palace following the death of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales.

In a clip from Harry: The Interview, which will be broadcast at 9pm on ITV1 and ITVX on Sunday, Prince Harry speaks about his memories of meeting mourners following the death of his mother in 1997.

Speaking to the presenter Tom Bradby, the duke said: “Everyone knows where they were and what they were doing the night my mother died.

“I cried once, at the burial, and you know I go into detail about how strange it was and how actually there was some guilt that I felt, and I think William felt as well, by walking around the outside of Kensington Palace.”

The Duke of Sussex went on to then describe feeling the mourners’ tears on their hands when he shook them. “There were 50,000 bouquets of flowers to our mother and there we were shaking people’s hands, smiling,” he says.

“I’ve seen the videos, right – I looked back over it all. And the wet hands that we were shaking, we couldn’t understand why their hands were wet, but it was all the tears that they were wiping away.”

He adds that he and his brother, William, were unable to show any emotion as they met the mourners. “Everyone thought and felt like they knew our mum, and the two closest people to her, the two most loved people by her, were unable to show any emotion in that moment,” he added.

In a previous clip released by ITV ahead of the interview, Prince Harry has said he saw “the red mist” in his brother, Prince William, when his older sibling allegedly attacked him during a confrontation over the younger duke’s relationship with Meghan Markle.

“He wanted me to hit him back, but I chose not to,” he said of his brother, who he earlier claimed in his book had physically attacked him – as was first reported by the Guardian.

The memoir, called Spare, is being published four months after the death of Harry’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, and the start of his father’s reign as king, and follows years of turmoil for the royal family amid the “Megxit” crisis, the Duke of Edinburgh’s death, accusations of racism in the Sussexes’ Oprah interview and the brothers’ long-running feud.

The reports follow revelations that in the memoir, Harry said he killed 25 Taliban fighters during his second tour of Afghanistan, and that he and his brother begged his father not to marry Camilla, now the queen consort.