Prince Harry says Diana would be ‘heartbroken’ over rift with William

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Prince Harry believes his late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, would be “heartbroken” at the rift that has developed between him and his older brother William, the heir to the crown.

“I think she would be sad … I think she would be heartbroken that it’s ended up where it’s ended up,” Harry told ABC’s Good Morning America show on Monday morning, in commenting on the breakdown in his relationship with the royal family and William in particular.

He talked of how Diana, who died in 1997 in a car crash in Paris after the breakdown of her marriage to Charles, now the king, would have been heartbroken, too, at the collapse of what he called the “pact” between him and William never to turn the British press against each other.

Harry also said he believed a return for him and his wife, Meghan, to the UK as working royals was not feasible.

“I do not think it’s ever going to be possible,” he said.

“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 added. Harry did not name a third party but implied the media and allegations of secret counter-briefing by competing royal press offices against Harry and Meghan.

“Not stopping us from actually going back but making it unsurvivable. And that’s really sad, because it’s essentially breaking the relationship between us. If there was something in the future where we can continue to support the commonwealth then that is of course on the table.”

The interview, one of a series the prince is giving, was timed around the publication of his autobiography, Spare, which will be published on Tuesday but a copy of which the Guardian was able to see ahead of time last week.

Harry and Meghan gave up their royal roles and titles and moved across the Atlantic, initially to Canada and then later moving to Los Angeles, after falling out with, chiefly, William and Charles over what Harry said was secret stoking by their press teams of media hostility to Meghan.

The prince said he was “stunned” that public funding of security for him and his family was withdrawn after he left Britain, at a time when he and Meghan and their two children were being hounded by the media, just as the press had done to Diana.

Harry was asked if he thought the security facilities were withdrawn because the rest of the royal family did not understand his concerns about safety for his family or because they did not sufficiently care.

“I think probably a little bit of both,” he said.

Harry also told ABC on Monday that the royal family should modernise by getting rid of “unconscious bias” that “can move into racism” following what he and his wife have described as problems Meghan experienced in the family because she is biracial.