Henry of Sussex, called Prince Harry, delivers his rancor and his resentments in an autobiography, pointing out the animosities and the climate of tension which reign within his family.
“After 38 years of having my story told by so many people with intentional distortions and manipulations, it felt like a good time to reclaim my story and tell it myself.” These are the words of prince Harry at the microphone of ITV News, Sunday, January 8. While his memoirs titled The Alternate went out on January 10, 2023 in bookstores, the good sheets of his book published last week, followed by his exclusive interviews granted to CBS and ITV News on Sunday and broadcast on French television on Monday January 9, on M6 and TF1, caused a real tsunami of reactions. The British tabloids did not hide their concern. For the royal correspondent of DailyMirrorRussell Myers, Harry “is on a mission to destroy his family”, when the biographer of King Charles III, Catherine Mayer, confides to the Guardian that it could “mark the beginning of the end of the monarchy”.
In the columns of 20 minutes, the media and press analyst Virginie Spies, however, temporizes: “The crown of England has seen others! What is new is that the impact is even faster than before. ” Proof, according to her, that the “soft power” of the royal family is not ready to disappear immediately: it “is at the heart of all media discourse in the United Kingdom and around the world. It is a gossip topic [potins ndlr.] among the gossips which interests a lot of people”.
For his part, Gwendal Cosson, multimedia communication consultant Media Agency, analyzes, also close to the daily, that Prince Harry, even if he sows disorder in a certain way, would have everything to lose by totally harming the aura of the British crown, if he wishes to “exist in the media on the long term”. “If the corona collapses, he also loses,” he says. The fact remains that Prince Harry still managed to weaken the royal family since he clearly put his famous communication strategy to the test. “It sounds like everything the British monarchy has been running away from for the past 20 years. […] It completely escapes them”, concludes with 20 minutes communication expert Philippe Moreau-Chevrolet.
No doubt on one point: the memories of Prince Harry will remain as the acme of the family divorce. Prince William and Kate Middleton, King Charles III and his wife Camilla: the one who now lives in the United States with his wife, Meghan Markle, spares no one in this new work, a month after the documentary was broadcast on Netflix Harry & Meghan. In this mini-series in six episodes, the princely couple had above all mentioned the harassment they said they had suffered from the tabloids.
The information brought to the public square by Prince Harry is, in fact, surprisingly detailed. He thus evokes an episode where his brother William would have been violent with him, the fact that he and his brother would not have wanted his father to remarry Camilla, or even the dubious jokes of his father, who would have questioned his relationship to Prince Harry. He also reveals several still unknown facets of his private life, such as the fact that he took cocaine at the age of 17.
Title The Alternatein reference to his delicate place as second (for a long time, the children of Kate and William having since passed him), behind his older brother William, to succeed Charles when the time comes, Prince Harry’s autobiography reveals the various points friction between Meghan Markle’s husband, her father Charles III and her brother Prince William.
Act one, Charles’ unwelcome joke on the day of his birth. “Magnificent! From now on, you have given me an heir and a substitute – mission accomplished”, would have dropped to Lady Diana the one who was then only Prince Charles, at the birth of his second son, says Harry, as reported The Guardian. A simple joke for some, an unshakable pain for the king’s youngest son, who believes he was regularly hurt by his father’s humor. In his viewfinder, Charles’ jokes about his “real father”.
Still according to Prince Harry, whose DailyMail is echoed this time, Charles III would have regularly had fun saying to Harry: “Who knows if I am really the Prince of Wales? Who knows if I am even your father?” And the prince remembered: “He was laughing and laughing, although it was a particularly not funny joke given the rumor that was circulating at the time, that my real father was one of mum’s former lovers: Major James Hewitt. “
THE DailyMail finally reveals that Harry and William would have implored their father, in 2005, not to remarry Camilla. Harry says he was particularly worried about having to deal with a “cruel” stepmother […] like all the wicked mothers-in-law in the stories”. “Despite pleas from Willy and I, Pa went ahead. We shook his hand and wished him good luck. No hard feelings,” recalls Harry, however.
Prince William also takes it for his rank, according to the first revelations on Harry’s autobiography. As revealed by Guardian, the youngest son of King Charles III returns to an episode in which we discover a completely different facet of Prince William. Harry explains that during a relatively recent argument, since this one would have taken place in 2019, William would have “grabbed him by the collar, tearing [s]one necklace, and [l’aurait] knocked it down.” And Harry added: “I landed on the dog’s bowl, which broke under my back, the pieces cutting into me.” The subject of this dispute? Meghan Markle, says Harry. Before coming to blows, William would have called Meghan Markle a “rude”, “difficult” and “abrasive” woman. Harry specifies that after his violent gesture, William would have “apologized”. This episode would have left him “with scrapes and bruises,” added Prince Harry.
In another excerpt from Substitute, Harry also claims that his choice for his now famous Nazi costume, which made tabloid headlines in 2005, creating scandal, and for which he finally had to apologize, would have been encouraged by Kate Middleton and William. As revealed Page Six, Harry writes that he hesitated between a pilot’s costume and a Nazi one. “I phoned Willy and Kate, I asked them what they thought of it,” says Harry, assuring that they would have answered: “The Nazi uniform.” Meghan Markle’s husband also explains that when he got home, he tried on the costume in front of them. “They both roared with laughter. It was worse than Willy’s leotard! Way more ridiculous! Which, again, was the point.”
Beyond his startling revelations about his conflicting relationships with his brother and father, Prince Harry also returns in his Memoirs to his cocaine consumption at 17 and his time in the British army, during which he fought in Afghanistan. .
sky news reveals that Harry acknowledges in his Memoirs that he “of course” took cocaine, although he didn’t find the experience “amusing”. He says he used this drug for the first time “at someone’s house, during a hunting weekend”. “It wasn’t very fun, it didn’t make me particularly happy (…), but it made me feel different, and that was my main goal, to feel, to be different”, explains the prince. “I was a 17-year-old who wanted to try anything that would upset the established order. Anyway, that’s what I was trying to convince myself,” he concludes. Harry also reveals that his father would then have taken him to a rehab clinic to meet former drug addicts.
Meghan Markle’s husband also returns, in this new book, to his ten years in the British army, during which he was deployed twice in Afghanistan. Prince Harry was indeed deployed in the country for ten weeks, between 2007 and 2008, then from September 2012 to January 2013, this time as a helicopter pilot. He claims in his Memoirs that he killed 25 “enemy combatants” in Afghanistan. “We shoot when necessary, take a life to save a life,” he added. Information reported by The Daily Telegraph.