Prince Harry talks future king William, Queen Consort Camilla, and grief over Princess Diana on 60 Minutes

On Tuesday, Great Britain’s Prince Harry will release his new memoir Spare, which promises to be a very unsparing look at the British royal institution known as “The Firm.” To promote the book, Prince Harry sat for multiple interviews, including a lengthy conversation with Anderson Cooper for CBS’ 60 Minutes. During the interview, he speaks about his fractured relationship with his brother, his “dangerous” stepmother Camilla, and how his grief over losing his mother impacted his life.

The Duke of Sussex is not particularly generous in his description of the future king in his book, but he tells Cooper that his words weren’t “intended to hurt” Prince William, but rather to “give a full picture of the situation as we were growing up” and “[squash] this idea that somehow my wife was the one that destroyed the relationship between these two brothers.” As to the former, he clarifies that the brothers lived very “separate lives” after their mother died.

For Harry, that formative event sent him on a path that included illegal drug use and joining the military. While his time in the service was the first time he felt “normal,” he also “didn’t have the awareness at the time that I was living my life in adrenaline, and that was the case from age 12, from the moment that I was told that my mom had died.”

For many years, he tells Cooper, he couldn’t believe that Princess Diana was actually dead, and both he and William speculated that the tragic car accident might be “all part of a plan” to escape the public eye. Even when they reached adulthood and were able to accept her passing, the brothers considered reopening the inquest into the accident: “Because there were so many gaps and so many holes in it. Which just didn’t add up and didn’t make sense.”

Prince Harry speaks of “a huge amount of frustration and blame towards the British press for their part” in Diana’s death, but his acrimonious relationship to the tabloids extends beyond their treatment of his mother. He calls his stepmother, Queen Consort Camilla, “dangerous” for her need to rehabilitate her image—as the “other woman” in King Charles’ marriage to Diana—which necessitated her developing a relationship with the press. (Harry says both he and Prince William asked their father not to marry his mistress.) In his book, he writes that Camilla “sacrificed me on her personal P.R. altar.”

He also attributes blame for the ongoing dissolution of his relationship with William to the press’ vicious treatment of Harry’s wife, Meghan Markle. The U.K. tabloids emphasized belittling stereotypes about Markle, that “she was American, an actress, divorced, Black, biracial with a Black mother,” her husband says. Harry claims that his whole family reads the tabloids every day, and at the time of the reported physical altercation between the brothers, William “was consuming a lot of the tabloid press, a lot of the stories. And he had a few issues, which were based not on reality.”

“[A] large part of it for the family, but also the British press and numerous other people is, like, ‘He’s changed. She must be a witch. He’s changed,’” Harry explains. “As opposed to yeah, I did change, and I’m really glad I changed. Because rather than getting drunk, falling out of clubs, taking drugs, I had now found the love of my life, and I now had the opportunity to start a family with her.”

Choosing to leave the U.K. to prevent “history repeating itself”—regarding his mother and now his wife—further alienated Harry from his family. The rift became so intense that Prince William and wife Kate Middleton excluded Harry from plans to see their grandmother Queen Elizabeth on her deathbed. Prince Harry says he has not spoken to his brother nor his father, King Charles, in “a while.” Of their refusal to condemn the press for its racist treatment of Meghan he states that “there comes a point when silence is betrayal.” Further, he claims his family encouraged that treatment: “This all started with them briefing, daily, against my wife with lies to the point of where my wife and I had to run away from… my country.”

“So now, trying to speak a language that perhaps they understand, I will sit here and speak truth to you with the words that come out of my mouth,” Harry says, “rather than using someone else, an unnamed source, to feed in lies or a narrative to a tabloid media that literally radicalizes its readers to then potentially cause harm to my family, my wife, my kids.”