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In true Harry tell-all fashion, the Duke of Sussex has announced to the world that he is ready to reconcile with his family. In a rare, in-depth video interview with GQ – released yesterday – he says that while he wants to patch it up, “some people don’t want to work it out”, which his team have since had to deny is a dig at his brother Prince William.
Although the 42-minute intimate chat was recorded in September – it was unfortunately aired during a state visit as his father King Charles, Queen Camilla, William and the Princess of Wales, welcomed the Sultan of Oman to Windsor. Whether the timing was by design or coincidence is irrelevant; the end effect will have been the same – annoyance. Royals going about their official royal duties never like to be overshadowed in any way.
Wearing a laidback khaki unbuttoned shirt showing a black T-shirt, Harry was asked by GQ’s senior special projects editor Zach Baron if he has grieved his complicated relationship with William and Charles, when Harry lets out an endlessly long “errrrrrr” out loud, while trying to think of a way to phrase his thought – before saying “Yeah, yes of course”.
Then, when asked if he really wants to heal the rift with his brother and father, Harry replied: “Of course I do. With everything else that's going on in the world, the most important thing is to reconcile. That's the key point.”
He even gives a little pep talk on how to heal relationships when asked if he thinks he could repair the fissure between them. “Certainly, letting go of the past, that's something that I would encourage everybody to do.”
He continued: “If there are certain things from the past that are still affecting your everyday, that’s harder to let go of. But yeah, for me, there’s enough drama in the world and enough drama in people’s lives to continue with issues with family, you know?”
So far, so poignant, were it not from the mouth of a man who, together with his wife, has been the source of so much drama for a family who were once known for their ability to “never explain and never complain”.
As Harry also points out, family fallouts are a “massively relatable issue for so many people” – including me who has spectacularly fallen out with all my three half-siblings – and that these are both painful and regrettable. However, he is wrong in telling us that we are looking for them to lead by example. While he says, “People may look at us and think, how are you gonna work it out?”, he might have been better off reflecting how we all would do well not to take a leaf out of their book. In fact, Harry is doing the exact opposite of what many of us in the same situation should be doing.
Because while it might suit him to patch things up – the first lesson when it comes to family estrangement is to understand it’s not all about you.
Harry can’t expect to settle in the Cotswolds – and boom – everyone and everything around him slots back into place just because he wants it. While I am sure he has some valid gripes, he need to empathise with those he has hurt too. It is unrealistic to simply expect the whole family to forgive and forget. Healing cannot happen unless he properly considers the hurt and damage that he and Meghan have also caused.
Taking the moral high ground as the bigger and better person who is trying to patch things up, doesn’t pass muster without a positive plan of action in place. And this has to go far and beyond just shaking hands, making up and agreeing to let bygones be bygones.
Since going “no contact” with one side of my family, my children have no relationship with their cousins, just like Archie and Lilibet don’t have with William’s children Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis. As deeply painful as this is, I’m not trying to force a reconciliation – and in fact, I’m really relieved my half- siblings aren’t either. It’s unrealistic pretend that its all just water under the bridge – unless real change happens at a much more profound and honest level.
Harry’s interview will be adding to the already jangled nerves of a royal family trying to steady its feet after a tumultuous few years of grief and serious illness, not to mention the deeply personal accusations Harry has made against them.
Harry wrote in his autobiography Spare that William “knocked me to the floor” when he came over to “Nott Cott”, his house in the grounds of Kensington Palace. He spared no detail of how he landed on the dog’s bowl, which cracked under his back, with the pieces cutting into him, during the confrontation in 2019. Meghan has been equally unsparing in her tell-all interviews too, accusing the royal family of racism in her televised interview with Oprah Winfrey. The animosity between Meghan and Kate would also need healing – and whatever caused Kate or Meghan to cry on her wedding day, depending on who and what story you believe.
It’s not the first time Harry has called for a reconciliation – in 2023 ahead of the release of Spare, he told Tom Brady’s for ITV News at Ten: “They feel as though it’s better, somehow, to keep us as the villains… They’ve shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile… [But] I would like to get my father back, I would like to have my brother back.”
It is not insignificant that you could almost hear Bradby’s eyebrows hitting the newsroom studio as he announced the latest Harry claims. One in the inner circle of the royal brothers, Bradby will have been more than aware of events playing out behind the scenes.
Dr Becca Bland, a family counsellor – and expert on family estrangement – who offers coaching and mediation, tells me key things will need to happen first for a true reconciliation to ever work.
“It isn’t based on one person who thinks they want it, or it’s the right time for them,” she says. “You can’t change a family system without everybody wanting to change their behaviour – and talk about the problem.”
And some people just aren’t ready, she says: “The main reason for that is a lack of trust -and that others won’t be able to take full accountability and create a shared experience rather than defend their own narrative.”
For those like Harry who might need to listen a little more and talk a little less, she advises testing the water with a third party therapist mediator to approach other family members – “somebody neutral”. But she makes it clear that in order to “create a safe place where hurt and harm can be owned without shame”, it should not be a family friend or relative because it will be “biased”.
“It doesn’t need everybody to apologise either,” she continues. “False apologies make things worse – in future it will all fall apart if you’re not sure what you’re apologising for. For any lasting reconciliation, it needs real harm to be acknowledged.”
Family members being “defensive” is common, she tells me, adding that people who have pre-existing power dynamics with toxic behaviour such as jealousy, resentment and abuse, are not going to want to give them up easily because she says they will feel “disempowered”.
For any lasting reconciliation, it needs real harm to be acknowledged
Dr Becca Bland
In Harry and William’s case, she points out, the one thing that has bonded them over the years is what makes everything even more complex. “They share intense family trauma in the media spotlight, and that media bias favouring one over the other is an external factor that will have had a huge impact on their relationship,” says Dr Bland. “They could start the reconciliation process by accepting they’ve been under a huge amount of stress.”
Harry’s intentions might be pure, but his public plea for family reconciliation sounds tone deaf. Nobody can just magic themselves back to a happy clappy family because they miss them, or maybe regret taking things so far.
Harry has said his “attitude has changed” and it was now “slightly easier” to come back to the UK. But the crucial part of the jigsaw he is missing it: has anybody else’s attitude changed to him?
Harry once said, “As brothers, you know, you have good days, you have bad days.” Call it bad timing, but this interview with GQ will certainly have triggered all the other times Harry and Meghan have clunkily waded in to give their side of the story.
But as Dr Bland points out, while all relationships in families are complex, “biology makes family, but trust maintains it”. When the trust is broken, it takes a lot more than a few weeks in the Cotswolds to get that back. Yes, timing is everything, but sometimes just taking a bit more time to think things through quietly and properly, can be a whole more important.