Prince Harry’s rift with his brother was sparked by William’s staff planting fears over his “mental health”, it has been sensationally claimed by a royal insider.
The campaign against Harry is alleged to have started after a 2019 interview where he said that the brothers “were on different paths”, the Duke of Sussex’s biographer Omid Scobie said.
In a new documentary on the breakdown of the brothers’ relationship, Scobie said that from then on Kensington Palace began to make claims against Harry.
In the 2019 interview with ITV’s Tom Bradby following the Sussexes tour of South Africa, Harry made the comment that he and William “were on different paths”. Meghan also claimed that she was “surviving not thriving” and not receiving support from the Royal Family.
The interview made headlines around the world and Scobie suggests that after that a campaign was started by William’s aides – although he doesn’t provide evidence to back his claim of briefings and tip-offs by staff over Harry’s mental state.
Scobie told a new ITV documentary: “I would say that it was no coincidence that it was shortly after that aired, even the next day, there were source quotes that came from a senior aide at Kensington Palace saying that William was worried about his brother’s mental health.
“That fed off such an ugly thing for Harry and it did not go unnoticed. Now whether William directed that or not, no one will ever know, but it came from the household he is the boss of. She’s a woman well into her 30s, I think she’s proven to herself and the people she’s worked with up until that point that she knows what she’s doing.
“She was certainly not someone who was going to change herself just to please the people around her. I felt they also had to be reminded ‘You’re not the stars of the show here. There is a hierarchy and you don’t come very high in it’.”
Also speaking in the documentary was royal author Robert Lacey, who feels that William was not happy about Meghan’s involvement in the Royal Family.
He said: “Someone close to William told me William felt from an early stage that Meghan had an agenda.”
