The 38-year-old Duke of Sussex has opened up about his relationship with his stepmother, who married his dad King Charles III in 2005. Picture: Reuters
PRINCE Harry has branded Camilla, Queen Consort, a “villain” who “traded information” in a bid to rehabilitate her image.
The 38-year-old Duke of Sussex has opened up about his relationship with his stepmother – who married his dad, King Charles III in 2005 – in a new US TV interview to promote his memoir “Spare” in which he called Camilla “dangerous”.
During his chat with “60 Minutes” host Anderson Cooper, Harry said: “She was the villain. She was the third person in (Charles’s marriage to Diana, Princess of Wales)… She needed to rehabilitate her image.”
The host then asked Harry: “You wrote (in the book): ‘I even wanted Camilla to be happy. Maybe she’d be less dangerous if she was happy.’ How was she dangerous?”
Harry then replied: “Because of the need for her to rehabilitate her image… That made her dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press. And there was open willingness on both sides to trade information. And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her, on the way to being Queen Consort, there was gonna be people or bodies left in the street because of that.”
The royal then added: “If you are led to believe, as a member of the family, that being on the front page, having positive headlines, positive stories written about you is going to improve your reputation or increase the chances of you being accepted as monarch by the British public, then that’s what you’re gonna do.”
The duke also opened up about why he and his brother William, Prince of Wales, both asked their dad not to marry Camilla – insisting they thought it would “do more harm than good”.
He told Cooper: “We didn’t think it was necessary. We thought that it was gonna cause more harm than good and that if he was now with his person, that… surely that’s enough. Why go that far when you don’t necessarily need to? We wanted him to be happy. And we saw how happy he was with her. So, at the time, it was, okay.”