In the trailer for his interview with Anderson Cooper on CBS’s 60 Minutes Prince Harry makes an expansive, circular movement with his hands as if to say: “This is the full picture.”
After the Oprah interview and the Netflix six-parter some may wonder how much he has left to say to complete his story. But in the course of a whole memoir, Spare, there will presumably be a great deal of detail about the tensions and unravelling of bonds and alliances that led to the Windsor civil war. The interviews with Cooper and ITV’s Tom Bradby, to be broadcast on Sunday, will offer a first proper look at his book, and trailers for the interviews provide glimpses of what he has to say.
“It never needed to be this way,” Harry tells Bradby. Historians spend entire careers trying to untangle the origins of vicious civil wars, but rarely do they conclude that one side is entirely blameless. Harry, however, appears to be taking the rather bold position that none of this can be pinned on him or his wife.
He would like to get his father and brother back, he says, but insists “they’ve shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile”. Indeed, “they” feel it is “better to keep us somehow as the villains”.
We’ve reached that stage in the conflict where the guy who has launched a massive campaign of carpet bombing claims he is doing so only out of self-defence, and that this is all the fault of the other side’s intelligence agencies engaging in dirty tricks to bring down their regime.
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Once again Harry, who wants “a family, not an institution”, blames dirty ops by Buckingham Palace: leaks and briefings against the Sussexes to the media. That, he tells Cooper, justified the way he and Meghan have responded. An ITN report says that the Bradby interview appears to be the first time he has subjected himself to robust questioning. Perhaps he will be interrogated on why his retaliation in the media battle was to go nuclear, detonating an Oprah bomb then unleashing the first cluster of missiles from a reported $100 million Netflix armoury.
Returning to a theme he has outlined before, Harry complains that the Palace defended other members of the family but did not put out statements denying stories about him and his wife. There comes a point, he says, “when silence is betrayal”. Stand by for a lot more noise.
