‘We bounced between the two of them... we never saw either enough’
THE devastating impact of Charles and Diana’s toxic marital breakdown on their sons was laid bare by Prince Harry in the interviews.
The boys longed to spend more time with both of their parents and were left feeling as if they were ‘bouncing between the two of them’, he admits in the ITV documentary.
Harry recalls: ‘There was the point where our parents split and… we never saw our mother enough or we never saw our father enough. There was a lot of travelling and a lot of fights on the back seat with my brother – which I would win. There was all that to contend with. And I– I don’t pretend we’re the only people to have to deal with that, but it was an interesting way of growing up.’
On screen, Harry laughs as he remembers the squabbles while in transit between their warring parents, but the story lays bare the emotional toll of the divorce.
The Prince and Princess of Wales separated in December 1992 after 11 years of marriage.
The relationship was riven with anger and bitterness, notably over the fact that, in 1986, Charles had resumed his love affair with Camilla Parker Bowles.
The separation announcement was made in the Commons by then Prime Minister John Major and Buckingham Palace. The couple would divide their households, with Diana at Kensington Palace and Prince Charles living between Highgrove and Clarence House. They were to share the parenting of William and Harry. But the day-to-day arrangements left the boys, then aged ten and eight, yearning to see more of their father and the mother they adored. Speaking about Diana, William tells the programme: ‘We felt incredibly loved, Harry and I.’
Harry adds: ‘It was a love that, even if she was on the other side of a room, you could feel.’
At the time of her fairytale 1981 wedding, Diana had seemed the perfect bride for the heir to the throne. But their honeymoon happiness proved short-lived when a picture of Camilla fell from the pages of Charles’s diary and then Diana found him wearing a pair of cufflinks with the initials C entwined. They were brought together by the birth of their sons in 1982 and 1984, but the Princess – lonely, isolated, and in the grip of an eating disorder – eventually sought solace with cavalry officer James Hewitt, surgeon Hasnat Khan and Harrods heir Dodi Al Fayed.
She secretly cooperated with author Andrew Morton on his seismic 1992 biography Diana: Her True Story, and then granted Martin Bashir the 1995 BBC Panorama interview in which she said: ‘There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.’
The marriage ended officially in August 1996, a year before Diana’s fatal car crash in Paris.
As adults, both Princes reflect on Diana’s innocence and youth when she embarked on a marriage that was to have such painful consequences. Harry says: ‘She was a normal 20year-old marrying into an institution, the British Royal Family.’
HARRY ON SIBLING RIVALRY I had a lot of fights on the back seat with William… and I won