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‘William’s always felt the need to keep an eye on his brother’
PRINCE HARRY took offence when his ‘snobby’ brother cautioned him not to rush into marrying Meghan Markle, the new Royal biography claims.
In the book Finding Freedom, authors Carolyn Durand and Omid Scobie repeat allegations that William questioned the speed at which his brother’s relationship with the American actress was moving.
According to the book, which is being serialised by The Times and The Sunday Times, a friend said the two brothers had spent their entire lives trying to avoid people taking advantage of them.
‘They’ve both developed a radar to detect that type of person, but as William didn’t know a whole lot about Meghan, he wanted to make sure Harry wasn’t blindsided by lust,’ the friend said.
The book claims that Harry took offence when William told him: ‘Take as much time as you need to get to know this girl.’
Harry is said to have considered the choice of the words ‘this girl’ to be condescending.
‘In those last two words, “this girl”, Harry heard the tone of snobbishness that was anathema to his approach to the world,’ claims the book. ‘During his ten-year career in the military, outside the Royal bubble, he had learnt not to make snap judgments about people based on their accent, education, ethnicity, class or profession.’
Harry, now 35, was elated after meeting Meghan, 38, on a blind date in London’s Soho House in the summer of 2016. A friend told the authors: ‘A happy and content Harry is rare, so to see him practically skipping around was a delight.
‘But at the same time William has always felt he needs to look out for Harry, not as a future Monarch but as an older brother. Their whole adult lives he’s felt he should keep an eye on Harry and make sure he’s not in trouble and on a good path.’
More cautious than his headstrong younger brother, William decided to sit Harry down for a chat in 2017 after meeting Meghan a handful of times.
‘William may have felt he was acting out of concern, but Harry was offended that his older brother still treated him as if he were immature,’ claims the book, which is sympathetic to the Sussexes.
‘Harry was p ***** off,’ another source said. ‘P ***** off that his brother would ask such a thing.’
Another friend added: ‘Harry could see through William’s words. He was being a snob.’
According to the book, Harry was ‘angry’ at the intervention, even if it was well-intentioned.
William didn’t really know Meghan and ‘was concerned that Harry had isolated himself from many of their old friends’.
Matters worsened, the authors say, when other senior Royals voiced concerns.
One of the older members of the family is said to have branded Meghan as ‘Harry’s showgirl’.
Another senior Royal is alleged to have told an aide: ‘She comes with a lot of baggage’, while a highranking courtier was reportedly overheard telling a colleague: ‘There is just something about her I don’t trust.’
Harry was ‘aware of the talk’ behind his back, a close friend of his told the authors. ‘He’s extremely protective of Meghan.
‘He understands that a lot of people are against them, and he will do everything he can to keep her safe and away from getting hurt – even if that means distancing himself from those people.’
In the months that followed the ‘this girl’ comment, the brothers hardly spoke, the book claims. Harry stopped visiting Prince George, now seven, and Princess Charlotte, five, and saw very little of Louis, who was born just before the Royal Wedding in April 2018.
Harry and Meghan invited the Cambridges to their Cotswolds country home, near Soho Farmhouse, but they never went, and while Kate sent Meghan flowers for her birthday, Meghan was upset that she didn’t ‘check in on her’, the book suggests. Finding Freedom adds that when she was first dating Harry, Meghan had expected Kate to ‘give her the lie of the land on everything an outsider to The Firm needed to know. But that was not how things turned out’.
Kate’s perspective was, apparently, that she didn’t think she and Meghan had much in common ‘other than the fact that they lived at Kensington Palace’. The book claims once the Sussexes moved to Frogmore Cottage on the Queen’s Windsor estate, that last link dissolved.