William and Harry reunite to dedicate Diana memorial
Bonded by childhood grief, sundered by adult quarrels, Prince William and Prince Harry united briefly yesterday to dedicate a statue of their mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, on what would have been her 60th birthday.
For a few fleeting minutes in the Sunken Garden at Kensington Palace, the two brothers set aside a season of acrimony — the anguished charges, and angry denials, of racism and callous treatment — to pay tribute to a woman whose sudden death 24 years ago ended her own turbulent history in the royal family.
Gently pulling two green cords, they unveiled a bronze statue that depicted Diana with children gathered in her outstretched arms. The memorial, they said, was to honour “her love, strength and character.”
“Every day, we wish she were still with us,” the brothers said in a rare joint statement. But this was no cathartic reconciliation: William and Harry, by all accounts, are still barely on speaking terms.
The elder brother, William, royal watchers say, is still deeply aggrieved at his younger brother for a series of interviews in which Harry and his wife, Meghan, described royal life as a kind of gilded prison and said family members held retrograde views on mental health and racial issues.
“It’s going to take a lot for this rift to be healed,” said Penny Junor, the author of several books about the royal family. “The initiative has to come from Harry, and it doesn’t seem to me that he is in any mood to do so.”
While the brothers laboured to present a united front, smiling occasionally, they kept a palpable distance from each other as they gazed at the statue. A handful of Diana’s family members watched from across the redesigned garden, planted with forget-me-nots, sweet peas, tulips, roses and other flowers she loved.
The Sunken Garden, below the flat where she lived, was a refuge for Diana, say Buckingham Palace officials. She often played there with her sons, who later had their own quarters in Kensington Palace, before Harry abruptly announced in 2020 that he and Meghan, a biracial American former actress, would withdraw from official duties and leave Britain.
The couple settled in California, where Meghan recently gave birth to their second child, Lilibet Diana, whose name pays tribute to Harry’s mother and to his grandmother, the Queen (her childhood nickname was Lilibet). Meghan did not fly to London for the unveiling, and Harry was not scheduled to stay around long.
The Princes were last reunited in April at the funeral of the Queen’s husband, Prince Philip, walking behind their grandfather’s coffin much as they had walked together as boys behind their mother’s funeral cortege. This time, one of their cousins walked conspicuously between them.
The brothers managed to stay on the same page in excoriating the BBC last month after it published the results of an internal investigation into a sensational 1995 interview given by Diana to journalist Martin Bashir.
It concluded that Bashir had used deceitful means to obtain the interview, in which Diana spoke about the adultery that destroyed her marriage to Prince Charles.
The social distancing restrictions imposed by the pandemic kept the statue ceremony exclusive and private, which royal watchers said was a blessing because it reduced scrutiny of William and Harry. Neither the Queen, Charles nor William’s wife, Kate, took part. But Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, and her two sisters, Sarah McCorquodale and Jane Fellowes, were on hand.
A small crowd gathered near Kensington Palace, some with balloons and posters wishing Diana a happy 60th birthday. But the ceremony was hidden behind a tall hedge. The garden will be open to the public.
The statue was designed by sculptor Ian Rank-Broadley, whose likeness of the Queen has been stamped on coins in Britain since 1998.
The Sunken Garden, conceived by King Edward VII in 1908, was remodelled for the occasion by Pip Morrison, a landscape architect who specialises in historic gardens.