FEMAIL takes a look at which royals come out best in Prince Harry’s memoir

Prince Harry’s bombshell memoir unleashed jaw-dropping attacks on his family – recalling in excruciating detail dozens of family rows and intimate conversations.

In almost every chapter of the Duke of Sussex’s book, Spare, which was released worldwide on Tuesday, attacks were fired.

He said his brother, Prince William, who he dubbed his ‘arch-nemesis’, assaulted him in a row over Meghan and accused Camilla, now the Queen Consort, of leaking stories about him through a palace spin doctor.

Elsewhere, while Charles is spared more pain than many had expected, Harry still paints him as an emotionally-distant father who wasn’t even able to hug him when telling him of his mother Princess Diana’s death in a car crash. 

 Here, FEMAIL reveals which royals come out best and worst in Prince Harry’s memoir…

QUEEN CONSORT CAMILLA

Camilla, the Queen Consort – who eventually married their father, King Charles III – takes a lot of heat in the Duke’s latest memoir, including claims that he and William both ‘begged’ their father not to marry his long-term paramour, fearing she would be their ‘wicked stepmother’.

He writes: ‘I remember wondering… if she would be cruel to me; if she would be like all the wicked stepmothers in the stories’. 

He recalls meeting Camilla for the first time, saying she appeared ‘bored’ and ‘neither of them was much fretted about the other’s opinion.’

He goes on to say: ‘Camilla had played a pivotal role in the unraveling of our parents’ marriage, and yes, that meant she’d played a role in our mother’s disappearance.’ 

The Duke of Sussex claims that he and his brother didn’t want to stand in the way of their father’s relationship with the ‘other woman’, but that they didn’t see the need for the couple to get married. 

Charles, eager of his partner to bond with his sons, arranged for both William and Harry to spend time with her separately to win them over before asking the public to accept Camilla. 

In an extraordinary passage in his explosive autobiography, titled Spare, the Duke of Sussex writes: ‘Shortly after our private meetings with her, she began to develop her long-term strategy, a campaign directed at marriage and with time, the Crown (with the blessing of our father, we supposed).

‘News stories started appearing in all the newspapers about her conversations with Willy, stories which recounted lots of small details, none of which came from my brother, of course.’

He later details how Camilla turned his bedroom at Clarence House into a dressing room after he moved out.  

In a follow-up interview with Anderson Cooper, he said she was ‘dangerous’ because of the connections that she was forging within the British press. 

‘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 going to be people or bodies left in the street because of that,’ he said.  

The duke also wrote in his memoir that Camilla ‘sacrificed me on her personal PR altar’, and accused her of scheming to wed the now King and become Queen Consort. 

However, Harry later says that ultimately he and William approved of Camilla because she made their father happy. 

Elsewhere, he describes that he hasn’t spoken to his step-mother in a long time, but they are ‘pleasant’ to each other when they see each other at family events. 

Asked about what his relationship with Camilla is like now in an interview with GMA, Harry said: ‘We haven’t spoken for a long time. I love every member of my family, despite the differences, so when I see her we’re perfectly pleasant with each other.

‘She’s my stepmother. I don’t look at her as an evil stepmother. I see someone who married into this institution and has done everything that she can to improve her own reputation and her own image for her own sake.’

PRINCE WILLIAM

William – now the Prince of Wales – has been branded as Harry’s ‘arch-nemesis’ in the Duke’s tell-all memoir. 

He accuses William, 40, of being immersed in his position as future heir to the throne, claims he ignored him when they were pupils at Eton College, and says he repeatedly put him in his place. 

While it was long rumoured tensions between the brothers began when Harry married Meghan in 2018, the book affirms that the rift started long before then.

He said Prince William told him to pretend they didn’t know each other at Eton, and despised being dressed the same as Harry. 

Their distance continued into their adult life – when Harry felt William was lying about him being a ‘slob’ and ‘snoring’ while they lived together. 

Later, Harry writes he feared William would abandon him following his marriage with Kate. 

Meanwhile he claims he was forced to go along with his brother’s ‘bare-faced lie’ that he was the best man at his wedding in 2011.

The Duke revealed his rift with his older sibling meant ‘Willy didn’t want me giving a best man’s speech’, according to his bombshell memoir, Spare.

In an extraordinarily personal revelation, Harry claims he was made to act out the role of best man to spare the blushes of Prince William’s two closest friends.

Meanwhile he also claims the two squabbled over various issues, including Harry’s work in Africa, Harry’s ability to keep his beard for his wedding, as well as his decision to launch the Invictus Games. 

Harry writes that William felt he would be using up all of the royal foundation funds on the project, but Harry felt he was ‘just being competitive.’ 

Meanwhile he also blames Prince William and Kate for his notorious appearance at a costume party wearing a Nazi uniform in 2005.

The Duke of Sussex says in his new memoir they both thought it was funny.

Harry claims he was considering either the Nazi uniform or a pilot’s outfit to a ‘Native and Colonial’ themed event and called his brother and sister-in-law for their opinion.

He writes: ”I phoned Willy and Kate, asked what they thought. Nazi uniform, they said.

In other claims, the Prince tells how William was meeting people who had assembled on the Mall by Buckingham Palace while ‘tipsy on last night’s rum’ just hours before his wedding to Kate.

Harry recalls he said to him: ‘You smell of alcohol’, before he offered him mints as he lowered the windows of the car, describing the smell of ‘the aftermath of last night’s rum’ on his ‘tipsy’ brother’s breath.

Harry also claimed that William ‘recoiled’ from Meghan’s hug during their awkward first meeting, describing the moment he introduced his brother to his girlfriend as a ‘classic collision of cultures’.

The meeting took place in late 2016 at the Prince and Princess of Wales’s Kensington Palace apartment, shortly before Prince Harry and Prince William went on a shooting trip.

The Duke explains how Meghan had already met Princess Eugenie, her then-boyfriend Jack Brooksbank, the Duchess of York, Prince Andrew and the Queen.

Describing the short walk from Harry and Meghan’s home Nottingham Cottage to Apartment 1A, the duke admitted that he was more nervous for his girlfriend to meet William than anyone else.

When his brother answered the door, Harry says William was a ‘bit dressed up’ in smart trousers and a shirt.

He wrote: ‘I introduced Meg, who leaned in and gave him a hug, which completely freaked him out. He recoiled.’

Giving some context to the awkward encounter, Prince Harry said his brother wouldn’t usually hug someone he didn’t know.

Harry added that his brother William ‘raised some concerns’ about his marriage to Meghan before their wedding in May 2018.

He said: ‘He never tried to dissuade me from marrying Meghan, but he aired some concerns very early, and said ‘this is going to be really hard for you’ and I still to this day don’t truly understand which part of what he was talking about. Maybe he predicted what the British Press’s reaction was going to be.’

Elsewhere, he writes how Willy put his finger into Meghan’s face during an awkward confrontation with Kate. 

Harry has also alleged that there was a fight between him and the Prince of Wales after his brother called Meghan Markle ‘difficult’, ‘rude’ and ‘abrasive’.

His bombshell book claims the row in Nottingham Cottage – his Kensington Palace flat – ended with William grabbing him by the collar and throwing him to the floor, shattering a dog bowl. His back was scraped and bruised, he said.

Harry has talked openly of wanting to reconcile with his father and his sibling, despite his extraordinary claims plunging the Royal Family into its worst crisis since the death of his mother in 1997. 

But his explosive claims have been backed by his bombshell TV interviews, in which he goes on to slate his brother.

In his ITV interview, the duke said his brother was so frustrated during the ‘Nott Cott’ incident which reportedly took place in 2019, he saw ‘red mist in him’.

‘He wanted me to hit him back, but I chose not to,’ he said of his brother. Harry said to his friend Mr Bradby: ‘What was different here was the level of frustration, and I talk about the red mist that I had for so many years, and I saw this red mist in him.’

PRINCESS OF WALES

While Harry clearly appeared fond of his sister-in-law in parts of the book, other passages in Spare portray the Princess of Wales as overly stoic.

He says: ‘I liked seeing Kate laugh. Better yet, I liked making her laugh. And I was quite good at it. My transparently silly side connected with her heavily disguised silly side. 

‘Whenever I worried that Kate was going to be the one to take Willy from me, I consoled myself with thoughts of all our future laughing fits together, and I told myself how great everything would be when I had a serious girlfriend who could laugh along with us.’

Elsewhere, he says he ‘loved’ her, felt she was a ‘sister’ rather than a sister-in-law’, and a good match for his brother.

However there are more critical moments which present a harder view of Kate.

He appears to place blame for the Nazi costume incident at Kate’s tour. saying he did it in part to make her laugh.

Elsewhere, he writes about her distant from Meghan, comparing the two women – writing about how Kate was formal and didn’t like hugging, while Meghan was ‘barefoot’ and open.

He details tension between Meghan and Kate, saying how the Princess grimaced after the Duchess borrowed her lip gloss before an event.  

He also goes into extraordinary detail about the bridesmaid dress argument, apparently sharing texts written between the two women. 

Directly referencing his niece – a breach of privacy that is sure to anger his brother William – Harry insists the incident was driven by his sister-in-law Kate, who appeared irritated that it had taken Meghan a day to get back to her about the problem.

The disagreement between the two women was, he claims, further exacerbated by Kate’s unwillingness to visit Meghan’s tailor at Kensington Palace and suggestions that they hold a party for the page boys when his bride-to-be was busy dealing with a row with her father, Thomas Markle.

Opening his latest salvo, the prince writes that Meghan received a text from Kate four days before their wedding saying there was a problem with the dresses for the bridesmaids and they needed altering.

He described arriving at their Kensington Palace flat and said that Meghan’s mouth was open because of the décor, priceless art on the walls, books and furniture, saying ‘wow’ repeatedly.

Harry said that they had been thinking to themselves that their neighbouring flat had Ikea lamps and furniture ‘we’d recently bought on sale with Meg’s credit card on sofa.com’.

They then sat down for a cup of tea and some biscuits where they asked after the Wales’ children, and they had been asked about their honeymoon.

But after that Meghan decided to raise the question of their relationship and tensions going back to when she started dating Harry.

She suggested there had been crossed wires when Kate thought Meghan wanted to use her connections in the fashion industry – but in fact she already had her own.

Meghan suggested that these problems had been magnified by the wedding preparations and the discussions over bridesmaids dresses.

Harry wrote that there were further issues – including William and Kate feeling disgruntled they hadn’t received a gift for Easter.

Harry then claims that Kate became so upset that her fingers gripping the side of the chair turned white.

He claims she demanded an apology from Meghan for offending her when she mentioned her hormones after giving birth and suggesting it had affected her memory.

Meghan initially said she couldn’t remember but then added she could remember what the disagreement was about.

Harry claimed Meghan said Kate had forgotten something, and she had told her it didn’t matter because it was probably because of the hormones.

Harry said Kate then said the two were not close enough for Meghan to talk about her hormones.

Meghan then said she spoke to all her friends that way.

William then called Meghan ‘rude’ to her face and ‘pointed a finger at her’ and explained: ‘These things are not done here’.

In an excerpt, which lays bare the rift between the Sussexes and the Waleses, Meghan then told William: ‘If you don’t mind, keep your finger out of my face’.

Defending his wife, Harry wrote: ‘Meg said that she had never intentionally done anything to offend Kate and that if she had, she begged her to let her know so she could avoid a reoccurrence’.

The Duchess of Sussex is then said to have declared that she had not wanted to offend Kate.

They all hugged and left, Harry said, because they thought it best to head home rather than row further.

Meanwhile he also recounts another awkward moment, which saw the family celebrating Trooping the Colour.

He said the mood was lively before Kate asked Meghan what she thought of the first parade of regimental colours, to which Meghan quipped ‘colourful’.

Harry calls the silence which followed ‘deathly’ and said it ‘threatened to engulf us all.’  

Harry also used an incendiary interview with ITV journalist, and old friend, Tom Bradby to accuse Kate of ‘stereotyping’ Meghan because she was an American actress and is divorced and biracial, saying it prevented them from ‘welcoming her in’.

Asked what he meant, the duke said: ‘Well, American actress, divorced, biracial, there’s – there’s all different parts to that and what that can mean but if you are, like a lot of my family do, if you are reading the Press, the British tabloids, at the same time as living the life, then there is a tendency where you could actually end up living in the tabloid bubble rather than the actual reality.’ 

Commenting on Prince Harry’s latest television interview and memoir, the Daily Mail’s Diary Editor Richard Eden said the royal appeared ‘determined to change views’ of his sister-in-law and ‘trash her reputation’.

The expert said: ‘What came across was Harry’s desire to change the image that we have of Catherine. We have this image of her being very poised, elegant, calm.

‘But no no, he was saying she was so angry that she was gripping the edge of the furniture so hard that her knuckles were going white.’

KING CHARLES III

Spare appeared to reveal a lot of mixed feelings which Harry holds for his father, King Charles III.

While Charles is spared more pain than many had expected, Harry paints him as an ineffectual father who wasn’t even able to hug him when telling him of his mother’s death in a car crash. 

The Duke revealed the moment he found out about the car crash in Paris in August 1997 for the first time, and also said he and William each have a lock of their mother’s hair.

Harry writes about how the King sat him down on the bed to break the news of the car accident, calling him ‘my dear son’ as he told how Diana had sustained head injuries that didn’t look likely to improve.

Although Harry says some aspects of his memory may not be entirely accurate, there are things he remembers ‘clear as day’ all these years on.

While he claims his father did not cry while breaking the news, he said the king put his hand on Harry’s knee and claimed everything would be ok.

After his father left, he recalls sitting by himself while his brother William, whom he affectionately calls ‘Willy’, sat in a separate room.

Harry claims his memory has undergone ‘decades of effort to reconstruct that morning’, but after all this time he has come to an ‘inescapable conclusion’ – that he stayed alone in the room until 9am the following morning when the piper began to play outside.

He says that when he confided in Charles about suffering panic attacks as a grown man, the prince looked at his plate sadly and said he had failed him.

However, in what are sure to be distressing passages for the King, Harry describes how when he returned to the UK to attend Prince Philip’s funeral in 2021, a clearly distressed Charles wailed at his warring sons not to make his ‘final years a misery’. 

PRINCE ANDREW

Elsewhere in the biography, Prince Harry became the first royal to make public comment about Prince Andrew’s sex abuse scandal.

He actually writes about the Duke of York on a number of occasions in the tome. 

He  recalled the moment when Meghan Markle met his grandmother Queen Elizabeth II for the first time and mistook Prince Andrew for her assistant.

He wrote: ‘After a moment Meg asked me something about the Queen’s assistant. I asked who she was talking about.

”That man holding the purse. That man who walked her to the door. That wasn’t her assistant? Who was it?”

Harry quickly prompted her that it was in fact his uncle and told Meghan: ‘That was her second son. Andrew.’

He wrote: ‘She definitely hadn’t googled us.’

Elsewhere, he labelled the Jeffrey Epstein affair ‘a shameful scandal’.

No one in ‘The Firm’ had spoken about allegations that the Duke of York twice sexually assaulted Virginia Guiffre, who claimed she was trafficked by the late disgraced financier Epstein.

Andrew settled her lawsuit last year, accepting no liability, and has always denied any wrongdoing. But Prince Harry brings up the affair in his book Spare.

When his wife Meghan asks if the Royal Family might cut their security after they quit Britain for North America, he says there is ‘no way’, considering his uncle still gets protection.

Harry told her there was an ‘obligation’ and an ‘implicit promise’ to protect them.

Pushed by Meghan if it would ever be removed, he said: ‘Never.

Not in this climate of hate. And not after what happened to my mother.’

The Duke of Sussex adds: ‘Also, not in the wake of my Uncle Andrew. Despite being embroiled in a shameful scandal, accused of sexually assaulting a young girl, no one had even suggested removing his security. People have had plenty of reasons to complain about us, sex crimes weren’t one of them.’

Prince Andrew has always denied the accusation.

However, once the couple stopped being working royals and moved to the US, they were no longer entitled to the security provided to the Royal Family.

QUEEN ELIZABETH II

Harry touched on the special bond he has with his grandmother in the explosive memoir. 

He revealed how his wife Meghan ‘bonded’ with the late Queen by telling her how much she wanted to be a mother.

The sweet moment happened during Meghan’s first joint engagement with the late monarch, which saw them travel to Cheshire on June 14 2018.

The Duchess of Sussex came home and told Harry that she and the Queen had strengthened their bond thanks to their love of dogs, and that she had told the monarch she wanted to be a mother.

Harry recounts that his grandmother told Meghan that the best way to induce labour was a ‘bumpy car ride’.

Writing about Meghan’s first engagement with the Queen, Harry says that his wife was ‘glowing’ when she returned from the trip and told him: ‘We bonded.

‘We talked about how much I wanted to be a mum and she told me the best way to induce labour was a good bumpy ride! I told her I’d remember that when the time came.’

Prince Harry also revealed his emotional final words to his beloved grandmother the Queen at Balmoral just hours after she passed away.

In his autobiography, the Duke of Sussex describes how he whispered to her that he ‘hoped she was happy’ and would be reunited with Prince Philip, who died a year earlier. He also told her that he admired her for having carried out her duties until the end.

Harry scrambled to Scotland to see the Queen – Britain’s longest reigning monarch – on September 8 last year after Buckingham Palace announced that she was gravely ill. However, he failed to reach the estate before she passed away aged 96.

He writes: ‘I advanced with uncertainty and saw her. I stayed still, watching her carefully for a good while.

‘I whispered that I hoped she was happy and that she was with Grandfather now. I said that I admired her for having carried out her duties until the end. The [Platinum] Jubilee, the welcoming of the new Prime Minister’.

In press interviews, he has described his love for her fierce wit, saying she was ‘sad’ about Megxit – but not angry or upset with him.

GMA anchor Michael Strahan asked if Her Majesty, who died in September aged 96, was ‘upset at you’ for walking away from royal duties with his American wife Meghan Markle in early 2020.

‘For what?’, Harry replied, adding that his grandmother was ‘sad’ about what happened.

‘I had many, many conversations with her both in the UK over the years and in the run-up to the point of this change, so it was never a surprise to anybody, least of all her’, he said.

But hinting she was sidelined, he said: ‘She knew what was going on. She knew how hard it was. I don’t know whether she was in a position to be able to change it.’ Harry also admitted that as his book comes out the divide between him and his family ‘couldn’t be greater’. 

THE QUEEN MOTHER

Spare sees the Duke detailing – in painstaking detail – the call he received while at Eton, telling him his great grandmother had died on March 30, 2002.

He writes: ‘At Eton, while studying, I took the call. I wish I could remember whose voice was at the other end; a courtier’s I believe. I recall that it was just before Easter, the weather bright and warm, light slanting through my window, filled with vivid colours.’

However, the reliability of Prince Harry’s memoir has been called into question after it emerged ‘facts’ about how he learned about the death of the Queen Mother cannot be accurate. 

Resurfaced photographs appear to place the prince in Klosters, Switzerland, the weekend the Queen Mother died – not Eton.

Harry posed alongside his brother William and father Charles in a media call on March 29, having recently shrugged off a bout of glandular fever in time to hit the slopes.

It was his first public appearance after admitting to smoking cannabis and drinking underage, BBC reported at the time.

Prince Harry reportedly told the gathered crowd he was on doctors orders to ‘take it easy’ on the slopes, and appeared jovial by all accounts. 

The trio leaned against a rock, laughed with one another and even put their arms around each other in the pictures. 

Three friends from Eton were said to have accompanied the boys on the trip.

Royal commentator Richard Fitzwilliams told MailOnline: ‘It seems from the evidence, that he was undoubtedly in Klosters at when the Queen Mother died.’

‘This portrait of being at Eton, ”the weather bright and warm, light slanting… vivid colours” is therefore inaccurate.’

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