Prince Harry Says Private Conversations With Royal Family Have Been Leaked

Prince Harry is putting the British royal family on blast, claiming that he’s been forced to make his private concerns with his family public to combat “leakings and planting of stories” about him and his wife, Meghan Markle. The Duke of Sussex made the leak allegations in a preview of Sunday’s 60 Minutes interview ahead of the release of his new memoir, Spare, next week. 

“Every single time I’ve tried to do it privately there have been briefings and leakings and planting of stories against me and my wife,” Harry tells Anderson Cooper in a CBS preview of the interview set to air Jan. 8, on 60 Minutes. “You know, the family motto is never complain, never explain, but it’s just a motto.”

“There’s a lot of complaining and a lot of explaining… being done through leaks.” Cooper says to Harry, who answers, “They will feed or have a conversation with the correspondent. And that correspondent will literally be spoon-fed information and write the story. And at the bottom of it they will say that they’ve reached out to Buckingham Palace for comment. But the whole story is Buckingham Palace commenting.”

“So when we’re being told for the last six years, ‘We can’t put a statement out to protect you.’ But you do it for other members of the family, it becomes – there becomes a point when silence is betrayal,” Harry adds. In a preview clip of Sunday’s interview released Monday, Harry adds that the royal family has “shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile” with him and Markle amid their rift, despite his own desire to. “I would like to get my father back. I would like to have my brother back,” he says.

Harry’s interview on 60 Minutes comes on the heels of his and Markle’s Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan, which didn’t hold back when it came to the splintered relationships within the royal family. “It became very clear very quickly that that goal was not up for discussion or debate,” said Harry of a crisis meeting in which he addressed his desire to step back from his royal duties. “It was terrifying to have my brother scream and shout at me, and my father say things that simply weren’t true and my grandmother quietly sit there and sort of take it all in.” 

He continued, “But you have to understand that from the family’s perspective, especially from [Queen Elizabeth’s], there are ways of doing things and her ultimate sort of mission goal or responsibility is the institution. People around her telling her, ‘By the way, that proposal or these two doing ‘xyz’ is going to be seen as an attack on the institution,’ then she’s going to on the advice that she’s given. That was really hard.”