Prince Harry Says That Camilla Planted Positive Stories In The Press To “Rehabilitate Her Image” As The “Villain”
In case you couldn’t tell by the 12,384,965,999 headlines about Prince Harry’s tell-all (and that’s a low ass estimate), Prince Harry has a tell-all, Spare, out this week. Penguin Random House reportedly paid Harry $20 million for his memoir, and sources claim it needs to sell at least 1.7 million copies to break even. So Harry is out there hustling like the mortgage on Chateau de Bottom-Joined Palm Trees was due last week. His interviews with 60 Minutes and ITV aired yesterday, his talk with Good Morning America came out today, and he’s on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert tomorrow night. All that peddling may be paying off because Spare is currently #1 on Amazon’s best-selling books list, even though it feels like every word of that book has already leaked. What else is there to read? Well, apparently, there’s more, including Harry accusing his stepmother Queen Consort Camilla of being a throne-climbing opportunist who’d stop at nothing to get her diabolical paws on the crown. Breaking news, I know.
We already heard that Prince Harry and his sad MMA fighter brother Prince William (aka Harold & Willy) begged their daddy, King Charles, not to make an honest tampon out of himself by marrying Camilla. During Harry’s talk with Tom Bradby for ITV, he spilled more thoughts about his stepmother, saying that, like other members of the Royal Family, Camilla passed stories to the press to push her image into a more positive place. Harry says that since the public hated Camilla for being Charles’ side piece and helping to make Princess Diana miserable, she was the “villain.” And Camilla wanted to be Queen but not an Evil Queen. So to change that narrative, she used the press and didn’t give a morsel of a fuck about who she had to step on to get to the top. When Charles and Camilla went public with their love, Harry says that he and his brother had private meetings with her to try to get to know her. Suddenly, those private meetings weren’t so private, and Harry says that she leaked that shit to the press and that her secretary is the one who took the fall. via Harper’s Bazaar:
“Shortly after our private summits with her, she began to play the long game,” Harry says, per an audiobook reading of the memoir aired in the ITV interview. “A campaign aimed at marriage and eventually the crown, with Pa’s blessing, we presumed. Stories began to appear everywhere in all the papers about her private conversation with Willie. Stories that contained pinpoint accurate details, none of which had come from Willie, of course. They could only have been leaked by the one other person present.”
At the time of the leak, Camilla’s office said that her private secretary was responsible; the senior aide later resigned. Harry instead claims that his stepmother was complicit in leaking stories.
When Bradby asks the royal about his “consistently scathing” comments about Camilla in the book, Harry responds that “no part of any of the things that I’ve said are scathing towards any member of my family, especially not my stepmother.”
Harry got into it more with Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes, saying that he wanted Camilla to be happy because “maybe she’d be less dangerous if she was happy.” via The Daily Beast:
“She was the villain. She was the third person in their marriage. She needed to rehabilitate her image,” Harry told Cooper of Camilla’s position after Diana had died.
Asked by Cooper how Camilla was dangerous, Harry replied, “Because of the need for her to rehabilitate her image,” which made her dangerous “because of the connections that she was forging within the British press. And there was open willingness on both sides to trade of information. And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her, on the way to being Queen Consort, there was gonna be people or bodies left in the street because of that…
“If you are led to believe, as a member of the family, that being on the front page, having positive headlines, positive stories written about you, is going to improve your reputation or increase the chances of you being accepted as monarch by the British public, then that’s what you’re gonna do.”
Camilla’s name, along with Charles’, popped up as a main suspect in the case of the royal racist who asked how dark Archie’s skin would be when he was still in Meghan Markle’s womb. Harry still won’t say who held up paint swatches and asked, “Okay, is his skin color going to be more like or like that,” (he’s gotta save something for Spare‘s sequel Sparer), but Tom Bradby did bring up that moment during their ITV interview, and things took a turn. Tom began with, “In the Oprah interview, you accused members of your family of racism-” and Harry stopped him with a head nod of NO. Harry went on to say that he and Meghan aren’t the ones who stamped RACIST on that moment; it was the British press. Harry doesn’t believe that question was racist and explained why. via HuffPo:
“No, I didn’t. The British press said that,” Harry said. “Did Meghan ever mention that they’re racist?”
Bradby mentioned Meghan’s revelation that “there were troubling comments about Archie’s skin color.”
“There was concern about his skin color,” Harry replied.
“Right. Wouldn’t you describe that as essentially racist?” Bradby followed up.
“I wouldn’t,” Harry said. “Not having lived within that family.”
“The difference between racism and unconscious bias, the two things are different,” he continued. “But once it’s been acknowledged, or pointed out to you as an individual, or as an institution, that you have unconscious bias, you therefore have an opportunity to learn and grow from that in order so that you are part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Otherwise, unconscious bias then moves into the category of racism.”
Here’s Harry throwing Tom off:
Prince Harry said his family aren’t racist and the conversation about Archie’s skin colour wasn’t racism.
He said during the Oprah interview, they never accused the Royal Family of it… the British press did…
Tom Bradby looks as baffled as we all feel 😂#HarryTheInterview pic.twitter.com/Hd0MgV5jvJ
— Kayla Adams (@KaylaAdams___) January 9, 2023
For context, here’s the moment in question from the Oprah interview:
Meghan Markle says several members of the Royal Family discussed with Harry concerns over what the color of Archie’s skin color would be.
Listen to the biggest bombshell so far of this entire interview with Oprah.#MeghanMarkle pic.twitter.com/CIQP6Q61pj
— Lynnette KhalfaniCox (@themoneycoach) March 8, 2021
Even though Harry defended the most un-racist family in the world from being racist, he did call the monarchy out for ignoring chance after chance to diversify. via HuffPo:
“Everything they said was gonna happen hasn’t happened. I’ve always been open to wanting to help them understand their part in it, and especially when you are the monarchy ― you have a responsibility and quite rightly people hold you to a higher standard than others,” he said.
And while at least one member of the Royal Family was holding up a magnifying glass to check for the shade of Archie’s skin as soon as he entered the world, his dad, Harry, was busy riding a Nando’s Pegasus chicken up into a cloud of LOLs. Because during the birth of his first child, Harry claims he stole some of Meghan’s nitrous for himself. via The Independent:
Harry wrote: “Meg was so calm, I was calm too.
“But I saw two ways of enhancing my calm. One: Nando’s chicken (brought by our bodyguards). Two: A canister of laughing gas beside Meg’s bed. I took several slow, penetrating hits.”
He also reportedly revealed how when the nurse came to give the duchess laughing gas, or nitrous oxide, for the pain, there wasn’t any left.
“I could see the thought slowly dawning. ‘Gracious, the husband’s had it all,’” he continued. “’Sorry,’ I said meekly.”
The duke also reportedly quipped that he “didn’t touch the laughing gas” during the birth of his daughter Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor in 2021 “because there was none”.
Why do I have a feeling that all the nitrous in the world wouldn’t even pull a tiny sliver of a laugh out of the royals right now? Well, everyone except for Prince Andrew. Ghislaine Maxwell’s dear friend is probably laughing his predator ass off over a royal mess that doesn’t involve him.
Pic: PA Images/INSTARimages.com