A resurfaced clip of Prince William and Prince Harry reminiscing about their late mother Princess Diana has gone viral online amid news of a royal rift between the brothers.
The viral video, which has been viewed more than 1.6m times since it was posted last January, shows a scene taken from the 2017 documentary, Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy.
The film, broadcast by ITV in the UK and HBO in the US at the time, follows the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Sussex as they looked back at moments from their mother’s life on what was the 20th anniversary of her death.
In the clip, Prince William and Prince Harry are seen flipping through old photographs of Princess Diana. At one moment, William shows Harry a picture of himself and their mother, which William notes was when they were “on holiday” together.
The older brother then picks up a photograph of Diana, who is seen holding a baby William in her arms while she was pregnant with Harry.
“Believe it or not, you and I are actually both in this picture,” William said, laughing. “You’re in the tummy.”
“She smothered us with love, that’s for sure,” Harry quietly said.
“Yeah,” William replied solemnly, as the scene cuts to a picture of the three of them together.
The bittersweet video drew thousands of comments from royal fans sharing their reactions to the “sad” video.
“I love seeing these two together,” one TikTok user commented.
“Diana loved her boys so so much,” said someone else.
“They belong together as brothers…it is sooo very sad,” a third person wrote.
Others reflected on the brother’s current relationship standing and how it could be different if their mother was still alive today.
“They were so good together and now if their mother was still alive maybe that wouldn’t have happened,” one person wrote, while someone else said: “People saying she would hate what Harry is doing. I say if she was still here, brothers would not be bickering like that. She would have guided them.”
Prince Harry has revealed many details about his rollercoaster relationship with his older brother Prince William, now the Prince of Wales, in his newly-released memoir, Spare. Perhaps the biggest revelation from the autobiography, which hit bookshelves on 10 January, was an alleged fight between the brothers that took place at Nottingham Cottage in 2019.
In Spare, Harry claimed that his brother grabbed him by the collar, ripped his necklace off and “knocked” him to the ground. He wrote that before their physical altercation, William called Meghan “difficult”, “rude” and “abrasive”, which the prince says was a “parrot[ing of] the press narrative” about his wife.
Harry claimed he gave his brother a glass of water and said: “Willy, I can’t speak to you when you’re like this.”
“He set down the water, called me another name, then came at me. It all happened so fast. So very fast,” the duke said. “He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor. I landed on the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out.”
Harry said his brother told him to fight back, but he refused. William then left before returning “looking regretful, and apologised.”
The alleged fight between the “heir and the spare” was perhaps the icing on the cake of a long history of sibling rivalry, including differences in their bedrooms at Balmoral Castle, William telling his brother to pretend they didn’t know each other at Eton, and laughing at Harry after he had a panic attack.
Now, as their father King Charles III’s coronation draws near, the monarch has reportedly leaned on the Archbishop of Canterbury to ask Prince Harry to attend his coronation. He is said to be facing opposition from Prince William, who is reportedly fearful of any opportunity that his estranged sibling could use at the event to stage a “stunt”.
