Prince Harry has told how he was forced to go along with the “bare-faced lie” that he was his brother William ’s best man, insisting: “Willy didn’t want me giving a best man’s speech”.
Revealing how his bitter rift with the heir to the throne hardened more than a decade ago, the Duke of Sussex said he was made to act out the role in order to spare interest into the lives of William’s two closest friends.
Harry was officially classed as William’s best man at his wedding to Kate in 2011 and even travelled with the future King to Westminster Abbey in a Bentley.
But in an astonishing declaration he claimed it was all for show and his brother’s close friends James Meade and Thomas Van Straubenzee actually gave the traditional speech at the reception.
Instead, Harry was demoted to act as a mere compere and introduce them.
The revelation poses questions as to devastating length and breakdown to their once inseparable bond, described in searing and brutal detail in his new explosive memoir.
Released this week by mistake ahead of its official global launch next Tuesday, booksellers in Spain gave the world its first glimpse at ‘Spare’.
A reference to the phrase “heir and a spare” uttered by his father King Charles to his late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, when he was born, it has already become a global bestseller and sent shockwaves around the royal family.
Harry’s brutal takedowns of members of his family including his father, “wicked stepmother” Camilla and sister-in-law Kate and once beloved brother William have sent shockwaves through the royal family.
The Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace households have refused to engage in a “tit-for-tat” battle of words with Harry with one insider claiming the royals were “beyond weary” of the Duke’s attacks.
In further petty claims Harry told how Prince William was tipsy on rum hours before his wedding to Kate in 2011.
The Duke says his older brother went down to greet people camping out on the Mall by Buckingham Palace, ahead of the ceremony while intoxicated, having been drinking to calm his nerves.
Harry said to him: “You smell of alcohol” and offered him some mint sweets 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.
Bitter and acrimonious allegations spill from the 557 pages seen in full for the first time on Thursday as The Mirror got hold of a copy from a bookshop in southern Spain.
Their squabbling included his own wedding; seven years later, when the brothers rowed over whether Harry should get married with a beard.
“At one point he actually ordered me, as the Heir speaking to the Spare, to shave,” he wrote – even though the late Queen had given his facial hair the seal of royal approval. Emphasising the competitive nature of their relationship, Harry adds: “He hated the idea of me enjoying a perk that he’d been denied”.
In the same chapter, Harry reveals his wife Meghan and the Princess of Wales were at loggerheads from the “early days”, laying the blame on a misunderstanding over Kate thinking Meghan wanted her “fashion contacts” when in fact she had her own.
Harry claims William and Kate confessed that they were huge fans of Suits, the legal drama in which Meghan played paralegal Rachel Zane, with William exclaiming “f*** off!” when he revealed he was dating Meghan.
In another extract of the book Harry recalls an “awkward moment” between his wife, Meghan Markle, and his sister-in-law, Kate.
The uncomfortable encounter allegedly went down before the Sussexes’ and the Waleses’ Royal Foundation Forum appearance in 2018, when Harry’s new wife asked to borrow Kate’s lip gloss when she forgot hers.
Harry said: “Kate, taken aback, went into her handbag and reluctantly pulled out a small tube,” Harry wrote. “Meg squeezed some onto her finger and applied it to her lips. Kate grimaced.”
Harry goes further to lay into his brother and Kate, suggesting that staff took sides in the run-up to Megxit. “Team Cambridges versus Team Sussex.
Rivalry, jealousy, competing agendas – it all poisoned the atmosphere,” he writes.
In one of the more bizarre of Harry’s claims, he tells how he believed that Princess Diana had faked her death to escape the press.
The Duke of Sussex was just 12 when his mother died in a tragic car crash in a Paris tunnel. In “Spare,” he admits that he has spent the subsequent decades trying to find out what really happened on that fateful night.
Following the tragedy the young princes were at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, staying with their grandparents, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, Harry told: “With nothing to do but roam the castle and talk to myself, a suspicion took hold, which then became a firm belief. This was all a trick.”
Detailing the further breakdown of his relationship with his brother, Harry claims William was constantly “jealous” of him for being allowed certain privileges over him, such as growing a beard at his wedding and setting up the successful Invictus Games sporting event around the world for injured service personnel.
“He appeared supremely irritated,” the former military pilot writes in his book, out Jan. 10, claiming that William complained it would drain funds from their foundation.
Harry, 38, called his sibling’s issue “absurd” and explained that the financing would come from the Endeavor Fund, a branch he “created specifically for the rehabilitation of veterans,” as well as donors.
Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace both declined to comment on any of the allegations.
