As readers of The Royalist will know, I have been reporting since last year that Prince Harry was planning to make a film about his mother for Netflix to mark the 30th anniversary of her death next year. The reliability of my sources was confirmed this week when sources in Harry’s camp told the Telegraph that he and Meghan were indeed planning such a film, which also explains why they have come back to a country that hates them.
I had also been hearing that William was being approached to make a film of his own, and that he was considering it. The * Sunday Times* reports today that he has in fact “declined several offers to make or appear in a documentary tribute to his late mother as the date approaches.”
I’m sure that’s correct, not least because the Times on Friday said that William had a meeting on Thursday with Matt Brittin, the BBC’s director general. It was literally a one-line mention, and no detail of what was discussed has emerged, when it should really be a huge story. If any subscribers are BBC insiders and know what went down, DM me in confidence! Oh, and while I’m at it, if you have a kid, grandkid or nephew at Ninestiles Academy in Birmingham, we also want to hear from you, as discussed in this video.
The BBC certainly was, I was told, one of the organizations looking to make a big Diana film for next year. I can’t help thinking that the meeting may have been William telling them, definitively, where to go, after his uncle’s interview with Laura Kuenssberg, which gave Spencer a prime BBC platform to air all his accusations against the King, especially the disgusting allegation that Charles sounded “giddily elated, like a lottery winner” when the two men first spoke after Diana’s death.
Kuenssberg did challenge him on that. Asked whether he could actually be sure that was what Charles was thinking, Spencer replied, “I cannot be sure,” adding that he was assuming from the tone that it was a possibility. That was it.
The description of Charles as elated is in marked contrast to Harry’s own account, in Spare, of his father coming to sit on his bed at Balmoral and struggling to get the words out. It is in marked contrast to the fact that Charles wept when he had to travel to Paris and view her body. And it is in marked contrast to what has been widely reported about his first reaction to the news, as recorded by that author Penny Junor: “They’re all going to blame me, aren’t they? The world’s going to go completely mad.”
He understood instantly that his ex-wife’s death would be laid at his door and that it had derailed the plan for Camilla to be Queen by at least a decade.
It is true that Charles, after her death, certainly did launch a campaign to blacken Diana’s name, as ▶we discussed with journalist Phil Craig on the Royalist podcast last week. That is documented. But it is a different charge from the one Spencer is making, and I’m sure William, who has had his difficulties with his father over the years but still respects his rank, was aggrieved that the BBC handed Spencer the platform to air his unproven allegations.
Mind you, William fell out with the BBC long ago. In November 2021, the Cambridges switched Catherine’s debut Christmas carol concert to ITV at the last minute after the corporation screened The Princes and the Press, an Amol Rajan documentary the royal households criticized for giving credibility to “overblown and unfounded claims.” The carol concert has been an ITV exclusive every year since.
There are a lot of high-stress words being flung around at the moment about William’s state of mind. William is “furious”; William is “spitting blood” about Spencer’s memoir. That is not what I’m hearing. The word I am hearing, over and over again, is “dismayed,” and beyond that, very, very little. This has been the policy of William’s side ever since Catherine’s cancer diagnosis: complete disengagement from what they see as damaged, dangerous, toxic individuals.
William and Catherine’s path is resonating enormously with the public, because so many people have difficult people in their own lives, and “detach with love” is increasingly the received wisdom on how to deal with them, whether they are family members or friends you have fallen out with.
William is totally right not to get involved, not least because making his own film would a) suck up all his bandwidth for the royal year ahead b) create a massive amount of publicity for Harry’s film, and c) contradict what William said on the 20th anniversary, when the brothers appeared together in ITV’s Diana, Our Mother: “We won’t be doing this again. We won’t speak as openly or publicly about her again.”
William now has such a high level of trust and confidence that people are inclined to see the best in him. With Harry, the absolute inverse is true. People will widely assume he is cashing in.
Confidence is so low that even when he does something public-spirited, like the Invictus Games, people are so mistrustful of him that they automatically assume Harry is out for himself, that Harry is looking to promote Harry (for example today’s revelation in the Sun that Amazon are to sponsor the Invictus Games is already being interpreted by some as Harry and Meghan using the event to build credibility with a new commercial partner).
This is exactly what Queen Elizabeth II warned him about at the Sandringham Summit: the danger of mingling private and public duties, as a royal, doesn’t work. The profit motive crashes into everything Harry and Meghan try to do. If you try to present yourself as a public servant, working for the good of the people, the good of the nation and the good of your charitable causes, doing public service in the very specific way the royals do it, while at the same time flogging your outfits on an AI fashion platform, you open yourself up to accusations of exploiting your position to cash in.
The royals are used to those accusations. It was a big problem with Prince Edward and Sophie, which is why they were stopped from pursuing their media careers. People forget how hated Edward was for his role in invading William’s privacy at St Andrews when his production company filmed him there. Look at them now. Having fully devoted their lives to public service ever since, the * Mail on Sunday* today is hailing Sophie as the great public servant of the age.
Harry is going to make this film; he is going to be seen as a hypocrite and as making money out of his mother’s legacy, while William has been asked to do the same and is not going to.
That doesn’t mean William won’t give his endorsement to a film (perhaps made by ITV rather than the BBC). There might be photographs or royal archive access provided, or a nod given to friends to cooperate, but William is right not to get involved personally.
