Prince Harry has spoken candidly about his mother’s death in his interviews with ITV’s Tom Bradby and CBS’s Anderson Cooper for 60 Minutes.
On Sunday evening, the Duke of Sussex sat down with the respective journalists for two televised interviews ahead of the release of his memoir, Spare. Extracts from the forthcoming book, which hits shelves on 10 January, were leaked in Spain five days before its official publication date.
Some of the major talking points in Prince Harry’s autobiography have surrounded the death of his mother Diana, the late Princess of Wales. Princess Diana died on 31 August 1997 during a fatal car crash in Paris, France, when Harry was just 12 years old.
While speaking to Anderson Cooper during his 60 Minutes interview on CBS, Prince Harry reiterated his disbelief over his mother’s death, and explained his longtime belief that Diana was actually alive.
The prince was woken up by his father, King Charles III, that morning in Balmoral Castle when he was told about his mother’s death. While reflecting on the death of his mother, and the “war” it started in him at age 12, Harry told Cooper that he was only able to cry once, when Diana was buried.
The Duke of Sussex added that his inability to cry haunted him, describing the “weight on his chest” he felt and “constantly trying to find a way to cry”. To do so, Harry revealed that he watched online videos of his mother “hoping to cry”.
The 38-year-old royal made similar comments during his ITV interview with Bradby, which aired on Sunday (8 January) at 9pm GMT. During the interview, Harry admitted to feeling “some guilt” when walking among the gathered crowds outside Kensington Palace after his mother’s passing.
He told Bradby: “Everyone knows where they were and what they were doing the night my mother died.
“I cried once, at the burial, and you know I go into detail about how strange it was and how actually there was some guilt that I felt, and I think William felt as well, by walking around the outside of Kensington Palace.”
From looking at photos of the car crash that killed his mother, Prince Harry also said he believes the last thing Princess Diana saw before her death were the lights of paparazzi cameras.
“I saw the photographs of the reflection of all the paparazzi in the window at the same time,” the Duke of Sussex told Cooper. “I saw the back of her blonde hair, you know, slumped on the back of the seat.”
Harry also told ITV of other photographs “that would probably show my mother’s face and blood.” He said he assumes those images were kept from him – something the Duke said he was “grateful” for.
In his memoir, Spare, Prince Harry admitted to believing his mother faked her own death to escape the press, and how he wanted the inquiry into her fatal car crash to be reopened. However, Harry writes that both he and his brother the Prince of Wales “were talked out” of calling for a reinvestigation of her death “by the powers that be”.
Harry also recalled driving through the tunnel his mother died in during his 20s, when he asked a driver to replicate the fatal journey Diana took through the Pont de l’Alma tunnel at the “same speed.”
In Spare, he writes: “We came to the mouth of the tunnel. We zipped ahead, went over the lip of the tunnel’s entrance, the bump that supposedly sent mummy’s Mercedes veering off course. But the lip was nothing, we barely felt it.
“As the car entered the tunnel I leaned forward, watched the light change to a kind of watery orange, watched the concrete pillars flicker past. Fphfff, Fphfff Fphfff. I counted them, counted my heart-beats and in a few seconds, we emerged from the other side.
“I sat back. Quietly I said, ‘Is that all of it? It’s nothing, just a straight tunnel.’ I’d always imagined the tunnel was some treacherous passageway, inherently dangerous but it was just a short, simple, no frills tunnel. No reason anyone should ever die inside it.”
