Prince William says Diana’s death brought him and Harry closer in old clip

A video clip of Prince William, Prince Harry and Kate Middleton explaining how Princess Diana’s death contributed to a strong bond between the brothers has gone viral after being uploaded to social media following the publication of the memoirs blockbuster from Harry.

In his book, Harry said his relationship with William had never been as close as it had been portrayed in public following their mother’s death, a revelation that surprised many, including 60 minutes anchor Anderson Cooper when he interviewed the prince shortly before the book was published.

Spare became the best-selling non-fiction book in history, but it would have widened the already wide rift between the prince and his older brother that has played out in public for the past three years.

Six years before Harry’s memoir was published, in which he makes a number of allegations against William, including jealousies and an account of a physical attack in 2019, the princes sat down with Kate to discuss the importance of mental health and how they were jointly affected. by the loss of their mother in a car accident in Paris in 1997.

At the time of Diana’s death, William was 15 and Harry was 12.

A video clip of the conversation, recorded to kick off the trio’s Heads Together mental health campaign, was uploaded to TikTok by user originland and viewed more than 400,000 times.

“Given all that you’ve been through, unfortunately, and the trauma that you’ve been through,” Kate told the brothers, “I think it’s amazing how strong and how you’ve been able to cope, really. And I jotted that down to your very early childhood experience. But also to the relationship that you have. You’re incredibly close.”

To this, William hinted that the brothers might not get along all the time, saying, “Most of the time”.

“Some families, unfortunately, aren’t as lucky as you to be able to share things,” Kate replied.

“We also got closer because of circumstances. That’s the problem,” William said of his relationship with Harry after Diana’s death. “You know, you’re uniquely bonded because of what we’ve been through. But, you know, even Harry and I over the years haven’t talked enough about our mother.”

“I used to think, what’s the point of bringing up the past? What’s the point of bringing up something that will only make you sad? Harry told his brother and sister-in-law. “It won’t change anything. It won’t bring her back.

“And when you start thinking like that, it can be really damaging. You [William] always told me, you have to sit down and think about those memories. But for me, it was like I didn’t want to think about it.”

William said: “What’s happened with us, and I think it has to happen with others too, is you have to put your mental health first. He added: ‘It’s very easy to run away from, you know, walk away from it and avoid it. Someone has to step up and be brave enough to force this conversation.”

In Spare, Harry explains in detail how he coped after the death of his mother. He described how his father, then Prince Charles, broke the news to him at Balmoral Castle and how he convinced himself for many years that she was not dead but simply hiding from the media.

It also describes her relationship with William and how over the years it grew strained and eventually close to estrangement.

Some of the comments on the viral TikTok video lamented the state of the brothers’ current relationship. During their interview, Harry told Cooper that he wasn’t talking to William but was looking forward “that we can find peace”.

James Crawford-Smith is Newsweek’s London-based royal journalist. You can find him on Twitter at @jrcrawfordsmith and read his stories on Newsweek’s The Royal’s Facebook page.

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