'I want my father and brother back': ITV releases trailer for interview with Prince Harry

Prince Harry: I would like my father and my brother back

 

Duke of Sussex tells ITV ‘it never needed to be this way’ and that ‘I want a family, not an institution’

 

Miranda Bryant

Mon 2 Jan 2023 15.46 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/02/prince-harry-would-like-father-brother-back-itv

 

The Duke of Sussex has said he wants his father and brother “back” during an ITV interview due to be broadcast on Sunday, two days before the publication of his highly anticipated memoir.

 

The latest intervention by Prince Harry, expected to again rock Buckingham Palace with revelations of its inner workings, is one of two interviews to be broadcast on the same day either side of the Atlantic. In the other interview, with a US broadcaster, he accuses the palace of failing to protect his family in the same way as other royal family members.

 

The prince says “I would like to get my father back, I would like to have my brother back” in a preview clip from the interview with the ITV News at Ten presenter Tom Bradby.

 

The 90-minute programme, produced by ITN Productions for ITV, will be broadcast two days before Harry’s autobiography, Spare, is published on 10 January.

 

In a series of clips cut together with no questions heard, Harry says “it never needed to be this way” and refers to “the leaking and the planting”, before adding: “I want a family, not an institution.”

 

He also says “they feel as though it is better to keep us somehow as the villains” and that “they have shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile”, although it is unclear to whom he is referring.

 

Filmed in California where Harry lives with this wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex and their two children, the interview will go into “unprecedented depth and detail” about his life in and outside the royal family, ITV said.

 

Bradby, who has known Harry for more than 20 years, was also behind the interview during the couple’s 2019 southern Africa trip, when he asked Meghan about the impact of the pressure she was under during an ITV documentary.

 

In comments that became an early public signal that the couple were struggling under the intense media spotlight, she said: “Thank you for asking because not many people have asked if I’m OK, but it’s a very real thing to be going through behind the scenes.”

 

In a separate interview, to be broadcast on US television, Harry told the 60 Minutes programme on CBS News that “silence is betrayal” while talking about the alleged failure of Buckingham Palace to defend him and the Duchess of Sussex before they stepped down as senior royals.

 

In a clip from the interview, to be broadcast on Sunday, Harry tells the journalist Anderson Cooper: “Every single time I’ve tried to do it privately, there have been briefings and leakings and planting of stories against me and my wife.”

 

“The family motto is ‘never complain, never explain’, but it’s just a motto,” he added. “[Buckingham Palace] will feed or have a conversation with a correspondent, and that correspondent will literally be spoon-fed information and write the story, and at the bottom of it, they will say they have reached out to Buckingham Palace for comment. But the whole story is Buckingham Palace commenting.

 

“So when we’re being told for the past six years, ‘we can’t put a statement out to protect you’, but you do it for other members of the family, there becomes a point when silence is betrayal.”

 

Buckingham Palace said it would not be commenting on either trailer.

 

Harry has previously said that Spare is written “not as the prince I was born but as the man I have become”. It will include “the highs and lows, the mistakes, the lessons learned”, he has said, promising it will be a “first-hand account of my life that’s accurate and wholly truthful”.

 

The book’s publisher, Penguin, described the memoir as “intimate and heartfelt” and “written with raw, unflinching honesty”.

 

Promotional materials say Harry will write for the first time about walking with William behind their mother’s coffin and include details of his time in the military in Afghanistan, and Meghan and Harry’s home life.

 

An audiobook, read by Harry, will also be released on the same day.

 

The interview comes weeks after the release of the six-part Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan in December, which broke viewing records at the streaming service and divided viewers with its explosive details.

 

The series, directed by Liz Garbus, included personal footage shot by the couple and their accounts of their heartbreak over wars with the palace, claims of Prince William shouting at his brother and briefing against them and the stresses over privacy action against the Mail on Sunday, which they believe led to them miscarrying.

 

Last month, the Sun was forced to apologise after publishing a column by Jeremy Clarkson in which he said he “hated” Meghan “on a cellular level”.

 

The article rapidly attracted widespread criticism and became the Independent Press Standard’s Organisation’s most complained about article. It was later removed from the Sun’s website at Clarkson’s request.

 

A spokesperson for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex said the apology was “nothing more than a PR stunt”.