Sharnaz Shahid
Prince Harry explains why he labels his stepmother Queen Consort Camilla ‘dangerous’ in his extraordinary new book, Spare.
Since the accidental release of Spare, one of the biggest revelations was how critical Prince Harry is of his stepmother, Queen Consort Camilla.
During one of his televised interviews on CBS with Anderson Cooper, the Duke of Sussex explained: “She was the third person in their marriage. She needed to rehabilitate her image.”
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In the book, it was detailed how Harry and his brother Prince William had asked their father, King Charles, not to marry the now-Queen Consort.
“We didn’t think it was necessary. We thought it would do more harm than good,” he revealed on CBS. “Why go that far when you don’t necessarily need to? We wanted him to be happy. And we saw how happy he was with her. So, at the time, it was, ‘OK.'”
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The American journalistic then probed: “You wrote that she started a campaign in the British press to pave the way for a marriage. And you wrote, ‘I even wanted Camilla to be happy. Maybe she’d be less dangerous if she was happy.’ How was she dangerous?”
Prince Harry speaks about his relationship with stepmother Camilla in his new book
To which, Harry replied: “Because of the need for her to rehabilitate her image. That made her dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press. And there was open willingness on both sides to trade of information.
“And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her on the way to being queen consort, there was going to be people or bodies left in the street because of that.” In the memoir, the Duke also wrote that Camilla “sacrificed me on her personal PR altar”.
He shared: “If you are led to believe, as a member of the family, that being on the front page, having positive headlines, positive stories written about you, is going to improve your reputation or increase the chances of you being accepted as monarch by the British public, then that’s what you – that’s what you’re going to do,” Harry said.
Both Charles and Camilla married in 2005, with the Queen Consort spending more than 17 years as a member of the royal family carrying out charity work. She was even endorsed by the late Queen to be Queen Consort on the eve of Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee in February 2022.
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