Prince Harry thinks his relationship with brother Prince William would look a lot different if Princess Diana was still around.
During an appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which aired on Tuesday, January 10, Harry, 38, addressed how the loss of his mother affected where he and William, 40, stand now.
“We wouldn’t have got to this moment,” the Duke of Sussex shared while promoting his Spare memoir. “It’s impossible to say where we would be now — where those relationships would be now — but there is no way that the distance between my brother and I would be the same.”
Harry noted that he has felt a deeper connection to his late mother since stepping back from the royal family.
“I’ve said quite a lot recently in different interviews that I’ve really felt the presence of my mom, especially in the last couple of years,” he continued. “And I detail in the book my brother and I talking at her grave and how he felt as though she had been with him for a long period of time and helped set him up with life and that he felt she was now moving over to me. And I have felt her more in the last two years than I have in the last 30.”
The late Princess of Wales died at age 36 after sustaining injuries in a car crash in Paris in August 1997. Harry, who was 12 when his mother passed away, reflected on the fact that he is now two years older than Diana when she died.
“Well, she died at 36, and I was 36 when this all kicked off,” he explained on Tuesday, referring to his and wife Meghan Markle‘s move to California in an attempt to create distance between them and the British monarchy. “January of 2020 was when my wife and I basically said, ‘Enough, we can’t cope. We can’t deal with this. We need to carve out something different.’ So that was an interesting overlap of time.”
Harry and Meghan, 41, who share son Archie, 3, and daughter Lili, 19 months, recently discussed their experience in their Netflix docuseries and his memoir. According to the BetterUp CIO, the intense U.K. media scrutiny toward his wife created the initial rift between him and his family.
“The direction from the palace was: don’t say anything. But what people need to understand is, as far as a lot of the family were concerned, everything that she was being put through, they had been put through as well,” he detailed in a December 2022 episode of Harry & Meghan. “So, it was almost like a rite of passage, and some of the members of the family were like, ‘My wife had to go through that, so why should your girlfriend be treated any differently? Why should you get special treatment? Why should she be protected?’ And I said, ‘The difference here is the race element.’”
Earlier this month, Harry revealed he isn’t sure whether a reconciliation with William and King Charles III would be possible.
“Meghan and I have continued to say that we will openly apologize for anything that we did wrong, but every time we ask that question, no one’s telling us the specifics or anything,” he said during a 60 Minutes appearance on Sunday, January 8, referring to his allegations that the royals leaked information about them to the British press. “There needs to be a constructive conversation, one that can happen in private that doesn’t get leaked. This all started with them briefing daily against my wife with lies to the point of where my wife and I had to run away from my country.”
