The rift isn’t closed yet. Prince William and Prince Harry are still clashing despite the united front they put on as they greeted mourners in the wake of Queen Elizabeth II‘s death, royal expert Christopher Andersen exclusively tells Us Weekly.
The new Prince of Wales, 40, and the Duke of Sussex, 37, appeared together in Windsor with their respective wives, Princess Kate and Meghan Markle on Saturday, September 10. It was the return of the Fab Four, but it doesn’t mean the brothers’ feud is over. Andersen said both men are putting their differences aside while grieving their grandmother, who died on Thursday, September 8, at age 96, and supporting their father King Charles III as he accedes the throne.
“I think [Charles is] very careful and I think he’s trying to be subdued and trying to be a unifying figure. I think he needs to sell the British people, for example, on a number of things. And one of them is Camilla as queen,” Andersen explained exclusively to Us on Monday, September 12.
“He’s gotta have all hands on deck, and that means having both William and Harry as partners as well,” the author, who wrote the New York Times bestseller The Day Diana Died, continued. “And I think the relationship with Harry and William is still dicey.”
The brothers have seemingly been at odds since at least 2019, when the Invictus Games founder openly acknowledged that they weren’t seeing eye-to-eye in the documentary Harry & Meghan: An African Journey. “We’re certainly on different paths at the moment but I’ll always be there for him and as I know he’ll always be there for me,” the BetterUp CIO said at the time.
William was the one to reach out and invite Harry and Meghan — who were in the U.K. ahead of the queen’s death for some public speaking engagements — to make an appearance with him and Kate.
“William invited Harry and Meghan to join them,” a source exclusively told Us about their public reunion on Saturday, September 10. “They were delayed in arriving while they arranged the plans.”
The invitation wasn’t an all-encompassing olive branch, Andersen told Us. “Even though they got together to greet people outside of the palaces and look at the flowers and such, [but] even then, you could see a kind of stiffness and formality between the two couples,” the Brothers and Wives writer noted.
While William extended the invite, Andersen believes it’s Charles who truly wants Harry back on good terms with the family.
“Charles would like everybody to be there and doing their job, and it’s in his interest to get Harry back into the fold. I’m not so sure William is that interested,” the journalist said. “I think he’s got much more of a grudge against Harry at this time.”
The Sussexes don’t seem too anxious to build bridges either. “I just think that Harry and Meghan still are uneasy,” Andersen continued. “We’ve seen that in a recent interview that Meghan gave [last month with The Cut]. So it’ll take an awful lot, I think, for them to mend those fences [and] get things back to where they were.”
However, grudges can be put aside, at least temporarily, for them to grieve the queen.
“Let’s not forget, this is to pay their respects to their grandmother. They were so close to Elizabeth,” Andersen said. “They admired her as anyone else would their grandmother, but she was also their queen, and William, in particular, was the recipient of all sorts of attention from the queen. I mean, she knew he was the future of the monarchy. He and Kate and the Cambridge children are there all the future of the monarchy.”
With reporting by Christina Garibaldi
