As regular readers of The Royalist will know, I have been reporting since last year that Prince Harry is planning a Netflix film about his mother, Diana, to mark the 30th anniversary of her death next year. This week, my stories were confirmed when sources in Harry’s camp told The Telegraph that he and Meghan were indeed planning such a film.
This could explain why they have come back to a country that hates them.
I had also been hearing that William was being approached to make a film of his own, and that he was considering it. The London Sunday Times reports that he has in fact “declined several offers to make or appear in a documentary tribute to his late mother as the date approaches.”
I was intrigued to read that William had a meeting on Thursday with Matt Brittin, the BBC’s director general. It was literally a one-line mention, and no detail of what was discussed has emerged. This should really be a huge story.
The BBC is one of several organizations that want to make a Diana film with William for next year. I can’t help thinking that the meeting may have been William telling them, definitively, where to go, after his uncle Charles Spencer’s interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. This gave Spencer a prime platform to air his accusations against the king, especially the disgusting allegation that Charles sounded “giddily elated, like a lottery winner” when the two men first spoke after Diana’s death.
Kuenssberg did challenge him on that, sort of. But not really. Asked whether he could actually be sure that was what Charles was thinking, Spencer replied, “I cannot be sure,” adding that he was assuming from the tone that it was a possibility. That was it.
The description of Charles as elated is in marked contrast to Harry’s own account, in Spare, of his father coming to sit on his bed at Balmoral and struggling to get the words out. It is in marked contrast to the fact that Charles wept when he had to travel to Paris and view her body. And it is in marked contrast to what has been widely reported about his first reaction to the news, as recorded by that author Penny Junor: “They’re all going to blame me, aren’t they? The world’s going to go completely mad.”
That is not a lottery winner. That is a man who understood instantly that his ex-wife’s death would be laid at his door and that it had derailed the plan for Camilla to be Queen by at least a decade.
It is true that after Diana’s death, Charles did launch a campaign to blacken her name, as we discussed with journalist Phil Craig on The Royalist podcast last week. That is documented. But it is a different charge from the one Spencer is making, and I’m sure William, who has had his difficulties with his father over the years but still respects him, was aggrieved that the BBC handed Spencer the platform to air his unproven allegations.
Mind you, William fell out with the BBC long ago. In November 2021, the Cambridges aired Catherine’s Christmas carol concert on Britain’s commercial ITV network, after the BBC screened The Princes and the Press, a documentary the royal households criticized for giving credibility to “overblown and unfounded claims.” The carol concert has been an ITV exclusive every year since.
There are a lot of high-stress words being flung around at the moment about William’s state of mind. William is “furious,” William is “spitting blood” about Spencer’s memoir. That is not what I’m hearing. The word I am hearing, over and over again, is “dismay,” and beyond that, very, very little. This has been the policy of William’s side ever since Catherine’s cancer diagnosis: complete disengagement from what they see as damaged, dangerous, toxic individuals.
I think William and Catherine’s path is resonating enormously with the public, because so many people have difficult people in their own lives, and this is increasingly the received wisdom on how to deal with them, whether they are family members or friends you have fallen out with.
William is totally right not to get involved, not least because making his own film would a) suck up all his bandwidth for the year ahead b) create a massive amount of publicity for Harry’s film, and c) contradict what William said on the 20th anniversary, when the brothers appeared together in ITV’s Diana, Our Mother: “We won’t be doing this again. We won’t speak as openly or publicly about her again.”
Harry is going to have to explain himself on that front if he’s going to avoid looking like a man in need of money trying to cash in.
There is now such a high level of trust and confidence in William that people are inclined to see the best in him. With Harry, the absolute opposite is true. Confidence is so low that even when he does something public-spirited, like the Invictus Games, people are so mistrustful of him that they automatically assume Harry is out for himself, that Harry is looking to promote Harry.
One example is the recent revelation that Amazon is to sponsor the Invictus Games, which is already being interpreted by some as Harry and Meghan using the event to build credibility with a commercial partner.
This is exactly what Queen Elizabeth II warned him about at the Sandringham Summit: the danger of mingling private and public duties, as a royal, doesn’t work. The profit motive crashes into everything Harry and Meghan try to do.
If you try to present yourself as a public servant, working for the good of the people, the good of the nation and the good of your charitable causes, doing public service in the very specific way the royals do it, and at the same time are flogging your outfits on an AI fashion platform, you open yourself up to accusations of exploiting your status to cash in.
The main story here remains that Harry is going to make this film, he is going to be seen as a hypocrite and as making money out of his mother’s legacy, and William has been asked to do the same and is not going to.
That doesn’t mean William won’t give his endorsement to a responsible film, perhaps one made by ITV rather than the BBC. There might be photographs provided, or a nod given to friends to cooperate. William would be shrewd not to get involved himself, but to give his tacit support to one really brilliant, authorized film, with a fantastic filmmaking team, made by a network he trusts.
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