Prince Harry claims William physically attacked him, hints at not attending Charles III’s coronation

Prince Harry has suggested he could boycott his father’s coronation in May, as leaked extracts of his upcoming book detailed a physical fight he says his brother William, the Prince of Wales, started over a row about Meghan.

In a clip released by UK’s ITV to promote the interview that will air on Sunday night local time, broadcaster Tom Bradby asks Harry if he would be attending the coronation of Charles III.

Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, is already generating headlines.Credit: AP Photo/Stefan Jeremiah, File

“There’s a lot that happen between now and then, the door is open, the ball is in their court, there’s a lot to be discussed, and I really hope that they are willing to sit down and talk about it,” Harry said.

Harry gave an emphatic “yes” when asked if he still believed in the monarchy but said he didn’t know if he would be playing a part in its future.

He defended the decision to reveal his private conversations with his brother and father without their permission, saying that criticism of this could only come from someone who “don’t understand or don’t want to believe that my family have been briefing the press.”

Harry said that he didn’t see how staying silent would improve the situation.

But any hopes the Duke of Sussex might hold about reuniting with his family are unlikely to be realised anytime soon given the extraordinary claim about his fight with William, contained in Spare, the younger prince’s eagerly awaited memoir, which is due to be released next week.

The publisher, Penguin Random House, has not made advance copies available before its release in Australia on January 11 (and in the UK on January 10). But The Guardian, which has published the details of the altercation, claims to have obtained a copy of what it labels a “remarkable volume”.

According to the British newspaper, Harry writes that William arrived at Nottingham Cottage – the house in the grounds of Kensington Palace that Harry and Meghan described in their recent Netflix six-part series as “small” with “really low ceilings” – to discuss “the whole rolling catastrophe” of the relationship between the couple and the British press.

The Guardian reports that in Harry’s version of events, William said he was there to “help”, but when Harry accused him of merely repeating the press narrative around Meghan’s behaviour, the pair got into a heated exchange.

Neither William nor the Palace have commented on the allegations at this stage.

Harry reportedly writes that his brother called him names, “then came at me. It all happened so fast. So very fast. He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor.

“I landed on the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out.”

Soon after William left the cottage, he returned, Harry writes, “looking regretful, and apologised”.

As he departed a second time, Harry claims William said to him: “You don’t need to tell Meg about this.”

Secrecy around the memoir has been extremely tight. The first hints of what it might contain were due to emerge over the coming weekend, with Harry to appear in two televised interviews, one with Tom Bradby for Britain’s ITV, the other with Anderson Cooper for America’s 60 Minutes.

A short teaser for the former had shown Harry saying the royal family has shown “absolutely no willingness to reconcile” with him and Meghan, while the ad for the latter has him saying every time he had tried to have a conversation with his family about the couple’s plans to start a new life overseas “there have been briefings and leakings and planting of stories against me and my wife”.

The couple made similar claims in their Netflix series, but the publisher will be hoping there’s enough new information in the book to spur massive interest – and sales.

Penguin Random House reportedly paid the Duke and Duchess of Sussex an advance of $US20 million ($30 million) in mid-2021 for a four-book deal. Upon announcing the deal, PRH chief executive Markus Dohle – who in 2017 paid a record-breaking $US65 million to sign up Barack and Michelle Obama for a his-and-hers memoir package – said Harry was “recognised for his courage and openness ... it is for that reason we’re excited to publish his honest and moving story”.

According to publishing industry newsletter The Optionist, run by Andy Lewis, a former books editor at The Hollywood Reporter, to break even, PRH will need to sell about 1.7 million copies of Harry’s memoir.

Noting that the $US20 million advance is in fact for four books, Lewis concedes “we don’t know exactly how that money is divided up”, while speculating that “the value of the deal is front-loaded in the first book”.

With a recommended retail price of $US36, Lewis calculates that the publisher would be expected to net $18 per print copy. Printing and distribution costs likely amount to $6 a copy, leaving the publisher with a clear $12 per copy. Ghostwriter JR Moehringer reportedly was paid a $US1 million fee, so that’s an additional cost.

All up, Lewis calculates, Harry’s memoir “would need to sell more than 1.3 million print copies and 400,000 digital editions around the world – a total of 1.7 million units”.

To achieve that, he adds, Spare would need to be only a “modest hit in the US”, with combined print and e-book sales of 850,000 copies, which would make it “the 14th or 15th bestselling book of the year”, with the remainder of the copies to be sold in other territories.

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