‘A year or more’: Prince Harry’s private betrayal of Queen Elizabeth revealed in new book
A new book suggests that the Duke of Sussex made the decision to rake in tens of millions for his memoir at one crucial, brutal moment.
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Princes William and Harry – breathe in – deigning to walk civilly into Kensington Palace’s Sunken Garden side-by-side and not resort to a fist fight.
A chipper Queen in an Hermès scarf at the Windsor Horse show.
The Duchess of Cambridge – remember her? – masking up at Wimbledon.
July 2021 is pretty much, from today’s vantage point, the royal bronze age.
It was only just over three years ago, and yet those summer weeks feel as distant and remote as when the Iceni were blueing themselves up and doing nifty things with woad.
But we have to go back there thanks to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, with the strategically rumpled Womble of a pollie accidentally revealing how even more extraordinary Harry’s decision to write a tell-all really was.
It all comes down to one stray sentence in Boris’ forthcoming book Unleashed (not recommended for those of weak stomach or the ego-intolerant) that forces us to consider the possibility that the duke decided to publish his autobiography – to air the muckiest of royal laundry in public in return for fistfuls of dollars – while knowing that the late Queen was dying.
So let’s rewind.
It’s the summer of 2021. The echoes of Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex’s Oprah Winfrey interview are still ringing in the ears of Buckingham Palace courtiers and roiling the delicate innards of aides. (Pepto Bismol was probably flying off St James’ pharmacy shelves).
Her late Majesty was still grieving the loss of her husband of 73 years Prince Philip only three months earlier.
Got the picture?
It’s July 19 when news breaks out of New York – Harry, a chappie not exactly famed for his literary bent, was set to pen his memoir.
“I’m writing this not as the prince I was born but as the man I have become,” as the duke sententiously put it in a press release as Penguin Random House execs busted out the Krug champagne, make it vintage why don’t you, and the anti-Sussex brigade back in the UK started to get really revved up. I’m sure at some point the word “turncoat” was used.
Back in London, the proceeding weeks saw the usual royal summer routine play out – the late Queen being welcomed to her Scottish estate by a nonplussed shetland pony, Balmoral picnics, tartan.
In October she returned to work, hosting an investment summit at Buckingham Palace.
And then everything changed.
The late Queen used a walking stick at a service at Westminster Abbey. It was a noticeably frailer, smaller monarch who hosted an event at the Palace.
Towards the end of the month, she pulled out of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow on doctors’ orders before The Sun revealed that the 95-year-old had been secretly taken to hospital for the night.
The Palace soon had to find ways to downplay the Queen’s regular cancellation of events without startling the horses of the public.
Something was clearly wrong and no amount of soft pedalling press releases could quell the growing fears for the monarch. She would die just 11 months later.
Enter Boris circa 2024, a man whose list of children, ex-wives, former paramours and one-time squeezes probably requires an Excel spreadsheet with some nifty macros to keep track of them all.
In his autobiography, he writes of Her late Majesty, “I had known for a year or more that she had a form of bone cancer”.
Maths time.
The late Queen died in September 2022, meaning that Boris knowing “for a year or more” would take us back to the summer of 2021, which is to say, right when Harry decided that it was the perfect time to pen a warts-and-all paint-peeler of an exposé about royal life, the first blood royal to do such a thing since the exiled Duke of Windsor in 1947. (At least he had the good taste to never use the word “todger”, or at least a wily Wallis made him take it out).
There are other clues that suggest that the late Queen might have known she had cancer even earlier still.
Recently, Her late Majesty’s groom of 28 years Terry Pendry spoke to the Telegraph, which reported that, “Four years before she died … she asked him to make a solemn promise: that he would never leave her as long as she was still riding … he believes she probably made that request just after her doctors told her that she wasn’t well”.
If that is the case, then that would backdate the nonagenarian’s diagnosis to 2018.
Pendry had a sense she was unwell as “she was getting lighter and lighter and frailer and frailer”.
On July 18, the day before Harry’s book announcement, Pendry and the late Queen would take their final ride together at Windsor.
If Johnson and Pendry knew around the time of Harry’s book announcement that Her late Majesty was battling cancer, then obviously her family did too.
What is hard to quite wrap your head around is that Harry made the decision to go ahead and write a book while possibly knowing that Granny did not have long left.
What I find strange is that he did not decide to wait.
It was hardly as if the sovereign was going to have some Lazarus-like recovery and be back galloping across a field with Pendry on her Fenn ponies any time soon.
Why did the duke make the choice such that his grandmother spent the last year of her life having to live with the knowledge that her grandson was writing a tell-all?
It can hardly be put down to financial need. At that time, back in 2021, the Sussexes had already signed their $145 million Netflix deal and a $43.5 million one with Spotify, and their fortunes and coffers looked nice and rosy and fat.
Nor, you would have to think, would Harry have feared that the currency of his tale would wane – his was a story that was going to sell like clappers and disappear off shelves whenever it came out.
So, why not grant his grandmother a degree of peace in her final stretch? Why make her spend her final months knowing that this book and the inevitable mushroom cloud it would unleash was in the offing?
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles
Originally published as ‘A year or more’: Prince Harry’s private betrayal of Queen Elizabeth revealed in new book
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