The heir and the spare: Prince Harry’s ‘frustrating’ life in Prince William’s shadow

Two boys walked behind their mother’s coffin in 1997, but only one of them is destined to be king – and the other was never allowed to forget it.

COMMENT

It was a Friday night in the late 1980s and Prince Harry was a tiny boy of four or five.

He was in the back seat of a car being whisked back to Prince Charles’ Highgrove House along with his mother Diana, nanny Olga, brother Prince William and bodyguard Ken Wharfe. Remonstrating with a cheeky William, Olga said, “Don’t be rude.” According to Mr Wharfe, Harry responded, saying, “It doesn’t matter anyway because William is going to be king.”

It is a startling and stark scene: They may have only been small children squabbling but even then they both implicitly understood that they were destined to live two very different lives.

This week, relations between Prince William and Prince Harry hit an all-time low, with William reportedly telling a friend, “I’ve put my arm around my brother all our lives and I can’t do that anymore; we’re separate entities. I’m sad about that.”

The revelation comes ahead of tomorrow’s “Sandringham Summit” where the Queen, Prince Charles and the two brothers will meet at Her Majesty’s private home to try to hammer out an exit deal for Harry and his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.

After less than two years of marriage, the Sussexes last week announced they were quitting as “senior” members of the royal family to carve out “a progressive new role within this institution” and to “become financially independent”.

High on lofty ambitions and low on details, the brief statement has sparked one of the biggest crises the Windsors have faced in decades.

William has said he can no longer support Meghan and Harry after they decided to split from the royal family. Picture: Tolga Akmen / AFP

As this unfortunate situation has played out in exquisite, painful and very public detail, just how bad the relationship between William and Harry has become came into focus. At the heart of this schism is the inherent tension that comes from one of them being raised to be king while the other is expected to live quietly in his shadow.

For William and Harry’s childhood and their early adulthood (until Kate Middleton tiptoed up the aisle of Westminster Abbey and into the history books), thanks to their shared suffering and heartbreak, their shared dignity and the obvious camaraderie, “Diana’s boys” were welded together in the public imagination.

From the moment they walked behind their mother’s coffin, ‘Diana’s boys’ were welded together in the public imagination. Picture: AFP PHOTO / POOL / Jeff J Mitchell

However, post-Eton, the lads followed distinctly different paths. William packed up his best corduroy trousers and everyman smile and headed north to study the history of art and to get discreetly sozzled with his hoorah Henry mates in Scottish bars.

Harry, meanwhile, took the tried and true path that second sons without the marks for Oxbridge have long followed and promptly enrolled at Sandhurst, temporarily trading his HRH status to become Officer Cadet Wales.

Over the coming years, William was stuck out on the moors trying to pass geography (he’d long junked that art malarky) and to catch the eye of a pretty co-ed named Kate Middleton. Harry, meanwhile, thrived in the bosom of the military.

It was clear that in the armed services, the Prince had found a keen sense of belonging and comradeship and, perhaps more importantly, a clear-cut sense of purpose. He showed incredible bravery pressing his superior officers to allow him to serve on the front line in Afghanistan not once but twice. There, he slept in a single camp bed in mortar-proof quarters and subsisted on one bottle of drinking water a day.

Unlikely as it may seem for a man brought up surrounded by unparalleled luxury, it was heaven.

Harry’s time in Afghanistan was some of the most ‘normal’ of his life. Picture: AFP PHOTO/John Stillwell / POOL / AFP PHOTO

In an interview from the war zone (which was released only when he was back on UK soil) Harry said: “I’m out here now, haven’t really had a shower for four days, haven’t washed my clothes for a week, and everything seems completely normal … I think this is about as normal as I’m ever going to get.”

When he returned for good in 2014, the once wayward royal was hailed a hero and his penchant for falling out of Mayfair nightclubs was largely overlooked by a bemused and enamoured public. However, the inescapable truth soon hit. While the army had offered him a defined role in which he excelled, back in London he faced having to find a way to suitably while away the daytime hours.

“The reality is royal duties,” he told the Times’ royal correspondent Roya Nikkhah then. “Most of the areas I looked at, from being able to work part time and also do royal duties, just simply weren’t going to work.”

William, by contrast, was being groomed and prepared to step into the top job. The inequities of their different spots on the royal totem pole soon started to make themselves keenly felt.

“Harry felt frustrated that he was having to run things by William and sometimes not take things on, or scale things back, so as not to outshine his brother, which was starting to happen,” a source close to both brothers told the Times this week.

“There were clashes over territory on things like conservation and the military. Harry wanted to crack on with new ideas and not feel restricted by William and having to do things a certain way.”

Harry and William have been on very different trajectories since they were born. Picture: Carl De Souza / AFP

With no clear mandate, role or authority, and despite proving himself on the battlefield, Harrye now faced taking a back seat to let his elder brother’s star shine.

“Harry has always complained about being sidelined by William, but now I think they see this split as an opportunity to really spread their wings,” a source previously told a British newspaper.

Elsewhere, a former aide has said: “They think the world is against them. Harry has always complained about being sidelined by William.”

Pecking order, allegedly, matters to Harry. The same piece quotes a source saying the Duke, in the wake of the Sussex office being moved to Buckingham Palace in 2019, talked about becoming “the most senior MRF (member of the royal family) at Buckingham Palace after the Queen”.

Meanwhile, Meghan is also alleged to have chafed against the rigid hierarchy of her new family, being wholly “unwilling to play second fiddle to her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Cambridge, to whom she is not close”, according to the (UK) Telegraph.

For years, William and Harry, and later Kate, seemed the best of friends. Picture: Jeff Spicer/Getty Images

The picture that has started to emerge is of two charismatic people driven to make a difference yet straining against the assumption they would forever accept having their light shoved under a royal bushel. With a new website and a new plan to become “quasi-royal”, it would seem that Harry is working to get out of his elder brother’s shadow and to move unobscured into the global spotlight.

In 2005, Harry gave an interview to mark his 21st birthday and touchingly said of William: “Every year we get closer. It’s amazing how close we have become … he is the one person on this earth who I can talk to about anything.”

Sadly, it would seem he was wrong.

Daniela Elser is a royal expert and writer with 15 years’ experience working with several of Australia’s leading media titles.