Prince Harry risks ending ‘any relationship’ he has with the royal …
Prince Harry's relationship with the royal family may never recover if the Duke of Sussex skips the upcoming coronation on May 6. Royal biographer Alexander Larman is the author of the new book The Windsors at War: The King, His Brother and a Family Divided. Ahead of the book's release, Mr Larman gave American tabloid Us Weekly new insight into the state of Harry and Prince William's relationship since the release of Spare.
"I'm on record saying that I think that they should have responded. I think Prince William should have given an interview in which he extended the hand of brotherhood," Mr Larman told the outlet. "He should have said, 'We're all very concerned about him.
We understand that he has most awful traumatic shock when his mother died so young. You know, we know life has been hard for him.'" The royal historian compared Harry and Meghan Markle's decision to leave the royal family to that of King Edward VIII and the Duchess of Windsor almost a century ago.
Edward VIII famously abdicated the throne in 1936 to marry the twice-divorced American socialite Wallis Simpson and left the royal family in disgrace. After stepping down as King, Edward and his new wife were known as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The couple were rumoured to be Nazi sympathisers and were exiled to the Bahamas before living out their lives in seclusion in France.
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were so controversial that the royal family quietly retired the Windsor dukedom following their deaths in 1972 and 1986 respectively. "You do wonder when a member of a royal family is not playing by the same rules as you, how well it's going to go in the long term because it was the same thing with the Duke of Windsor. He wasn't playing by any of the established rules because they'd all been torn up for him," Mr Larman said.
"(Edward) was a complete loose cannon and so there wasn't an awful lot his family could do in order to reign him in. Because if you can't take some of the money away (and) you can't take a very royal status away, what can you do?" Mr Larman warned that Harry risks further isolation from the royal family if he chooses not to attend the coronation.
Although the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have confirmed their invitation to the historic occasion, they have yet to confirm their attendance at the event with just over a month to go. "I can't see in the current situation how he's ever going to have any sort of relationship with any of (the royals). "(Charles) is not a young man either and we have no idea how long he's going to be king for," he said.
"And so after that when the Prince of Wales becomes king if he's still estranged from his younger brother that's going to be a very odd state of affairs, isn't it?"