- Valentine Low’s new book about the royal family, “Courtiers,” is out in the UK on Thursday.
- In an excerpt published in the Daily Mail, Low writes about Prince Harry and Prince William’s rift.
- Harry declined a crisis meeting with William in 2019, Low reports.
The Duke of Sussex declined to meet with the Prince of Wales after opening up about their rift in a TV documentary, according to a new royal book.
According to an excerpt from Valentine Low’s “Courtiers,” published in the Daily Mail on Sunday, Prince William asked for a crisis meeting with his brother after Prince Harry said they were “on different paths” in the ITV documentary, “Harry and Meghan: An African Journey,” in November 2019.
“Part of this role and part of this job, this family, being under the pressure that it’s under, inevitably stuff happens,” Harry said in the documentary.
“But look, we’re brothers, we’ll always be brothers,” he added. “We’re certainly on different paths at the moment but I’ll always be there for him and as I know he’ll always be there for me.
Valentine Low is a royal correspondent who has covered the royal family for The Times of London since 2008, according to his profile on The Times’ website. In his role, he has traveled overseas with the Queen, the Prince and Princess of Wales, and other members of the royal family.
In Low’s book, which is released in the UK on Thursday, he said that William used WhatsApp to message Harry and ask for a meeting the day after the documentary aired.
“This put Harry and Meghan into a spin. What should they do?” Low wrote, adding that Harry was initially in favor of a meeting before discovering that William would have to inform his private secretary to clear his schedule.
“He was so concerned that William’s team would leak the visit to the Press that he would rather not see his brother than risk it getting into the papers. To everyone who knew what was going on, this was heartbreaking,” Low wrote.
“It highlighted the dysfunction at the heart of so many royal relationships, and how members of the Royal Family so rarely pick up the phone to speak to each other directly. Instead, they communicate via the apparatus around them. And the result is mistrust and division,” he added.
Low also reports that William and Kate Middleton’s team felt that Harry and Meghan were trying to overshadow their tour of Pakistan, which coincided with their documentary release.
“William and Kate’s team was not happy, it seems, and saw it as a deliberate attempt to knock the couple out of the headlines. Relations between the two households became quite tense,” Low wrote.
Representatives for The Duke of Sussex and Prince of Wales did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.