Inside the super ‘heated’ call that tore Prince William and Prince Harry’s households apart – Click to read more

A royal author has claimed that Prince William and Prince Harry had an incredibly ‘heated’ phone call that ended up being the reason they officially separated their royal households

It’s been well-known that Prince William and Prince Harry’s once close relationship has become incredibly strained for some years.

For many years before Harry’s royal exit, the brothers undertook many of their official engagements together, and they shared a royal household in Kensington Palace and ran their charitable work through the Royal Foundation. However, in March 2019, it was announced that the shared household would be officially splitting, with Kate and William’s being run separately from that of Harry and Meghan’s.

A royal author has claimed that one seriously ‘heated’ phone call between Harry and William was the catalyst for this official break between the brothers – and that it was William who, after this final straw, decided to pull the plug on the shared household. The claim was made in Robert Lacey’s book, Battle of the Brothers, which was published in 2020. The royal author claimed that after allegations were brought to Prince William by royal aide Jason Knauff that Meghan had been “bullying” staff members, the future King was not pleased, and confronted his younger brother over the allegations.

The phone call quickly became “heated”, the author claimed and eventually led to Harry hanging up the phone on his older brother. After this, William decided that the time had come to officially split their shared households and move in different directions, with Meghan and Harry opening up new offices in Buckingham Palace.

“The moment [William] heard the bullying allegations, he related to this friend, he got straight on the phone to talk to Harry – and when Harry flared up in furious defence of his wife, the elder brother persisted. Harry shut off his phone angrily, so William went to speak to him personally. The prince was horrified by what he had just been told about Meghan’s alleged behaviour, and he wanted to hear what Harry had to say,” the author claimed he was told by one of William’s friends.

The royal author also wrote, “When accounts of the rift started seeping out through the winter months that followed, it was generally assumed that the volatile Harry must have set the pace in the splitting up of the joint Kensington Palace household. He was the brother who visibly departed, stalking off to set up a new home in Windsor, with offices for himself and Meghan in Buckingham Palace.

“But the reverse was the case. It was William who made the decisive move. Following his furious confrontation with his younger brother in the autumn of 2018, the prince instructed Simon Case to start the process of dividing their two households immediately. William wished to be separated from Meghan on a day-to-day basis – and that meant being separated from his brother as well.”

Prince Harry has detailed his side of the story in a series of interviews, the Netflix documentary he made with his wife Meghan, and his bestselling memoir Spare. In his telling the allegations that Meghan had mistreated staff were untrue, and in fact the opposite had been the case, with her often making efforts to help staff members who were going through any difficulties.

However, Prince Harry did admit in his memoir that the allegations of Meghan “alienating” the staff became a point of contention between him and his brother. Harry claimed that even shortly after the Sussex’s wedding in 2018 William “blamed” Meghan for staff members crying – Harry put this down to their staff being overworked, and that “in such a climate there was no such thing as constructive criticism. All feedback was seen as an affront, an insult.”

Harry also claimed that William came to talk to him in person about Meghan’s behaviour after the couple decided to launch legal action against the Mail on Sunday for publishing extracts of a letter the Duchess had written her father Thomas. The Duke of Sussex alleged that the confrontation, which took place in 2019, became so heated that William physically attacked him, after arriving at Nottingham Cottage “piping hot” and had “parroted the press narrative” about Meghan. Representatives of Meghan have previously called the allegations of bullying a “smear campaign” and denied their veracity.

Do you have a story to tell? Email: emma.mackenzie@reachplc.com