Prince William ‘declined several offers’ to appear in Princess Diana documentaries

Last week, Prince Harry’s team confirmed something long-rumored: that Harry is planning to produce or take part in a documentary about his late mother Princess Diana. The planned project will likely be for Netflix, and it will be timed around the 30th anniversary of Diana’s death next year. Interesting sidenote: I think we got that confirmation from Team Sussex because Charles Spencer let it slip in his Swan Song promotion that Harry was already talking about doing his own Diana project. Anyway, soon after that announcement, “sources” piped up about Prince William getting multiple approaches about participating in other Diana documentaries, and something about how William is “thinking hard” about it. Well, over the weekend, the Times confirmed that, actually, William won’t do or say anything around the 30th anniversary. Obviously, Tom Sykes had a completely measured take on all of this.

As readers of The Royalist will know, I have been reporting since last year that Prince Harry was planning to make a film about his mother for Netflix to mark the 30th anniversary of her death next year. The reliability of my sources was confirmed this week when sources in Harry’s camp told the Telegraph that he and Meghan were indeed planning such a film, which also explains why they have come back to a country that hates them.

I had also been hearing that William was being approached to make a film of his own, and that he was considering it. The Sunday Times reports today that he has in fact “declined several offers to make or appear in a documentary tribute to his late mother as the date approaches.”

I’m sure that’s correct, not least because the Times on Friday said that William had a meeting on Thursday with Matt Brittin, the BBC’s director general. It was literally a one-line mention, and no detail of what was discussed has emerged, when it should really be a huge story.

The BBC certainly was, I was told, one of the organizations looking to make a big Diana film for next year. I can’t help thinking that the meeting may have been William telling them, definitively, where to go, after his uncle’s interview with Laura Kuenssberg, which gave Spencer a prime BBC platform to air all his accusations against the King, especially the disgusting allegation that Charles sounded “giddily elated, like a lottery winner” when the two men first spoke after Diana’s death.

Kuenssberg did challenge him on that. Asked whether he could actually be sure that was what Charles was thinking, Spencer replied, “I cannot be sure,” adding that he was assuming from the tone that it was a possibility. That was it.

The description of Charles as elated is in marked contrast to Harry’s own account, in Spare, of his father coming to sit on his bed at Balmoral and struggling to get the words out. It is in marked contrast to the fact that Charles wept when he had to travel to Paris and view her body. And it is in marked contrast to what has been widely reported about his first reaction to the news, as recorded by that author Penny Junor: “They’re all going to blame me, aren’t they? The world’s going to go completely mad.” He understood instantly that his ex-wife’s death would be laid at his door and that it had derailed the plan for Camilla to be Queen by at least a decade.

It is true that Charles, after her death, certainly did launch a campaign to blacken Diana’s name, as we discussed with journalist Phil Craig on the Royalist podcast last week. That is documented. But it is a different charge from the one Spencer is making, and I’m sure William, who has had his difficulties with his father over the years but still respects his rank, was aggrieved that the BBC handed Spencer the platform to air his unproven allegations.

There are a lot of high-stress words being flung around at the moment about William’s state of mind. William is “furious”; William is “spitting blood” about Spencer’s memoir. That is not what I’m hearing. The word I am hearing, over and over again, is “dismayed,” and beyond that, very, very little. This has been the policy of William’s side ever since Catherine’s cancer diagnosis: complete disengagement from what they see as damaged, dangerous, toxic individuals. William and Catherine’s path is resonating enormously with the public, because so many people have difficult people in their own lives, and “detach with love” is increasingly the received wisdom on how to deal with them, whether they are family members or friends you have fallen out with.

William is totally right not to get involved, not least because making his own film would a) suck up all his bandwidth for the royal year ahead b) create a massive amount of publicity for Harry’s film, and c) contradict what William said on the 20th anniversary, when the brothers appeared together in ITV’s Diana, Our Mother: “We won’t be doing this again. We won’t speak as openly or publicly about her again.”

William now has such a high level of trust and confidence that people are inclined to see the best in him. With Harry, the absolute inverse is true. People will widely assume he is cashing in. Harry is going to make this film; he is going to be seen as a hypocrite and as making money out of his mother’s legacy, while William has been asked to do the same and is not going to. That doesn’t mean William won’t give his endorsement to a film (perhaps made by ITV rather than the BBC). There might be photographs or royal archive access provided, or a nod given to friends to cooperate, but William is right not to get involved personally.

[From The Royalist Substack]

Of all the lies the royalists tell, I find this one the most egregious: that Diana’s death “derailed the plan for Camilla to be Queen by at least a decade.” Horses-t. While Camilla basically had to go into hiding for a few years – because she was correctly blamed for destroying Diana’s life too – the parallel universe where Diana had lived would have made it much, much harder for Camilla’s image to be whitewashed. Anytime Camilla stepped out, Diana would be there, sucking up all of the oxygen and calling Camilla “the Rottweiler.” It would be a side-by-side comparison and Camilla would lose every round. The ONLY way Camilla marries Charles in 2005 is if Diana is dead or permanently exiled.

As for William versus Harry over Diana’s memory… in my opinion, William doesn’t want to do a documentary because he doesn’t have anything to say publicly about Diana at this point. I don’t buy that William is even enraged by Harry’s plans either – this idea that the brothers are fighting over Diana’s memory and legacy is mostly a media fiction. William has, in essence, given Harry the playing field and it’s been that way for years. I also don’t buy that “the public” would be skeptical of a Diana documentary made by Harry. I think most people would feel like “oh, this is going to be the definitive documentary if Harry produced it.”

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.