Friends of Camilla, the Queen Consort, have denied her step-son Prince Harry’s “unfair” claims in “Spare” that she fed negative stories to the press about him as part of a media campaign to help her marry into the royal family, saying the “last thing she could care about is being queen.”
“All Camilla ever did was have the bad luck to fall in love with a prince,” a confidant exclusively told The Daily Beast of Camilla, 75, who married King Charles, 74, in 2005 after the public scandal of their affair in the 1990s led to his disastrous divorce from Harry’s mother, Princess Diana.
Harry, who previously avoided discussing his stepmother in his and Meghan Markle’s infamous Oprah interview and Netflix docuseries, accuses her in “Spare” of being a slippery schemer who “sacrificed” him to the “PR altar” as part of a “campaign aimed at marriage [to Charles] and eventually the crown.”
The Daily Beast’s source, however, scoffed at Harry’s portrayal.
“Literally the last thing she could care about is being queen. It’s absurd, and anyone who knows her knows it is absurd,” they said.
“All she ever wanted was to support the man she loved.”
Another source close to the royal family told the outlet that Harry’s attacks on Camilla will likely be a turning point in his relationship with his father.
“It’s profoundly unfair to drag Camilla into it,” the source said, adding that Charles is “betrayed, bewildered and angered” by his son’s statements.
Both sources’ comments corroborated similar predictions from last October, when a palace insider told the outlet that Charles would not tolerate Harry making cruel remarks about Camilla.
“It is one thing for Harry to attack Charles, he can take it on the chin, but if Harry forces him to choose, by laying into Camilla in his book, I have no doubt he will choose Camilla,” the source said, noting that the new king is “incredibly protective” of his second wife.
The Montecito-based prince also claimed in his memoir that he and his brother, Prince William, begged their father not to marry “the Other Woman” before ultimately supporting his decision to go ahead with the wedding.
Harry, 38, also doubled-down in a 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper, in which he described Camilla as a “dangerous” person obsessed with “the need for her to rehabilitate her image.”
“If you are led to believe…that being on the front page, having positive headlines, positive stories written about you, is going to improve your reputation or increase the chances of you being accepted as monarch by the British public, then that’s what you’re going to do,” he explained.
Perhaps aware that lashing out at his stepmother compromised his tenuous ties to the royal family, Harry himself walked back his statements in a conversation with Good Morning America’s Michael Strahan.
“We understood that she’d been trapped like everyone else in the riptide of events,” he said, clarifying that he feels “compassion” for the Queen Consort and does not view her as an “evil stepmother.”
Royal confidants, however, are unsure that Harry can climb his way back into the fold after his explosive claims. According to a report by the Independent this week, King Charles will invite Harry and Meghan to his coronation in May, but “it would be very hard for Harry and Meghan to be there given everything that has been said in the interviews and the book.”
“The family expects Harry and Meghan to find a reason not to be there,” the insider explained.
While possibilities of a tense reunion remain unclear, members of the royal family showed brave faces on Thursday: Prince William and Kate Middleton, now Prince and Princess of Wales, presented a united front at the opening of the Royal Liverpool Hospital, while King Charles was all smiles in a kilt at the Mid-Deeside Community Shed in Aboyne, Scotland.
