Prince Harry at 40: ‘All he does is spend time looking back’

When the Sussexes cut loose from the monarchy in 2020, ditching tradition, hierarchy and courtiers, it was a giant gamble. On paper the Duke of Sussex got everything he wanted. Financial independence, the freedom to live and shape his young family’s future away from the pressures of royal life. But Harry’s transition into the celebrity prince of California came with painful sacrifices: a bond with his brother shattered almost certainly beyond repair, the relationship with his father strained to breaking point, and ties with the wider royal family damaged by the artillery of truth bombs he has fired since he left these shores.
On September 15 Harry will turn 40. Those closest to him say he is at a crossroads. After laying his soul bare last year with Spare, the fastest-selling non-fiction book in history, he seems torn between battling old demons and getting on with his life. “All he does is spend time looking back,” says one former adviser to Harry. “If only he could wrench his neck around and look forwards.”
Some who have known him since his army days — the time in his life that seemed to give him his strongest sense of self, and inspired him to launch the Invictus Games for injured veterans in 2014 — think he is grappling with a key unanswered question: “What is the purpose of Prince Harry and what is Prince Harry’s purpose?”, as one of his former aides puts it. “He loved the army and was very good at his job. The work with Invictus is great and fatherhood was the role he most wanted, so perhaps those are enough for him. But everything else is a bit woolly. I always thought he wanted more from life. I can’t help but think he must be wondering, ‘Where do I go from here?’ ”
As he nears his fifth decade, Harry is said to be thinking carefully about his next chapter. There are signs he is taking a breath from getting it all off his chest. Speaking to the US network CBS earlier this month about the Sussexes’ initiative promoting child safety online, Harry did not dig up the past. A far cry from their bombshell sit-down with Oprah Winfrey in 2021: he listened as Meghan spoke of wanting to protect their “amazing” children, Prince Archie, five, and Princess Lilibet, known as “Lili”, three.
A close friend of Harry reflects on how things have panned out since the late Queen decided in January 2020 that there could be no “half in, half out” route forward for the Sussexes: “He made his decision [to leave] for his family — that was the right choice and he has no regrets. One of the primary reasons for them leaving the UK was the institutional and media issues they felt they faced, so for that they must feel vindicated. But did he get what he wanted? No. The perfect scenario was to get what they originally asked for — ‘We’d like to move and still be semi-royals.’ So they’re finding another way of doing it.”
Is another way possible? Can Harry maintain a gilded existence in exile in the US — and will that be enough to satisfy a man whose biography on the Sussex.com website describes him as a “humanitarian, military veteran, mental health advocate and environmental campaigner”?
In their six-part tell-all Netflix series in December 2022, Harry said of their move to California, “We are exactly where we’re supposed to be,” but added: “I miss the UK.” Some friends are unconvinced that life has turned out as he wanted.
“I know how important it is for him to have a happy, settled family life, but you need to do more than that if you’re him,” says a source who has known Harry since his teenage years. “He has ended up isolated from his family and most of his old mates, in an environment where your friendships are not like the ones you forged as a young man. He used to love a night out in the pub and hanging out in the country with friends. Maybe he has grown into a different person, but do I think he’d really suit the Californian lifestyle? No. Now we’ve seen it all play out, what has that left him with? On the surface, an enviable lifestyle — but for the Harry I know, I can’t imagine that gilded exile in California is where he wanted to end up.”
Amid the star-studded enclave of Montecito, where the actress Gwyneth Paltrow and pop star Katy Perry are among their neighbours, the Sussexes keep a tight circle of friends, entertaining at their £11 million, nine-bedroom home — on which they were reported in Variety to have secured a mortgage of $9.5 million (£7.4 million) — overlooking the Pacific, with its gym, cinema, pool and guesthouse. Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, visits often and Meghan sees friends from her school and acting days in Los Angeles. But Harry has had to forge new friendships.
The couple are said to be close to the Canadian music mogul David Foster, 74, and his wife, Katharine McPhee, 40, a school friend of Meghan’s who has said Harry and her husband are “like father and son”. But what of Harry’s old pals — school friends, army friends and wise owls who were trusted confidants for decades?
He is still in touch with Charlie van Straubenzee, a school friend from Ludgrove, and Mark Dyer, a former equerry to the King who was a close aide to Harry and William — both are godparents to Archie. But the aftershock of his split from the royal family has shrunk his friendship group. “I miss my friends … I’ve lost a few friends in this process,” he said in the Netflix series.
Many cannot forgive Harry’s decision to air the family laundry. After Spare was published, one of his closest friends, who has faithfully kept Harry’s secrets, told me, “I can’t believe he’d stoop so low. It’s outrageously disloyal. Oprah, Netflix and then the book? Three strikes and you’re out.”
Another friend of William and Harry’s says, “Harry and Meghan could have left with dignity and decency and not trashed the institution. The conclusion is they’ve made money from trashing his family.”
One of Harry’s oldest friends says they are among the few who get “the odd WhatsApp from him”, adding, “He’s an angry boy. Things haven’t turned out how he wanted. I think he misses being over here [in Britain] desperately and wants to be admired more. Anyone who knows him feels he’d rather be top of the pops here with everyone loving him, as they do with William and Kate.”
But after quitting an institution that the majority of Britons support, and which holds a fascination for many Americans, will Harry ever be top of the pops again? A YouGov poll earlier this year showed the Princess of Wales was the most popular royal, followed by her husband. Harry and Meghan languished near the bottom — only Prince Andrew was less popular with Brits.
If Harry needed reminding of the faultlines caused by the royal rift it came in June, when he and Meghan were absent from the wedding of one of his oldest friends, the Duke of Westminster — Hugh Grosvenor — at Chester Cathedral. Grosvenor, so close to the royal brothers that he is godfather to Princes George and Archie, wanted to avoid any “awkwardness” with William, who was an usher.
But Harry’s drift away from his old pals began before the move to America. A source who worked closely with him and was often at his former homes — Nottingham Cottage at Kensington Palace and Frogmore Cottage on the Windsor estate — recalls, “It was sad to see. He used to have lots of friends coming round to see him, army mates, polo friends, then they just tailed off. Then it was the yoga guru, the wellbeing guru, everyone saying we must eat less meat and fly less. We were all scratching our heads as they were taking private jets.”
Harry may be resigned to losing some friendships, but the broken family bond is an open wound. Ahead of Spare, in an interview with the ITV broadcaster Tom Bradby, Harry said, “I would like to get my father back, I would like to have my brother back,” but “they’ve shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile”.
The comments stunned those close to the King and Prince William, after leaked copies of the book revealed Harry’s damning depictions of his family, including claims that William physically attacked him and knocked him to the floor in Nottingham Cottage’s kitchen during an argument about Meghan in 2019.
Charles was portrayed as an emotionally stunted father who married Camilla despite his sons’ pleas not to let her fill the role of “wicked stepmother”, and who was jealous of his sons’ popularity. In an interview with CBS, Harry said he had viewed Camilla as a “villain” who “left bodies in the street” in her quest to boost her image — comments that “crossed a red line” with Charles.
Harry raised further eyebrows in an interview with ITV last month, claiming the royal family’s reluctance to join his legal crusade against several tabloids for historic phone hacking allegations was “certainly a central piece” of the rift with his family — a view that seems to ignore the chasm caused by the Sussexes’ Oprah interview, in which suggestions of racism within the royal family were aired, as well as accusations that the institution callously disregarded Meghan’s mental health struggles. These claims prompted Queen Elizabeth II to respond that “some recollections may vary”.
When she died on September 8, 2022, family tensions were at boiling point. Harry was deeply hurt by some of his father’s actions leading up to her funeral. He was stung by Charles’s decision not to let him wear military uniform during the mourning period — except for the vigil at Westminster Hall with his cousins two days before the funeral — on the grounds he was no longer a working royal. He was “devastated” when his Blues and Royals uniform arrived with his grandmother’s “ER” initials stripped from the shoulder. At a vigil the previous evening the Duke of York, also no longer a working royal, had retained the initials on his vice-admiral’s uniform. A friend of Harry told me he was “heartbroken” and to avoid “humiliation” had considered wearing a morning suit. “To remove his grandmother’s initials feels very intentional,” the friend said.
The Sussexes also understood they would be at Buckingham Palace on the eve of the funeral alongside the rest of the royal family, when Charles and Camilla hosted a reception for foreign heads of state. They were initially asked to the event but their invitations were later “rescinded”, with the Palace clarifying the event was for “working members of the royal family” only.
A friend of Harry’s tells me this had difficult repercussions for the Duke of Sussex, who missed an important family briefing on the funeral as a result. “The King made some really bad decisions — it was conveyed that he didn’t want them there. For f***’s sake, this was a global reception for his grandmother, and as her grandson, he should have been there. There was a funeral briefing for the whole family at the palace just before the reception, which would have meant Harry and Meghan going to the briefing then having to leave the palace as all the guests were arriving and other family members were staying. So in the end, they didn’t go. The briefing notes didn’t arrive [via email] for them until around 11pm.” Such decisions understandably wounded Harry.
Harry keeps his hopes of reconciliation alive. After Charles revealed his cancer diagnosis in February, his younger son made a 24-hour dash to the UK to visit him at Clarence House, a meeting that lasted less than 45 minutes. “The fact that I was able to get on a plane and go to see him, and spend any time with him, I’m grateful for that,” he said on ABC’s Good Morning America a few days later, adding, “Any illness, any sickness, brings families together.”
There was no reunion, however, when Harry returned to London in May for events marking the tenth anniversary of the Invictus Games. His spokesman issued a statement implying the King was too busy: “The duke is of course understanding of his father’s diary commitments and various other priorities and hopes to see him soon.”
The Sunday Times learnt that the King had in fact agreed to Harry’s request to stay at a royal residence, hoping to make the logistics easier for them to meet, but Harry stayed in a hotel. It was later reported Harry refused Charles’s offer because it did not come with adequate security — a suggestion that bemused the King, who offered Harry digs at Buckingham Palace, one of the country’s most protected buildings.
Harry’s legal battle with the Home Office over his security is a key bone of contention between father and son. The prince lost his automatic right to round-the-clock police protection when he stepped back as a working royal, a decision he claimed was influenced by members of his father’s household who sit on the Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures. He still receives protection here on a “bespoke” basis but has said that unless full security is restored, it is not safe to bring Meghan or their children to the UK.
In February he lost a High Court challenge to overturn a ruling that there was nothing unlawful in the decision to downgrade his security, but he intends to appeal. Sussex “insiders” recently told the couple’s favoured US celebrity magazine, People, that Harry “feels the only person who can do anything about it is his father”, but calls to Charles “go unanswered”. Friends of Harry said “they are no longer speaking” but if his security were restored, it would be “swords down” . The sources also said Meghan “wishes he could let go of these lawsuits, be happy and live in the moment. She wants him to be free of all this.”
She is not the only one. A source close to the King tells me Charles wants no involvement with Harry’s Home Office duel. “His Majesty’s son is suing His Majesty’s government, and that is very tricky for the King. If they were to meet, there is a worry that son would lobby father because of the mistaken belief that the King has control over his security. For him not to have accepted the judgment of His Majesty’s government and courts is frustrating.” Other friends of Charles point out it would be “wholly inappropriate” for the monarch to intervene in a judicial process.
One friend of Charles says, “The problem for the King and other members of the family is the worry that if they have a chat with Harry, it will appear in Spare volume two. How do you regain the trust? I don’t think Harry ever can. But from the conversations I’ve had with the King, I would never say their relationship is irreparable. The King’s capacity to forgive his son is undimmed. There are other members of the royal family who are much more weighted against Harry, that’s the problem.”
One arena for a public rapprochement between father and son could be the Invictus Games, which is next staged in Canada in February and returns to the UK in 2027 in Birmingham. Some close to the King think he will want to support his son there. A friend of Charles says, “I think he would acknowledge it would be a good thing to go to. He would not want to look punitive.” Charles attended the inaugural Invictus Games in 2014 — as did William, who is not expected to go again.
The permafrost between heir and spare seems unlikely to thaw. A friend of both concedes, “I always said the brothers would be there for each other at the end of the day, and that’s been proven wrong so far.” Another close friend says, “Harry simply cannot do without his brother.” But William appears committed to making do without his sibling. For now, he has written Harry out of his script. The brothers are understood not to have spoken since the Queen’s funeral, when they “barely exchanged a word”, Harry wrote in Spare.
When the Princess of Wales publicly revealed her cancer diagnosis in March — news William did not share in advance with his brother — sources close to the Sussexes said they reached out privately to William and Kate. That contact was unreciprocated.
William is unlikely to forgive Harry any time soon for his slights against Kate in Spare, among them the suggestion she was cold towards Meghan. Those close to William say his brother rarely comes up in conversation. “This year his focus has very much been on his wife, his children and his father,” a friend says. “His brother isn’t really something that’s discussed.”
In the aftermath of the King’s coronation last year, William let it be known that he wanted his own crowning to “look and feel different”. One difference could be the absence of Harry. Friends of William say that as things stand he would not want his brother at his coronation, whenever that time comes. One of the brothers’ closest friends says, “They are estranged, which is dreadfully sad.”
Harry’s angst-ridden role as the royal spare has been happily replaced with the one he most craved: fatherhood. “Harry was always in a rush and fixated on getting married,” says a source who advised Harry inside the royal fold for years. “He wanted so badly to create his own identity, build his own family, carve out his own thing.”
Thanks to their parents’ decisions, Archie and Lili will grow up free from the confines of royal life, while keeping their royal titles. But they are also growing up with little, if any, contact with their cousins or grandfathers. The King has not seen Archie and Lili in person since the Sussexes briefly came to the UK in June 2022 for Queen Elizabeth’s platinum jubilee, and neither Archie nor Lili has met Thomas Markle, Meghan’s father, from whom she is estranged and whom Harry has never met.
Nevertheless, family life appears idyllic. Harry has been spotted cycling along local waterfronts with Archie on the back of his bike, and shares the school and nursery runs with Meghan. Family walks with their rescue dogs — beagles Guy and Mamma Mia, and Pula, a labrador — are another favourite pastime. Speaking at the SXSW conference in Texas earlier this year, Meghan described her husband as “such a hands-on dad”.
In an interview in February on Good Morning America, Harry said, “The kids are doing great, growing up like all kids do very, very fast. They’ve both got an incredible sense of humour and make us laugh and keep us grounded every single day, like most kids do. I’m just grateful to be a dad.”
Aside from the joys of fatherhood the prince wants to be known for his humanitarian work. But he will not rush into anything on a whim. “In the past, there was an urgency mentality to his decisions,” one friend says. “His headspace is a little different now. He sees he has a longer runway to add value. He wants to be a humanitarian and he should, because he’s good at that. He’s giving himself longer to see what the life he’s set up and next ten years-plus look like. Harry and Meghan should perhaps keep their heads down after a very noisy period and put the right plans in place for the future. There needs to be a bit of substance there.”
At the top of Harry’s agenda is maintaining the success of Invictus. But even his proudest achievement was subject to controversy last month when the US TV channel ESPN gave him the Pat Tillman award for his work with veterans. The mother of Tillman, an American football player who gave up his career after 9/11 to enlist in the US army, and was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in 2004, expressed her dismay: “I am shocked as to why they would select such a controversial and divisive individual to receive the award. There are recipients that are far more fitting.”
A petition to stop Harry receiving the award gained more than 70,000 signatures, while Lord West, the former first sea lord and chief of the naval staff, advised Harry to “think very hard and long” about accepting certain awards, adding that it “doesn’t travel well with people in the military”.
Harry was said to have been stung and surprised by the backlash, but accepted the award in LA with a nod to the furore: “I stand here not as Prince Harry, Pat Tillman award recipient, but rather a voice on behalf of the Invictus Games Foundation and the thousands of veterans and service personnel from over 20 nations who have made the Invictus Games a reality. This award belongs to them, not to me.”
In January, Harry — a former Apache helicopter pilot who served two tours of duty in Afghanistan — faced ridicule in some military quarters for his decision to attend the Living Legends of Aviation awards in Beverly Hills, where he collected a gold medal from John Travolta for his “significant contributions to aviation”. Harry’s appetite for gongs of late is perhaps driven by his belief that, as he said in a stinging statement after his grandmother removed his accolades, his “service is universal”.
The couple’s five-year, multimillion-pound deal with the streaming service Netflix is up next year, with question marks over its renewal. To date, their output includes their 2022 documentary Harry & Meghan and Harry’s Heart of Invictus film last year, which charted the journey of six competitors. Harry is an executive producer on an upcoming documentary about polo and Meghan is said to have finished recording a series on “the joys of cooking, gardening, entertaining and friendship” in which Harry is likely to feature.
In the 2022 documentary, Harry said he wanted to stop being viewed “as entertainment”. But in their adopted homeland, they are still fodder for parody. An episode of South Park last year lampooned the couple, depicting characters closely resembling them on a “worldwide privacy tour” — a “Princess of Canada” described as a “sorority girl, actress, influencer, victim”, and her husband, a prince who wrote a tell-all book about his family called “Waaagh!” The Hollywood Reporter included them on its “biggest losers of 2023” list, citing their “whiny Netflix documentary, whiny biography” and adding that “the Harry and Meghan brand swelled into a sanctimonious bubble just begging to be popped”.
They were mocked again at this year’s Golden Globes, when the host comedian Jo Koy quipped, “Turns out Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will still get paid millions of dollars for doing absolutely nothing — and that’s just by Netflix. How great was Imelda Staunton in The Crown, wasn’t she amazing? The portrayal of the Queen was so good Prince Harry called her and asked her for money.” This prompted laughter from the audience, including Ted Sarandos — the CEO of Netflix.
Harry is also “chief impact officer” at BetterUp, the online mental health and career-coaching company, though he was notably absent from the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, where most of the leadership team participated. When Harry joined in 2021, the CEO, Alexi Robichaux, said he would have a “meaty” role. Last year one employee told the Daily Beast website that Harry’s day-to-day responsibilities included “zero things”.
Spotify came to the same conclusion last year, prematurely calling time on the Sussexes’ multimillion-pound deal in June 2023 after deciding not to renew Meghan’s Archetypes podcast. Soon afterwards Bill Simmons, Spotify’s head of podcast innovation and monetisation, described Harry and Meghan as “f***ing grifters”.
Speaking on his own podcast, Simmons said, “I wish I had been involved in the ‘Meghan and Harry leave Spotify’ negotiation. ‘The F***ing Grifters’, that’s the podcast we should have launched with them. I have got to get drunk one night and tell the story of the Zoom I had with Harry to try and help him with a podcast idea. It’s one of my best stories… F*** them. The grifters.”
• Harry and Meghan’s team: another one bites the dust
Harry often references his late mother’s decision to break free of the monarchy as an inspiration. After her divorce in 1996 and official severing of ties with the royal family, Diana, Princess of Wales’s star burnt even brighter in America. But a friend and adviser to the royal family, who once worked closely with Harry, feels he has work to do to make his mark Stateside. “What they haven’t been able to do is create a public presence that’s respected and popular. I was in LA recently and was struck by how they’re not the topic of conversation. Everyone wanted to know about the King and Kate’s health. Harry and Meghan have dropped out of the conversation.”
Meghan hopes to reignite the conversation with her new lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard, though five months after its Instagram launch and many jam jars gifted to her friends on social media later, no products are on sale. The motto of their Archewell Foundation is “Show Up, Do Good”. But just how Harry plans to show up and do good in a way that resonates for the next 40 years is not clear — nor is where the money will come from to sustain them. The Spotify, Netflix and book agreements were each reported to be multimillion-pound deals — the exact amount is unknown — and their lifestyle does not come cheap.
Meghan, 43, remains Harry’s chief sounding board. “Most things would be impossible without you,” he wrote in Spare. Also helping her husband figure out his next move was Harry’s new chief of staff, Josh Kettler, who joined his team earlier this year and lived near the Sussexes in Santa Barbara. Kettler is said to be “smart”, business-minded and was keen to co-ordinate Harry’s various projects, but he quit recently after three months in the post.
He accompanied the Sussexes to Nigeria in May and was due to have joined the couple on a trip to Colombia this month at the invitation of the vice-president, Francia Márquez. Kettler previously held executive roles with the outdoor clothing brand Patagonia and Lionsgate Films, and describes himself as an “avid trail runner and skier and a steadfast supporter of conservation and the environment” as well as an “organiser and confidant”. Some thought he was just what Harry needed — organiser and confidant is how several of his more successful former courtiers would describe themselves. Kettler had been working with them on the Parents’ Network, the initiative they launched through Archewell this month, promoting child safety online. Perhaps his biggest challenge would have been focusing Harry on the future rather than his past, and his departure prompted plenty of coverage about the Sussexes’ turnover of staff. But a source close to Harry says: “I think this one was genuinely both agreeing the role wasn’t quite right for him during the probation period.”
Harry and Meghan’s four-day visit to Colombia, which concludes on Sunday, has been a high-profile opportunity for them to build on “Brand Sussex” and try to focus minds on their priorities. According to sources close to the couple, the trip is intended to highlight their “lifelong philanthropic endeavours” including “embracing the military community and female empowerment”. Márquez said she decided to collaborate with them after watching their Netflix documentary.
Harry’s campaign against fake news and “misinformation” was high on his agenda. At one engagement he spoke of his and Meghan’s belief that “information integrity is a fundamental right,” and at an online safety summit in Bogotá appeared to refer to the recent riots in the UK, warning that the ongoing spread of fake news and online abuse meant social cohesion had collapsed: “What happens online within a matter of minutes transfers to the streets. People are acting on information that isn’t true. It comes down to all of us to be able to spot the true from the fake. In an ideal world, those with positions of influence would take more responsibility. We are no longer debating facts. For as long as people are allowed to spread lies, abuse, harass, then social cohesion as we know it has completely broken down.”
In an interview in 2016 the prince, who once made his mark as the loveable rogue, dutiful soldier and loyal servant of the Crown, told me of his fears of becoming irrelevant. “I’m in this privileged position and I will use it for as long as I can, or until I become boring, or until George ends up becoming more interesting,” he said. “There’s nothing worse than going through a period in your life where you’re making a massive difference and then suddenly, for whatever reason it is — whether it’s media or the public perception of you — you drop off. You want to make a difference but no one’s listening to you.”
As he prepares to turn 40, in his quest to stay relevant, Harry will hope his once captive audience doesn’t tune out.