Prince Harry has revealed that he only cried once when his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, died in 1997.
In a new interview clip promoting the publication of his autobiography Spear, Prince Harry has told how he and Prince William were unable to show any emotion when meeting the bereaved in public.
He told ITV’s Tom Bradby that he cried when his mother was buried.
The Duke of Sussex said he felt “some guilt” as he walked through the flower-leaving crowd outside Kensington Palace.
Princess Diana’s absence from Prince Harry’s life is highlighted as a theme throughout the sparring.
The book is not due to be published until January 10, but excerpts were leaked after some copies went on sale early in Spain. BBC News has obtained a copy and is translating it.
In an ITV interview broadcast on Sunday evening, Prince Harry said “everyone knows where he was” when his mother died in a car crash in Paris in August 1997.
He said he looked back on the footage of himself and his brother meeting the bereaved a few days later.
“I cried once, at a funeral, and you know I go into detail about how strange it was and actually there was some guilt that I felt, and I think William did too. “I felt it, walking out of Kensington Palace,” he said.
“There were 50,000 bouquets of flowers for our mother and there we were shaking people’s hands, smiling…
“And those wet hands that we were shaking, we couldn’t understand why their hands were wet, but it was all tears that they were wiping away.”
Prince Harry added: “Everyone thought and felt they knew our mother, and her two closest people, her two dearest people, were unable to show any emotion at that moment.”
Spears details how he walked behind his mother’s coffin at Prince Harry’s funeral, where crowds flocked to him, and how he felt unable to cry in public.
He also writes about getting a driver to take him through the road tunnel in Paris where his mother died, hoping to get closure from “a decade of unbearable pain”. have
And he says his father didn’t hug him when he broke the news, Princess Diana had died, sitting in her bed at Balmoral.
