ON A SUNDAY in late January, Prince Harry —Duke of Sussex, California resident and U.K. expat—found himself in an unlikely place: the mountains of Utah, surrounded by a group of Girl Scouts.
Harry was there with his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, for the premiere of Cookie Queens , a documentary about the Girl Scout cookies program that the couple officially joined as its 17th and 18th executive producers one month earlier. Their addition lent the documentary a Sussex sheen, as paparazzi captured the couple walking the Park City streets and posing with scouts who boasted individual records of selling more than 10,000 boxes of cookies a cycle.
In a London courtroom days earlier, Harry had marked the finale to another project: a legal broadside against British tabloid press tactics that he says contributed to his 2020 decision to flee the U.K. He gave evidence for over two hours against the publisher of the Daily Mail , laying out how the outlet’s intrusion had caused him to become paranoid and distrustful, and ultimately resulted in him stepping back from the life he’d known as a working British royal.
While the so-called “spare” appeared to fight back tears during his final statement to the judge, his brother, the heir, was just two hours’ drive away on the Windsor Estate. Prince William spent his week gamely performing for the very same cameras Harry sought so hard to evade.
The king-in-waiting traveled to Scotland to engage in the kind of public performances that modern royals are expected to undertake in front of clicking photographers. William watched as his wife, Catherine, known as Kate, tried her hand at helping weave a two-mile-long tartan scarf at a mental health charity. The prince was later filmed sliding down the ice on one knee to release a curling stone at Scotland’s National Curling Academy.
Despite being in the same country, the brothers didn’t meet and made no plans to do so.
Six long years after Harry roiled the royals with “Megxit,” a new chapter has emerged in the family dynamic, one that spells out possible futures for the monarchy itself. The brothers’ strained relationship is both an ordinary story of siblings growing apart and a referendum on the world’s most famous hereditary institution.
This account of the brothers’ diverging paths is based on interviews with more than a dozen personal and professional associates.
William has spent most of the past six years becoming a king-in-waiting, and the most popular face of the family since the boys’ grandmother Queen Elizabeth II died in 2022 after 70 years on the throne. In William and Kate, the House of Windsor sees a chance for restoration and a renewed interest in a young king with a young family.
While William’s future appears more predictable than ever, Harry, a man who grew up in Kensington Palace and remains fifth in line to the British throne, today lives far from Britain, literally and figuratively. Recent business ventures have struggled, the Hollywood production deals that initially subsidized his exit are drying up , and his nonprofit arm laid off much of its staff shortly before Christmas.
Those who know Harry describe him as happily settled into family life in Montecito, continuing to advocate for the causes he cares about, and often starting his day as his older brother does: with school drop-off. But some who have spent time with him in recent months have also found him adrift and isolated, with Meghan chasing new pursuits as he passes the time in his sleepy new hometown.
The fact that Harry and Meghan fled the U.K. symbolizes to their supporters that the crown has calcified into what they see as an anachronistic and racist institution. Their entrepreneurial efforts in the U.S. seem to others evidence of the crass opportunism hidden beneath the patina.
King Charles entertains calls from Harry, and vice versa, but William has cut ties with his brother as he sketches out plans for a reign free of the kind of familial blowups— from Uncle Andrew on down—that have tainted the Windsor brand over the past four decades.
William, 43 years old, and Harry, 41, haven’t spoken in years, and it’s unlikely they will ever fully make up, according to colleagues, friends and associates of both men. “The prospects of reconciliation are pretty remote,” says Sally Bedell Smith, who has written several royal biographies. “There are just so many wounding and damaging revelations.”
In at least one area, though, it appears as though a detente may come soon. Harry, who spent the past few years throwing dirt at the royal family after decamping to California, has been trying to mend fences with his father, King Charles, who is in treatment for cancer.
The Duke of Sussex’s aides are optimistic that the U.K. government will grant Harry’s family taxpayer-funded police protection when visiting Britain, opening the path for Meghan and the couple’s two children to make the trip over from the West Coast this year. The culmination of the prince’s various legal battles with the press could also smooth the way for father and son to be publicly reconciled at an Invictus Games event for wounded servicemen in 2027, aides say. (A public reunion while the prince’s legal battles continue against the U.K.’s biggest tabloids could be fraught for the palace, observers say.)
Still, the more Harry struggles to forge a new existence, the more he appears to be refocusing on what he knows best: riffing on his own persona of the amiable, accessible royal, undertaking pseudo-royal visits to draw attention to good deeds across the globe. When William comes to the throne, Harry will always be in the background, a foil, a potential distraction and a constant reminder of a regal brotherly duo that could have been.
In a royal life already marked by tragedy, this latest act could cast Harry in an appropriately Shakespearean role, a Banquo’s ghost at Prince William’s table.
THE BROTHERS GREW UP as sandy-haired schoolboys always under the camera’s eye, their fraternal relationship forged by loss and memorialized by the image of them walking side by side behind their mother Diana’s casket on a September morning in 1997.
epa06172093 The Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry lay flowers given to them by members of the public outside Kensington Palace in London on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the death of Princess Diana in London Britain, 30 August 2017. It will be 20 years since the death of Princess Diana on 31 August 2017 when she was killed in a car accident in Paris, France, on 31 August 1997. EPA/STR UK AND IRELAND OUT
epa01104661 Prince William (R) and Prince Harry (C) arrive at the Guards Chapel, Duke of Wellington Barracks in Central London, England 31 August 2007, to attend the service on the 10th anniversary of the death of Princess Diana. The event was organised by her two sons Prince William and Prince Harry. EPA/GERRY PENNY
As teenagers, they wrestled with a constant spotlight on their dating lives and school activities as two of the world’s most eligible bachelors. Everything from their birthday parties to their hairlines was scrutinized. But to the public, the brothers always had a camaraderie rooted in sadness; they had only each other to fully understand what they had been through.
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The two brothers were close, flanking their grandmother on the royal balcony or smiling on the sidelines of a polo match. In Harry’s lawsuits against various British tabloids, he cites how he and his brother would regularly discuss their private lives with each other, including leaving detailed voicemails on each other’s phones.
When William married Kate, Harry would write of seeing his brother off to a life where he would no longer be the future king’s closest companion.
“Who shall separate us?” he wrote in his memoir. “Life, that’s who.”
Harry’s life took a dramatic turn after he married Meghan in 2018. At the time it was billed as a public relations masterstroke for the monarchy, which was now modernizing by welcoming a mixed-race American celebrity into its ranks. The fairy tale quickly went sour as the couple chafed at the confines of regal life, complaining they were hounded by what they described as an at times racist tabloid press. The tensions reached a boiling point, and in early 2020 they announced their exit.
For a time, it looked as though Megxit had gone according to plan. The couple settled in Montecito, a coastal haven 90 miles northwest of Los Angeles near Santa Barbara. They had a production deal at Netflix and another one at Spotify, and Harry secured millions of dollars to write his memoir, Spare , about a life in waiting.
Prince Harry’s autobiography Reserven, also called Spare in english, is ready for sale at the Boghallen bookshop in Copenhagen, January 10, 2023. Ritzau Scanpix/Ida Marie Odgaard via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS – THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY. DENMARK OUT. NO COMMERCIAL OR EDITORIAL SALES IN DENMARK.
While working on the autobiography with a ghostwriter, Harry saw the book as a chance to set the record straight, though he did wonder out loud to associates whether he was making a mistake in writing it. A Netflix documentary that detailed the Sussexes’ escape from the clutches of a suffocating royal family and a tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey on CBS had already put relations with the palace on life support.
In September 2022, William made an impromptu call to Harry to suggest they walk out of Windsor Castle together to greet crowds who had gathered to mourn the death of Queen Elizabeth. The crowds were expecting William and Kate to show up; and the addition of Harry and Meghan was so last minute that it caught even the couple off guard.
The episode, far from rekindling a sibling bond, turned out to be a bookend in the two brothers’ relationship. The couples haven’t been seen together since.
Spare , published four months later, may have described the life of the second-born son, but its title did not describe the author’s approach. The propriety of the Windsor clan was shucked for juicy details on Harry losing his virginity behind a pub (“she spanked my ass”) and the tense conversations with family members about his impending exit. He even dared to criticize the monarchy itself and the finances required to sustain it.
“Of course, some members of my family will never forgive me for writing a book,” Harry later told the BBC. “Of course, they will never forgive me for lots of things.”
Britain’s Prince William and his fiancee Kate Middleton (L) pose for a photograph in St. James’s Palace, central London November 16, 2010. Britain’s Prince William is to marry his long-term girlfriend Kate Middleton next year, after an on-off courtship lasting nearly a decade, bringing months of speculation about his intentions to an end. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett (BRITAIN – Tags: SOCIETY ROYALS ENTERTAINMENT PROFILE)
FOR WILLIAM , Spare was a gut punch, people who know him say. Not only did it damage the family brand in his view, it severed a bond of trust between the brothers.
Spare painted William as the hotheaded older brother who pushed his sibling to the ground during an argument. It shattered the Windsor mantra of “never complain, never explain,” stripping back the mystique of monarchy, revealing a somewhat dysfunctional family trapped inside an institution it struggles to manage.
“William takes his privacy very seriously,” says Robert Hardman, author of The Making of a King: King Charles III and the Modern Monarchy . “The fact that Harry’s book said out loud all those things said in private, that really hurt.” Hardman says William never read the book in full and was instead briefed by aides on its contents.
William publicly commented only once on the Sussexes’ allegations, to deny insinuations they had made to Winfrey that the family was racist. Soon that saga was eclipsed by a darker, much more serious familial crisis. In early 2024, Kate underwent a procedure on her abdomen during which doctors discovered cancer . Soon after, King Charles got his diagnosis . William dialed back his public engagements, and for a long stretch, Kate largely disappeared from public view until they saw fit to tell their children about the diagnosis. Last year, Kate confirmed she is in remission from cancer. Buckingham Palace says Charles is responding well to treatments.
Next to the happy-go-lucky Harry, William always came off as the earnest, somewhat colder older brother who seemed to march solemnly toward the inevitable fate of being burdened by the crown. William’s persona has softened with age—and, it appears, to an extent, by design.
On a recent crisp November Tuesday in northern Wales, some 50 people crowded near a beach cafe in Colwyn Bay to catch a glimpse of the Prince of Wales. It was a mixture of old and young. A lady brought two best-in-show dogs to meet him. A mother rocked a stroller. A group of young marine conservationists stood nervously in line waiting to greet the royal. Security officials dressed in Barbour jackets and earpieces discreetly corralled the crowd.
A polite cheer erupted when Prince William’s motorcade pulled up. William, dressed in a dark blue knee-length coat and cashmere sweater, stepped out and worked the crowd.
“How’s the weather been?” he asked one onlooker. “You must be a local!” he joshed with a man wearing shorts in the cold. An old woman hugged him and started to cry.
This is the de rigueur work of what William’s officials call an “away day”—when the prince heads every other week into the provinces to sprinkle some royal stardust. It’s the kind of bread-and-butter regal engagement that helped cement The Firm’s place in the hearts of the British public, the royals mixing with real Brits in all corners of the realm. William, as the Prince of Wales, has a particular duty to get out and be seen in Wales proper. His mantra, says one palace official, is to be Prince for Wales.
HARRY AND MEGHAN’S lasting absence has created a manpower problem. William and Kate are the only full-time working British royals under the age of 60. The younger Windsors are eschewing the grinding rounds of endless ribbon-cutting their forebears engaged in to try to make fewer, more high-impact interventions heralded to the nation via social media.
William is also looking to lay the groundwork to become a different kind of monarch than King Charles, aiming for a less formal, less stuffy style. Unlike his father, who has carved a niche as a somewhat quirky renaissance-man-turned-grandfather to the nation, William cuts a more norm-core jib: His primary hobby appears to be soccer, in particular his favorite team, Aston Villa. He champions environmental causes, influenced by his father, and mental health awareness, a campaign his wife steered him toward.
While he is destined to become the supreme governor of the Church of England, he isn’t an assiduous churchgoer. His family will likely never live in the drafty Buckingham Palace, having recently signed a 20-year lease on a less grandiose mansion on the Windsor Estate with no live-in staff. The prince fires off WhatsApp messages to aides running the Duchy of Cornwall, a large tract of land traditionally handed to the heir of the British throne, and often dives into the weeds of running the estate. He is also softening the stiff upper lip that once personified his family’s approach; William was filmed recently tearing up after talking to a woman whose husband had died by suicide.
So far, his low-key earnestness has struck a chord with the British public, with nearly 71% approving of him. He is Britain’s most popular royal.
And herein lies one of the central ironies of the Windsor story today: Those who have worked with Harry in the U.S. say he would have also made a great working royal.
Since leaving his royal duties, Harry has embarked on tours of foreign countries that, from a distance, resemble those of the Windsor travels around the Commonwealth. He is a natural with kids and strangers, and colleagues have been touched when he talks of inheriting a role of service from his mother. He remains the driving force of the Invictus Games, which started with veterans, including some injured on the same tour as the prince.
Last year, he traveled around Britain meeting with charity leaders and army veterans and engaging in balloon fights with children, with the kind of warm approach that had once made him so popular in the country. Shortly after, he visited Ukraine to meet with injured veterans. He raised eyebrows in Buckingham Palace when he then traveled to Canada to meet military veterans in the lead-up to Remembrance Day, traditionally a centerpiece event for the British royal family, where fallen soldiers are honored.
Over the Remembrance Day weekend, however, the contrast returned. In the U.K., William and Kate spent the weekend in black, attending solemn ceremonies and wreath-layings for fallen soldiers. Harry and Meghan were in black too—for a 70th birthday party for Kris Jenner with a James Bond theme, thrown by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The Sussexes were photographed heading into the black-tie party, also attended by Beyoncé, Adele, Bill Gates and six Kardashians.
@dailymailMeghan Markle and Prince Harry joined a parade of world-famous names at Kris Jenner’s James Bond-themed 70th birthday bash in Beverly Hills on Saturday. Kris, who previously celebrated turning 60 with a party inspired by The Great Gatsby, is said to have opted for 007 this year as a play on the number 70, via Page Six. Read more at Daily Mail♬ original sound – Daily Mail
Jenner and her daughter Kim Kardashian posted photos of Harry and Meghan at the party, but then quickly deleted them—which only generated mystery that drew more attention to undefined their attendance.
“We were told that it was totally cool to post. And then after it was posted, I think they realized it was Remembrance Day, and they didn’t want to be seen at a party,” Kardashian said in late January on a podcast hosted by her sister Khloé.
The foreign tours are rolling on in 2026, with the couple recently visiting Jordan where they met with wounded children from Gaza. A trip to Australia is in the works for next month.
The couple’s glitzy life in California has left them with bills to pay, and so far the Sussex entrepreneurial efforts have been a mixed bag. After Megxit, Harry and Meghan tried in vain to get a best-of-both-worlds setup, pitching to continue to represent the monarchy while also chasing commercial interests. Harry’s grandmother would not let them.
Their Netflix deal, which Harry saw as an opportunity to produce David Attenborough–style documentaries, has not been renewed. Though an initial documentary on the couple scored high ratings with further details on Megxit, viewership for Meghan’s more recent how-to show, With Love, Meghan , fell this last season. Instead, the streaming service has opted for a first-look deal with the production division of the couple’s Archewell firm, meaning it has the first right to pick up any project it produces but doesn’t otherwise fund the company.
In 2025, Meghan pivoted to consumer products, launching As Ever, an online marketplace of jams, dried flowers and other home goods that she started with help from Netflix employees. At Netflix’s headquarters, employees were encouraged to take home some leftover perishable inventory. Last week, As Ever and Netflix announced the companies were ending their partnership, leaving Meghan’s firm to operate independently. (Meghan, meanwhile, has expressed an interest in returning to acting—and filmed a cameo in an upcoming Amazon MGM production in which she plays herself.)
In recent times, the couple would emerge from separate offices at their Montecito home to work jointly on the Archewell Foundation, which they launched to raise awareness of issues ranging from vaccination to social-media abuse. But in December, the foundation staff were blindsided when they were told it was shutting down, according to people who worked with it. The couple plan to narrow their philanthropic efforts to grant-giving and similar dispersals, rather than running a nonprofit themselves—a move that will reduce overhead costs, former employees say.
Following Meghan’s entrepreneurial bent, Harry began putting plans together last year to launch his own venture, but that is a longer-term goal. The couple have had major turnover in staff. When their head of communications left last year, she was the 11th person to exit the role since they left the U.K.
The dissolving of the foundation has left the couple with little to work on together, say former employees. Meghan continues to try to expand As Ever. Harry is known to play polo at a nearby club, and the couple socialize with entertainment executives with homes in the area, such as Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos, who gave them their first major production deal.
The prince undertakes paid speaking work, including in December traveling to Toronto to address the Ontario Real Estate Association. But for much of the time, Harry is at home. The town around the Sussexes looks like a sun-kissed version of a Windsor Estate, with green acres and wide expanses.
IT’S NOT THE FIRST TIME that the Windsor franchise has dealt with an estranged sibling living across the water. In 1936, William and Harry’s great-grandfather George VI came to the throne after what threatened to be an existential crisis for the British crown. George’s older brother Edward VIII abdicated to marry a divorced American, Wallis Simpson.
epa06749565 Britain’s Prince Harry (L), Duke of Sussex and Meghan (R), Duchess of Sussex exit St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle after their royal wedding ceremony, in Windsor, Britain, 19 May 2018. The couple have been bestowed the royal titles of Duke and Duchess of Sussex on them by the British monarch. EPA/NEIL HALL / POOL
FILE PHOTO: Britain’s Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex exit St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle after their royal wedding ceremony, in Windsor, Britain, 19 May 2018. NEIL HALL/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo
Telling his own story decades later, Harry would recount how royal custom dictated he ask his grandmother for permission to marry Meghan. Meghan had divorced a talent manager in 2014, a taint on her résumé from The Firm’s perspective. When Harry confided to friends his plans to propose to an American divorcée, the Duke of Windsor was invoked. (His grandmother’s ultimate reply, as recounted in Harry’s memoir: “Well, then, I suppose I have to say yes.”)
In Edward’s time, a pliant British press didn’t call into question the future of the monarchy. But Edward created a long tail of ignominy. A year later, in 1937, he had tea with Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany and was later sent into semi-exile in the Bahamas amid fears his views on appeasement could prove an embarrassment to the British establishment.
Edward, who settled in France, later threw up the kinds of headaches that will feel familiar to King Charles. While no longer a de facto working royal, Edward lobbied relentlessly for Simpson to be granted the title Her Royal Highness.
Once outside the royal fold, the then–Duke of Windsor needed to raise cash to pay for his lifestyle. In 1951, he published the first royal tell-all memoir, A King’s Story , which flew off the shelves and painted him as a victim of an establishment stitch up. He also took part in a CBS interview with Edward R. Murrow to promote his wife’s memoir, which followed shortly after. He died near Paris in 1972.
Ultimately, however, the royal family survived, and actually thrived, largely by appearing to ignore the Duke of Windsor in public.
The same strategy is being applied to the Duke of Sussex, but some royal watchers fret that the relationship could get worse before it gets better. The Duchess of Sussex could write her own memoirs or more freely air her views on American politics, though associates say she has been loath to weigh in on any topic that might invite the slightest controversy. Harry has in the past hinted he has enough leftover material from Spare to write a new book.
Others see the only way forward as reconciliation and bringing Harry back into some sort of royal orbit. The stumbling block, says the author Bedell Smith, is that Harry doesn’t seem inclined to apologize. “It would be nice to have that reconciliation part now,” Harry said last year. “If they don’t want that, that’s entirely up to them.”
Both brothers’ decisions are driven in part by an identical desire: to avoid inflicting on their own families a repeat of their own childhood trauma of seeing their mother chased to her death by paparazzi. William has doubled down on royal life, ensconcing his children in the privacy of the Windsor Estate with the aim of giving them as normal a life as possible. Harry has cut himself off to also try to build something better for his children on the other side of the world. He and Meghan are vigilant about personal security and keeping their children away from unsanctioned cameras, whether wielded by professionals or their own neighbors.
The result: The trauma that bound the brothers together as young men ultimately drove them apart in parenthood.
For now, the hidebound traditions of royalty loom over their relationship. Harry remains family and fifth in line to the British throne. But when William becomes king, he will be able to wield power over the Sussexes, including the ability to strip them and their children of their titles if they step out of line or, in an extreme circumstance, removing his brother entirely from the line of succession.
And if Harry were ever to remarry, he would have to ask the king to consent first.
Main image was converted to black & white .
Write to Erich Schwartzel at erich.schwartzel@wsj.com and Max Colchester at Max.Colchester@wsj.com
