What of Prince Harry? Lloyd recalls the younger Windsor brother being a tonic for William, who was often uncomfortable in the face of adoring royal fans, describing Harry as ‘the cheeky, irrepressible one, always there to josh William out of his awkwardness.’ The 2004 wedding of Lady Tamara Grosvenor and Edward van Cutsem, both family friends of the royals, serves as a prime example, with Harry teasing the future Prince of Wales following cries of ‘Marry me, William’ from the crowd. By 2009, however, things seemed to be getting a little more strained. Lloyd cites a photo shoot at RAF Shawbury, where it seemed like the pair were faking the conviviality that was captured on film. When William tied the knot with Kate Middleton in 2011, the future Duke of Sussex ‘looked quite fed up’, a feeling Harry would later confirm in Spare, the biography that took any apparent feud between the pair into the public eye.
In the memoir, Prince Harry revealed that, while the public may have been led to believe that William named him best man, the role in fact went to James Meade and Thomas van Straubenzee. ‘The public had been told that I was to be best man, but that was a bare-faced lie,’ Harry wrote. ‘The public expected me to be best man, and thus the Palace saw no choice but to say that I was. In truth, Willy didn’t want me giving a best-man speech. He didn’t think it safe to hand me a live mic and put me in a position to go off script. I might say something wildly inappropriate. He wasn’t wrong,” Harry writes.’
While the Duke of Sussex recalled his brother looking gaunt-faced and red-eyed on the morning of his wedding – nor was Harry too happy about being forced to wear the uniform of the Blues and Royals – everything went off without a hitch, and the future Prince and Princess of Wales drove off into the sunset. Left behind, however, Prince Harry was feeling stormy.