Princess Diana’s friends reveal one bond Princes William and Harry do share despite rift

For the Prince of Wales, that meant carrying Ikea furniture up three flights of stairs in Aberdeen as he helped to prepare a home for a tenant emerging from homelessness thanks to his Homewards initiative, a project inspired by the homeless people to whom he had been introduced by his mother when he was a boy.

For the Duke of Sussex, whose return to the UK this week has shone a fresh spotlight on his complicated relationship with the royal family, it meant preparing to spend time with the charities and patronages whose work echoes her instinct to champion those in need. 

Nearly 29 years on from her tragic death, the brothers share the compassion she instilled in them, but the bond of brotherhood she hoped would continue throughout their lives has long since fractured and their lives have moved in dramatically different directions. William and Harry champion many of the causes closest to their mother’s heart, but do so from very different worlds.

Brothers divided

While in the past they might have come together to remember her, the brothers’ rift is so deep that there is no plan for them to meet during Harry’s visit and they have not spoken to one another since the late Queen’s funeral.

It’s a situation that would have been painful for their mother, who firmly believed that her beloved boys would support each other throughout their lives.

“I think she’d be very sad, and would do her very best to pull them together,” says royal biographer Ingrid Seward, who knew the Princess personally.

“I think she’d be very sad, but not surprised. They were always very different and she understood that. But what would really upset her is the fact that they are the only two people in the world who know what it’s like to be in their situation.

“The one thing that still unites them is the compassion and empathy they inherited from her.”

Ingrid, who spoke to the Princess at length over lunches, tells HELLO!: “They always fought, they scrapped like boys do, but I don’t think if Diana had been alive they would ever have fallen out to such an extent. I don’t think it would have happened because Diana would have intervened.”

A mother’s love

“As a mother, she was absolutely fantastic. And, as she always said, the boys were her life. She did say to me that ‘William is William. And we sometimes don’t get on at all because he is so like me. And Harry is fine.’ William was the sensitive one and Harry would just skim through life.

“They were her life and maybe she sometimes smothered them. But I think that’s totally understandable, as someone in her situation, because that’s really what she had, her boys.”

Diana never got to meet George, 12, Charlotte, 11, Louis, eight, Archie, seven, and Lilibet, five, her five grandchildren, but photographs of her grace their homes and their fathers talk to them about “Granny Diana” to keep her memory alive.

At the time of writing, Harry had been tipped to make a trip with his family to Althorp, the Spencer family’s ancestral home, where his mother is buried, during their planned visit to the UK.

As William joked back in 2017: “She’d be a nightmare grandmother. She’d love the children to bits, but she’d be an absolute nightmare. She’d come in probably at bath time, cause an amazing amount of scene, bubbles everywhere, bathwater all over the place, and then leave.”

How Diana’s approach changed the royals

Says Ingrid: “She just adored children, she was magical with children. When she was at one of her schools, one of the house mistresses said to her: ‘You must remember that when you’re with old people or children, you must come to their level. If somebody old is in a hospital bed, you must sit on the bed and come to their level. And with children, you kneel and look at them in the face and you just chat away.’

“Diana was very young when she started this and she automatically did that. And I don’t remember any member of the royal family doing that before, especially the kneeling. It was just something that I think you’re born with.”

Compassion came naturally to Diana, says Ingrid, as it does now for her sons, who also have inherited her skill for connecting with others. Whether it’s William’s eyes filling with tears at the story of a bereaved mother and wife, or Harry playing with sick children supported by the charity WellChild, they share her ability to make others feel seen.

Jacques Azagury, the designer behind some of Diana’s most daring looks, recalls her magnetic charm. He says that “she had this amazing power to make you feel completely at ease”. Of their first meeting, he recalls: “Within two or three minutes, we were talking as if we’d known each other all our lives.”

A fashion icon

Jacques, who worked with the Princess for a decade, created some of her most dazzling evening dresses. She understood the power of her image and worked hard for it.

“Everybody was following her from day to day,” he tells HELLO!. “Every day she would be on the front page with a new dress, with a new story. And they really did feel they knew her personally. And she didn’t back away from that. I think she loved that.”

Yet he adds: “She was probably one of my least ‘princessy’ princesses. She knew what she wanted, she knew what she was going to get. She wouldn’t say anything until I had done the fitting and if she wanted it a bit more fitted, we would do that. She would really study herself in the mirror. She really, really trusted me.

“She would go out of her way to choose the right shoes, to choose the right jewellery for it, the right hair style, it wasn’t just one thing. It was the whole total look that she would be aware of.” Jacques also got to know Diana’s playful side, which included wanting to experiment with bolder and more high-fashion looks. 

“When it was the time of the supermodels, it was super-short skirts and exposure and a lot of the time she wanted to hitch her skirt length as high as possible. And each time we had to bring them down… She was a princess, after all. When you look at the images, they did get quite short, but she would have gone shorter had she been given the chance!”

Diana also used fashion to mark her departure from royal life and her divorce from Prince Charles. “Royals aren’t supposed to wear black apart from during mourning,” explains Jacques, “so the minute she was able to, she wore as much black as possible.”

Of her need for privacy and to get away from the confines of Kensington Palace, he says: “A few times when she was coming to the store, as opposed to me going to the palace, she would say that she just had to get away.”

It’s a pattern that both her sons have followed for their own families. William moved out to Forest Lodge in Windsor Great Park to give his children as much freedom and normality as possible while they are young. Of course, Harry went further, turning his back on royal life and moving his family to America.

Diana’s enduring appeal

Her rare combination of glamour and humanity remains central to Diana’s enduring appeal, but those who knew her say it was never simply her exquisite style or global fame that made her extraordinary – it was the way she made people feel.

“We talked about everything,” Ingrid says. “I was stunned because I thought: ‘I don’t think I talked to my closest girlfriend like this.’ She, Diana, used to sort of suck you in, in a way. She genuinely loved people and was intrigued by people and wanted to know everything about them.

“She loved to talk about her work, but said: ‘No one wants to hear about my work. They just want to hear gossip from me.’ But she did talk about it. She was very, very proud of her landmine campaign. And she had all these ideas.”

For Jacques, Diana’s warmth and humour have stayed with him above everything else. Spending time with her “was always exciting, and that lasted right to the end. With all the dresses, all the stars, all the people I dressed, the only person I really got excited about seeing every time was the Princess.”

He believes her extraordinary ability to connect with people is why her memory has endured. “She’s still very, very present, whichever way you look at it. She’s still being talked about. And we’re all here today talking about her [and] her life. And I think she really was a phenomenon that we will not see again for a very long time.”

What does he remember most? “How interested and how funny she was. She was very, very funny. She was a real laugh whenever you were with her. She was a real laugh.”

With both her sons in the UK for the first time for nearly a year, there will be no reunion and no shared tribute to the mother they adored. But despite their differences, one common bond remains – the compassion Diana instilled in them. It may not be the future she imagined for William and Harry, but as they both embody her values, they are ensuring, nevertheless, that her legacy endures.

The full interview with Ingrid and Jacques is exclusively available for our VIP community on A Right Royal Podcast, on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.