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Katie Nicholl’s new book details what King Charles was like as a parent when his children were teenagers.
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One of the King’s former aides told Nicholl he was not “present” with Harry and William.
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William and Harry often couldn’t get in touch with their father, according to Nicholl’s book.
Prince William and Prince Harry acted like teenagers because their father, King Charles III, didn’t pay enough attention to them, according to a new book.
Royal journalist Katie Nicholl published ‘The New Royals: Queen Elizabeth’s Legacy and the Future of the Crown’ on October 4, and she details what Prince William and Prince Harry’s upbringing was like through conversations with former palace staff.
According to the book, princes were often on their own as teenagers after Princess Diana’s death because King Charles was “busy”. Princess Diana died in 1997, when William was 15 and Harry was 12.
“With a busy work schedule and Camilla now a priority in his diary, Charles placed too much trust in William and Harry to look after themselves,” Nicholl wrote of the King’s approach to raising her teenage sons.
William and Harry attended Eton College, an elite boarding school, as teenagers, but they also spent time at their father’s Highgrove House throughout their teenage years – and the king was often not there with them, as one of Charles’ former assistants. Nicholl said.
“The boys wanted their independence and they probably had too much of it,” the unnamed former assistant told Nicholl. “A lot of times when they wanted to talk to their dad he wasn’t there, and because he didn’t have a cell phone with him, they were frustrated that they couldn’t reach him. If they needed him , they ended up calling his protection officers so they could talk to him, which wasn’t ideal.”
“They wanted to talk to their dad, but Charles doesn’t make hot shoe calls or text messages; he likes to take time for thoughtful conversations,” the aide also told Nicholl.
Nicholl also wrote in his book that Charles relied on close family friends to help him raise his sons, and William and Harry spent a lot of time in the family homes of their nanny, Tiggey Legge-Bourke, and their friends, the Van Cutsems.
Surrogate families provided support for William and Harry, but the princes still got into trouble when unsupervised, as Queen Elizabeth’s cousin Lady Elizabeth Anson, who died in November, said 2020, to Nicholl in a series of interviews before his death.
“At Highgrove at the weekend the boys could be idle because Charles wasn’t always there,” she told Nicholl.
For example, William and Harry started “Club H” in Highgrove, where they threw parties for their friends, and in 2001, when Harry was just 17, he drank alcohol and smoked cigarettes at an inn near the house, according to Nicholl.
“Those who knew closed their eyes, but when an aide recognized the unmistakable smell of marijuana emanating from Club H, the young prince was arrested,” Nicholl wrote.
The fallout from the incident led to the first rift between Harry and William, as only Harry got into trouble even though William was with him at the time, according to Nicholl.
Read the original Insider article
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