Queen Camilla and Prince Harry should maintain a “civil” and “lowkey” approach following years of strained relations, according to a relationship expert.
Harry, 41, traveled to the U.K. this week for a four-day visit that includes multiple events commemorating the one-year countdown to the Invictus Games Birmingham 2027. There was significant speculation surrounding the Duke of Sussex’s much-anticipated journey, including whether or not his wife Meghan Markle would be by his side. He ended up traveling alone.
Onlookers also wondered whether he would be invited to meet with the royal family, including his father, King Charles, and stepmother, Queen Camilla.
Harry has caused friction with several royal family members since departing the U.K. to establish a new life with Meghan and their two children, Prince Archie, seven, and Princess Lilibet, five. His explosive memoir, Spare, didn’t help matters, with Camilla being among the family members who faced particularly harsh criticism.
Now, Jordan Schieber, Head Strategist and Matchmaker at Matchmaking for Me, has revealed how the duo should conduct themselves around each other given their contentious dynamic.
Schieber initially examined Harry and Camilla’s early dynamic, explaining to the Irish Star, “Their relationship started when Harry was a child, and that origin makes the whole thing inherently complicated. It’s not really about assigning blame; life happens, and a child in that position is looking for security from the adults around him.”
Prince Harry traveled to the U.K. this week for a four-day visit that includes multiple events commemorating the one-year countdown to the Invictus Games 2027 (Image: Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)
“That said, the responsibility was on Camilla, as the adult coming into his life in what was likely a maternal role, to build trust, stability, and comfort over time. If that effort wasn’t consistently there, then whatever Harry feels, including what he wrote in Spare, is justified. It’s his experience to name.”
The relationship expert went on to outline how the two should navigate their dynamic moving forward, stating: “But they’re both adults now, and he has full agency in how he engages with her going forward.
“At this point, staying reactive or relitigating the past in public doesn’t really serve a purpose for him. I don’t think these kinds of relationships necessarily become close or fully resolved, and they don’t have to.
“The most useful approach, especially heading into this visit, is simply cordiality and discretion. Not overly warm, not cold, just civil. They can each privately feel however they feel about everything that’s been said. Publicly, staying composed and keeping things low key is what actually serves both of them well.”
Schieber concluded, “Not every relationship is workable in the conventional sense, and that’s okay. Some relationships just are what they are, and trying to force them into something closer or fully resolved isn’t always realistic or necessary.”
In his memoir Spare, Harry disclosed that in 2005, he and Prince William urged their father not to wed Camilla, with whom Charles had maintained a lengthy affair throughout his 15-year marriage to Princess Diana.
Harry wrote in Spare that he and Prince William urged their father not to wed Camilla (Image: UK Press via Getty Images)
“Despite Willy and me urging him not to, Pa was going ahead. We pumped his hand, wished him well. No hard feelings,” Harry wrote. “We recognized that he was finally going to be with the woman he loved, the woman he’d always loved.”
In another passage from Spare, presumably from the late 1990s, Harry remembered questioning whether Camilla would treat him harshly “like all the wicked stepmothers in storybooks.”
He observed that William “long harbored suspicions about the Other Woman,” and asserted that Camilla transformed his bedroom into her personal dressing room immediately after he departed Clarence House at age 28.
Throughout the book and accompanying promotional interviews, Harry proceeded to critique Camilla, suggesting she had a strategy to rehabilitate her public reputation as the “other woman.”
During his initial promotional interview with ITV, Harry referenced that the dynamic between the Royal Family and the British press includes substantial “briefings, leakings, and plantings.”
He charged certain family members with getting “into bed with the devil,” revealing that Camilla purportedly leaked one of her initial conversations with William. Nevertheless, The Telegraph reported that it had been Camilla’s former assistant who leaked the conversation and that she was subsequently dismissed.
In other sections of Spare, Harry asserted that Charles and Camilla’s “spin doctor” recommended they throw him “right under the bus” and that they disclosed information about his drug use in 2002. Harry additionally maintained that Charles revealed he’d sent Harry to a drug rehabilitation center to garner public sympathy.
Harry also stated that in 2019, William was “seething” after Pa and Camilla’s people had planted a story or stories about him, and Kate, and the kids, and he wasn’t going to take it any more. He said, “Give Pa and Camilla an inch, he said, they take a mile.”
Harry leveled additional accusations against Camilla during a separate 60 Minutes interview, describing her as “dangerous” due to her media connections.
“There was open willingness on both sides to trade information. And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her on the way to being Queen Consort, there was going to be people or bodies left in the street,” he told host Anderson Cooper.
Harry asserted in Spare that Charles and Camilla’s “spin doctor” recommended they throw him “right under the bus” (Image: Getty Images)
He subsequently characterized his stepmother as “the villain” and the “third person in the marriage,” mirroring his mother’s 1995 interview with Martin Bashir, when Diana disclosed there were “three of us in the marriage.
“I had complex feelings about gaining a step parent who, I believed, had recently sacrificed me on her personal PR altar,” Harry wrote in Spare. “In a funny way I even wanted Camilla to be happy. Maybe she’d be less dangerous if she was happy?” The royal family largely maintained their silence in response to the majority of Harry’s remarks, with many British outlets reporting that Camilla did not leak the stories Harry described.
BBC’s former royal correspondent Jennie Bond even tried to ignite a relationship with Camilla, but failed.
Then, in an interview with Good Morning America following the memoir’s release, Harry claimed that he has a “huge amount of compassion” for Camilla, adding that they haven’t spoken in a while, but he loves his family, so they remain cordial.
Nevertheless, he stood firm in his assessment: “She’s my stepmother. I don’t look at her as an evil stepmother. I see someone who married into this institution and has done everything that she can to improve her own reputation and her own image for her own sake.”