Prince Harry Admits He ‘Never Wanted’ Royal Job, Felt ‘Lost and Betrayed’ Following Death of Princess Diana

Prince Harry has admitted he ‘never wanted’ the royal role laid out for him, telling an audience in Melbourne on Thursday that he felt ‘lost and betrayed’ after Princess Diana’s death in 1997 and briefly resolved to walk away from royal life altogether. Speaking at the InterEdge Summit in the Australian city, the Duke of Sussex said he was 12 when he first thought, ‘I don’t want this job. I don’t want this role — wherever this is headed, I don’t like it’, according to People.

The news came as Prince Harry continues a public, and at times raw, reassessment of his life inside the monarchy. His latest remarks follow years of increasingly candid disclosures, from a 2017 interview with The Telegraph to his 2023 memoir Spare, all circling the same central point: the night his mother’s car crashed in a Paris tunnel and the burden of being the ‘spare’ to Prince William’s heir. What is different now is how directly he links his royal role to the sense of danger that followed Diana.

At the Melbourne event, held as part of his and Meghan Markle’s Australia tour, Harry told Australian business leader and former politician Brendan Nelson that he believed his mother’s royal role ‘got her killed.’ That conclusion, he implied, helped fuel a teenage resistance to palace life. ‘I was very much against it, and I stuck my head in the sand for years and years,’ he said.

Diana died in August 1997 when the Mercedes carrying her crashed into a pillar in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris. She and her companion were being pursued by paparazzi at the time. An official investigation later found that her driver, Henri Paul, had alcohol and prescription drugs in his system and was speeding at 65 mph. For two boys of 12 and 15, Harry and William, the forensic details of that night became public knowledge long before they had processed the private loss.

Prince Harry has long argued that this combination — profound grief, no emotional outlet and relentless scrutiny — left deep marks. In 2017, he told The Telegraph he had come close to a ‘complete breakdown’ years after Diana’s death. ‘I can safely say that losing my mom at the age of 12, and therefore shutting down all of my emotions for the last 20 years, has had a quite serious effect on not only my personal life but my work as well,’ he said then, adding that he had eventually sought help from a ‘shrink’ to cope.

Prince Harry’s Royal Job and the Shadow of ‘Spare’

The phrase ‘I never wanted this job’ carries extra weight given how Prince Harry’s ‘spare’ status has become shorthand for his place in the institution. In Spare, he recalls the label trailing him since birth. He wrote that King Charles III referred to him as a ‘spare’ on the day he was born, a claim that Buckingham Palace has not publicly addressed.

Growing up, Harry said he ‘took no offence’ to the idea of being the spare, even managing a wry perspective on it. ‘Every boy and girl, at least once, imagines themselves as a prince or a princess,’ he wrote. ‘Therefore, spare or no spare, it was not half bad to actually be one.’ That line reads differently now when set against his Melbourne confession that his first instinct after Diana’s death was to flee the monarchy.

What shifted, he told the InterEdge audience, was a sense of responsibility and Diana’s imagined verdict. He said he ultimately stayed in his royal role for many years because he felt he could use his privilege to ‘make a difference in the world.’ At a key moment, he asked himself, ‘What would my mum want me to do?’ That question, he said, ‘really changed my own perspective.’

Feeling ‘Lost and Betrayed’ Inside the Royal Job

Prince Harry’s royal job is not just a ceremonial description; it has become shorthand for a life that, by his account, veered between duty and disillusionment. In his keynote address at the InterEdge Summit, delivered before an on-stage conversation with Nelson, he spoke at length about grief as a destabilising force.

‘In my experience, loss is disorienting at any age,’ he told delegates. ‘Grief does not disappear because we ignore it.’ He described what it was like to mourn ‘in a goldfish bowl under constant surveillance,’ saying that without a sense of purpose, ‘it can break you.’

Harry went further, acknowledging that he has felt ‘lost, betrayed or completely powerless’ many times across his life. The choice of words was pointed, though he did not specify whether the sense of betrayal was directed at the media, the institution, family members or all of them together. He framed his survival in terms of resilience and purpose, arguing that finding a way to channel pain had been essential.

That search for purpose eventually led him out of the very role he says he never wanted. In 2020, two years after marrying Meghan Markle, Harry stepped back from frontline royal duties. The couple moved to Montecito, California, where they now live with their two children, Prince Archie, 6, and Princess Lilibet, 4, in a reported $14 million home.

Their departure followed mounting tensions with both the media and the palace. Harry’s later decision to lay out grievances in a 2021 Oprah Winfrey interview, the Harry & Meghan Netflix series in 2022 and his memoir the following year has left him largely estranged from his family. Any possibility of quiet reconciliation has been complicated by the fact that he has told his story in serial form, each instalment making the next conversation with his relatives that bit harder.

Nothing in his Melbourne appearance suggested that Harry is about to reverse course or re-enter the working royal fold. If anything, his latest admission — that he wanted to walk away at 12 and stayed only after invoking his mother’s memory — underlines how fragile his bond with ‘the job’ has always been.

For now, what can be confirmed is straightforward. He never wanted the role, he stayed in it for years and he is still working out, in public, what that decision cost him and what it may yet allow him to do.