Friday 17 June 2022 11:40 PM REBECCA ENGLISH reveals Prince William thinks 'Harry has been sucked into alien ... trends now

Turning 40 is a milestone in anyone’s life. But for the Duke of Cambridge it is also a time of reckoning.

He is on an inexorable journey to becoming king, a prospect that once scared him. Yet William is more at peace with himself than ever before, as the happy family scenes at the Platinum Jubilee celebrations demonstrated.

His marriage to Kate is strong and fatherhood has given him contentment beyond his dreams.

Even his notoriously prickly relationship with his father, Prince Charles, is more harmonious than it has been since his early teens.

The biggest worry is the fractured bond with his brother, Prince Harry. Relations are still at ‘rock bottom’, friends tell me.

‘He alternates between grieving for what he has lost and feeling really, really angry about what his brother has done,’ said one.

‘He truly loves Harry and feels he has lost the only person, aside from his wife, who understood this strange life of theirs.

‘But he believes there are things you just don’t do. And Harry has 100 per cent crossed that line.’

In a new series for the Daily Mail — ahead of Prince William’s landmark birthday on Tuesday — I have spoken to impeccable sources within his circle, some on the record, some on condition of anonymity, to find out what makes him tick.

The result is illuminating, encouraging — and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny.

Yet his strained relationship with his brother does, inevitably, come heavily into play.

Asked whether they thought William would ever repair his bond with Harry, one friend says: ‘That’s a hard question to answer. The truth is they have got to find some common ground again.

‘But to do that both have to admit fault — and it’s pretty obvious that one of them is absolutely refusing to do that.

‘William is also very principled and believes Harry has crossed a line. He’s thrown accusation after accusation, knowing that silence is the family’s only option because it doesn’t want to get dragged into a public slanging match.

‘He sees how upset his father has been by it all, and it hurts.

‘William is absolutely allergic to drama, but Harry has ensured that the family laundry is being aired on a global scale.

‘I think they will find themselves in a better position in the future, but not now. And too much water has gone under the bridge for things to ever go back to the way they were.

‘Truthfully, William thinks Harry has been sucked into an alien world and there’s f*** all he can do about it. But he does want Harry to be happy, and if he stops throwing dust in their faces, then maybe he will find a way to forgive and forget.’

Another source I have spoken to is more conciliatory. ‘He’s actually always been very protective of Harry and has a very low tolerance of people being disrespectful about him, even now. I think he’ll keep the door open to him for ever,’ they insist.

‘In some ways, it’s not like any of this was a surprise. Harry always had concerns about life within the Royal Family.

‘And in hindsight the pressure that was put on him and William, living and working together as some sort of dynamic duo, placed a massive strain on their relationship. They had no room to breathe. But Meghan complicated it.

‘Harry had to pick a side — and there was only one side he was ever going to choose.

‘But I also find it impossible to believe there is anything these two brothers could say about each other that means they will never find a way to repair things.

‘They were too close and have been through too much together for that to happen.’

But despite these difficulties, my discussions with members of William’s close circle have left me in no doubt that he is, at last, as comfortable as he will ever be with his future — and ready for the challenges ahead.

He will always be his mother’s son, but he has grown more like his father than anyone — including he himself — might care to admit.

One confidant, who has known the prince for many years, says the second-in-line to the throne hasn’t always been as dull and dutiful as some would think.

‘Let’s just say that, like his younger brother, William enjoyed himself immensely in his teens and 20s. Unlike Harry, though, he was never caught!’ they laugh.

William was always more cautious about who he hung around with, preferring to let his hair down with a small group of trusted friends in less public places. He had to be more mindful of what lay ahead.

His long-term mentor and former private secretary Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton (a godfather to his son, Prince George) tells me William was always someone of deeply impressive maturity.

‘He hasn’t rubbed his hands in glee [at what is to come], but has looked at it in a dutiful way,’ says Lowther-Pinkerton. ‘One of the lovely things I remember early on was this sense of disbelief that people were really interested in who he was or what he was doing.

‘But he quickly decided that if they were, he was going to turn it to whatever good use he could.’

Lowther-Pinkerton was hugely supportive of William’s determination — as a future head of the armed forces — to ‘serve’ in whatever way he could, even if he couldn’t do it from the frontline.

He did this first with the RAF as a search and rescue pilot, then with East Anglia Air Ambulance — both jobs, Lowther-Pinkerton, says, allowed him to look the forces ‘square in the face’ and shaped him as a man.

‘If you’re going out in the Atlantic or the Irish Sea in a Force 8 and flying your helicopter right up to a cliff face to rescue a climber, you can look anyone in the face, even someone who has been on operations in war zones. The danger is the danger. And he was bloody good at it,’ Lowther-Pinkerton says.

The roles also afforded William space in which to marry and start a family away from the goldfish bowl of royal life: first in Anglesey, then Norfolk. He did not move to London to become a full-time working royal until 2017.

Anyone who knows William will say that becoming a husband and father has been the making of him. ‘He just loves being a dad and having a settled family around him. Having children always puts things into perspective, and doubly so for him,’ says one friend.

‘Whatever happens “at work”, he has to go home and be a “normal” person for the sake of his kids, which has made him more at peace with the reality of his other life.’

Indeed, for William, the single most important priority in his life in recent years has been to protect his children and secure their future.

He has worked hard to build a ‘fortress’ around them, shielding them from the paparazzi and the pressure of being born into such public roles.

Now that they are growing up as happy, unaffected youngsters who enjoy football, ballet and play dates like all their other schoolmates — along with the occasional public appearance — everything else has fallen into place.

William turns up like any other dad to sports matches and school events. ‘It was a bit of a head-spinner at first,’ says a fellow parent. ‘But then you get used to it. He’s just George or Charlotte’s dad.’

Throughout all of this, Kate, 40, has been not just his wife, but his best friend and ‘anchor’.

Their relationship has, inevitably, been picked over at length and subjected to scrutiny and gossip.

I have discussed this with several in William’s circle and all are of the same opinion.

‘It’s just b******s,’ says one.

‘They honestly couldn’t be happier as a couple. You can’t get a cigarette paper between them. They are so tight, just inseparable.’

Kate has now been by William’s side for half of his life, since they first became friends as teenagers at university.

‘They spend all their time together. They lunch together every day, they sit and watch television together every evening.

‘They do go out and see their own friends, of course, but they spend an inordinate amount of time together and live a very conventional married life,’ says one who knows them well.

‘They aren’t a flashy couple — he likes his motorbikes but that’s about it. They are both very outdoorsy people and spend every minute they aren’t working with their children. That’s what they really care about.’

Another source makes clear that William’s approach to his future has very much been dictated by his past.

‘When you speak to William, he’s actually quite puritanical in his attitude when he talks about his parents’ marriage and what went wrong.

‘It hugely affected the way he approached his own relationship with Catherine and why it took so long for him to settle down. He wanted it to be with the right person and [for it to last] for ever.

‘William is very conscious that if it wasn’t for him, the man she fell in love with, Catherine would be living a nice life in the country and bringing up a family away from the spotlight.

‘There’s a bit of snobbery, sadly, when you marry in from outside. It’s a lot better now than it was, but William is still very protective of his wife.

‘The way he sees it, she is as important to the institution as he is. He genuinely admires the way she has just dug her heels in and stuck with it.’

There’s no doubt that William is a complex character — and perceptions of him sometimes depend on who you speak to.

There are some I know who have had angry run-ins with him over the years and describe him as controlling and suspicious — someone who sees an ‘agenda’ everywhere, particularly in terms of the palace machinery (something he has in common with Harry).

But those individuals, it should be stressed, are few and dealt with William as a younger man, when he was still railing against authority — and, particularly, his father.

Prince Charles loves both his sons deeply, but is scarred by his own emotionally difficult childhood.

He is also a workaholic whose diary is organised to the letter six or seven months in advance, making it difficult for him to attend ‘impromptu’ birthday parties for his grandchildren — something for which William and Kate, initially, failed to give him much leeway.

As a result, William gravitated towards his ‘surrogate family’, the Middletons, leaving a rather bruised Charles feeling ‘airbrushed’ out of his life.

Pointedly, when his first grandchild, Prince George, was a baby, Charles told one confidant that ‘I see him as much as I can — within the constraints’.

Explosive rows between father and son were often overheard by staff, with Charles — who hates family confrontations — burying himself in his paperwork to avoid the conflict.

But over the years the situation has

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