Private investigator Gavin Burrows spoke with BBC journalist Amol Rajan about investigative work he had done for the now-defunct News of the World in the first episode of The Princes and the Press. In the documentary that aired yesterday on BBC, the PI claims that the public was far more interested in Prince Harry than his older brother, Prince William, in the early 2000s.
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Burrows also apologised for apparently stealing the duke of his teenage years as he accepted, he had targeted the phone of Prince Harry’s ex-girlfriend. He claimed on the BBC:
It wasn’t a case of me being interested in him, the editors made it very clear that if you put Prince William on the front of a newspaper, he doesn’t sell as many copies as Prince Harry.
Sincere apologies
Burrows was told by his editors that putting Harry on the front page would sell more newspapers than the Duke of Cambridge. He said:
So, Harry had basically become, as explained to me by a couple of editors, the new Diana. They were much more interested in Harry than William.
As such, getting into the phone of Harry’s ex-girlfriend was a greedy need. He further commented:
There was a lot of voicemail hacking going on, there was a lot of surveillance work on her phones, on her comms. Chelsy would brag to her friends when she was going to see him.
He further apologised for his behaviour, claiming that it was a ruthless media culture and said:
I was greedy, I was into my cocaine, and I was living in a fake state of grandeur. I was basically part of a group of people who robbed him (Harry) of his normal teenage years.
Harry is popular
The two-part BBC documentary depicts Prince Harry's enduring popularity up until his marriage to Meghan Markle. For Prince William, he said:
He [William] didn’t really get up too much, he didn’t do much, he wasn’t much of a subject for a tabloid newspaper, there was nothing there until he met Kate.
Rajan mentioned how after Harry and Meghan's romance became official, an opinion survey revealed that public support for the Duke of Sussex had surpassed that of his brother for the first time. He said:
The media had a new golden couple.
However, their popularity had gone down a bit after their wedding. As several stories were leaked to the press which highlighted the couple in a bad light.
