William’s Brutal Confession Against Harry Live On Air: YOU ARE A CATASTROPHE FOR ROYAL FAMILY!

Prince William scolded Prince Harry after a drugs scandal, telling his brother “you have been partying far too hard and too recklessly to not eventually be caught,” an English court heard.

The News of the World ran a front-page exclusive in January 2002 stating the Duke of Sussex, when he was a teenager, had been smoking cannabis and was taken to visit a rehab clinic by King Charles III. The newspaper said this was to shock him into stopping, rather than because he needed treatment.

And the scandal led to an “investigation at breakneck speed” at the Sunday Mirror and Daily Mirror, the journalists of which hacked the phones of Harry’s associates in their efforts to get exclusive material, a High Court judge found.

One article in the Mirror cited by Judge Timothy Fancourt included a quote from Prince William scolding his brother—though it strikes a different tone to the account Harry gave in Spare.

The judgment, released on Friday, read: “In the same newspaper on the same day, a further article by [reporters] Jane Kerr and Jeff Edwards purported to quote Prince William saying to his brother: ‘This serves you right. You have been partying far too hard and too recklessly to not eventually be caught. You’ve been an accident waiting to happen. Let this be a lesson to you.’

“Ms Kerr was unable to explain where this quotation came from, except that it was not through anything that she had done, but she felt sure there would be a legitimate source.”

The quote was published by the Daily Mirror at the time but it is only now, following a lawsuit brought by Prince Harry, that the judge has ruled the newspaper was hacking phones in its investigative work on the day it was being prepared.

The judgment read: “Ms Kerr, who said that she was not involved in phone hacking and would never have made up information, herself suggested that others, such as the editor, Piers Morgan, might have contributed,” to the stories the Mirror ran at the time. Fancourt added: “It is clear that someone did.”

In Spare, though, Harry suggested Prince William had been on his side: “I phoned Willy. I couldn’t speak. He couldn’t either. He was sympathetic, and more. (Raw deal, Harold.)

“At moments he was even angrier about the whole thing than I was, because he was privy to more details about the spin doctor and the backroom dealings that had led to this public sacrifice of the Spare [Harry].”

Newsweek has contacted Kensington Palace as well as Harry’s representatives for comment.

It is not clear where the quote attributed to William that appeared in the Mirror came from. During the lawsuit, Harry argued private information included in news stories must have come from phone hacking, though the judge noted this was not always true.

“There was a tendency for the Duke in his evidence to assume that everything published was the product of voicemail interception because phone hacking was rife within Mirror Group at the time,” Fancourt wrote. “But phone hacking was not the only journalistic tool at the time.”

It is therefore difficult to assess its accuracy. Needless to say, it is a bizarre by-product of the phone-hacking scandal that stories once viewed as tabloid tittle tattle were in fact more accurate than even some of their own readers may have realized at the time of publication.

The News of the World, which was eventually closed down due to the illegal practice, headlined its own story “Harry’s Drugs Shame.”

It was a major scandal at the time it was published, in 2002, but also featured prominently in Harry’s book.

The prince took a swipe at Charles and Queen Camilla’s PR adviser for cooperating with the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid.

Harry wrote: “This spin doctor, Marko said, had decided that the best approach in this case would be to spin me—right under the bus.

“In one swoop this would appease the editor and also bolster the sagging reputation of Pa.

“Amid all this unpleasantness, all this extortion and gamesmanship, the spin doctor had discovered one silver lining, one shiny consolation prize for Pa.

“No more the unfaithful husband, Pa would now be presented to the world as the harried single dad coping with a drug-addled child.”