Prince Harry has claimed Queen Consort Camilla was a "villain" in the royal household and sacrificed him on her "personal PR altar."
Speaking in an explosive interview with Anderson Cooper, which airs on Three and ThreeNow on Monday from 7pm, the Duke said it came as his stepmother tried to "rehabilitate her image."
His mother, Princess Diana, had referred to Camilla as the third person in her marriage to the then Prince Charles in an infamous BBC interview, with the press quick to label the now-75-year-old as a "villain" - something which Harry has never forgotten.
"She was the villain, she was the third person in the marriage - she needed to rehabilitate her image," he told Cooper.
When asked about he and brother William begging their father, now King Charles, not to marry Camilla, Harry said the marriage was "going to cause more harm than good."
"We didn't think it was necessary. We thought it was going to cause more harm than good. And that if he was now with this person that that's surely enough. Why go that far, when you don't necessarily need to. We wanted him to be happy, and we saw how happy he was with her," he said.
In his memoir Spare, Harry wrote about his stepmother: "Maybe she'd be less dangerous if she was happy."
When asked why he viewed her as "dangerous," Harry told Cooper it was because of the campaign to turn her image around.
"Because of the need for her to rehabilitate her marriage. That made her dangerous because of the connections she was forging within the British press.
"And there was open willingness to trade on both sides in information and with a family built on hierarchy, and with her on the way to being Queen Consort, there was going to be bodies left in the street because of that."
Harry said that he was "one of those bodies" and accused Camilla and King Charles of using him and William to achieve better tabloid coverage at the time.
Camilla "sacrificed me on her personal PR altar," he added.
The Duke of Sussex will be interviewed by 60 Minutes' Anderson Cooper in his highly-anticipated first US television one-on-one, which in New Zealand will air exclusively on Monday, January 9 at 7pm on Three and ThreeNow.
