Prince Harry Jokes About ‘Challenging’ Sibling Relationships During U.K. Outing amid Prince William Rift

Prince Harry touched on sibling bonds amid an ongoing rift with Prince William.

On Sept. 8, the Duke of Sussex, 40, attended a reception before the 2025 WellChild Awards. Prince Harry is patron of WellChild, the U.K.’s national charity for seriously ill children, and Declan was one of the WellChild Award winners Harry met with before the big event.

According to Hello! magazine, the Duke of Sussex asked Declan Bitmead, 17, about his family, and the young man said, “I’ve got a younger brother.”

“Does he drive you mad?” Prince Harry asked before being told that they got along fine.

“You know what, siblings,” Harry said with a laugh.

After learning that Declan and his brother attend the same school, the Duke of Sussex said, “That sometimes makes it more challenging.”

In his 2023 memoir Spare, Prince Harry wrote that Prince William wanted him to keep a distance when he began at Eton College, where William was already enrolled, in 1998.

“Willy had told me to pretend I didn’t know him,” Harry wrote in Spare. “For the last two years, he explained, Eton had been his sanctuary. No kid brother tagging along, pestering him with questions, pushing up on his social circle. He was forging his own life, and he wasn’t willing to give that up.”

“None of which was all that new,” Harry wrote. “Willy always hated it when anyone made the mistake of thinking of us as a package deal… And now, to attend the same school was pure murder.”

Strain remains between King Charles’ sons amid a bitter rift that has distanced them for years.

The clash came into public view in 2020 when Prince Harry and Meghan Markle stepped back from their royal roles.

“Things were said that sparked the initial rift, and it’s never healed,” Princess Diana’s biographer Andrew Morton recently told PEOPLE in an exclusive cover story.

Prince Harry stepped out in London on Sept. 8, the third anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s death, to attend the WellChild Awards, but he was not expected to reunite with his brother.

The Prince of Wales, 43, stepped out with his wife, Kate Middleton, at The National Federation of Women’s Institute in Sunningdale to commemorate the third anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s death, bringing the estranged brothers about eight miles apart as Prince Harry visited their grandmother’s burial site at Windsor Castle.

Over the summer, William made a comment about family dynamics that some royal watchers saw as pointed amid his rift with Harry.

While speaking at the Army Air Corps in Wattisham, Suffolk, the Daily Mail reported that William asked: “‘Is the pace of life good at the moment?”

After one man said that it was “a mixed bag,” William replied, “Families okay? See you enough? Some of them might not want to see you that much. It’s a mixed bag sometimes.”