Could Princess Diana’s nieces put an end to William and Harry’s feud?
There’s someone you always look for loitering at the corner of all-family gatherings. One person who makes the chaos of being in the same room as every distant relative feel somewhat less anxiety-inducing and judgmental: the cool cousin. In the ages of infancy, they’re the willing co-conspirator to plead for an early-opening of Christmas presents. Come adolescence, the lookout as you sneak a secret swig of booze from the grown-up’s table.
For Harry and William, the Spencers, unsurprisingly, offer this coalescence of calm and cool in the form of blonde twins Eliza and Amelia; the now 33-year-old nieces of Princess Diana, who are increasingly stepping further into the British social scene spotlight after a childhood spent in South Africa alongside their parents, Charles, 9th Earl Spencer and his first wife, Victoria Lockwood.
While the twins’ older sister, Lady Kitty, has long frequented the pages of society magazine Tatler and been the face of fashion campaigns for both Dolce & Gabbana and Bulgari throughout her twenties, Eliza and Amelia have historically had more private lives. Yet, over the past year, they’ve stepped further to the forefront of public life with a walk down the red carpet at Cannes Film Festival last May, an Aspinall of London brand ambassador announcement in June and a sparkling appearance at the Fashion Awards in December.
The twins first fled London when they were three years old to escape the paparazzi that relentlessly hounded the Spencer family at the height of Princess Diana’s fame. This didn’t stop attention following them to the Southern Hemisphere, with the pair telling Tatler how Diana protected them from paparazzi at Western Cape when they were just small children.
“Obviously, it could have been terrifying for us, being so young and not understanding what was happening,” Eliza recalled. “But she turned it into a game of who could get back to the car first. It was amazing how she protected us in a way that made us feel safe and not frightened,” she added of her “incredibly warm, maternal and loving” aunt who “always made an effort to connect with us as children and had a talent for reading children’s hearts”.
This tale is markedly similar to one recounted by the Duke of Sussex in his 2022 Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan. “My mum did such a good job of trying to protect us,” Harry said. “She took it upon herself to basically confront these people,” he added, as the scene cut to archival footage of Diana on a 1995 ski trip to Switzerland, where paparazzi were circling her family while they were trying to eat. “Please leave,” Diana tells the photographer, who tells her that if he gets one photo, he’ll leave her alone. “No,” she retorts. “We’ve had 15 cameras following us today. As a parent, I want to protect the children. Thank you.”
Two years on from this incident, Princess Diana was dead. “As a child, I realised the enormity of the loss for my father and family,” Eliza said of her family’s grief. “It was only later that I came to understand the significance of the loss of her as a figure in the world… I really had very little idea of how significant she was in the world until I was much older… She stayed with us, just before she passed away… We were very fortunate to have spent that time with her.”
Throughout his life, Harry has felt a deep connection with his mother’s side of his family and never more so since he has been living in “exile” with Meghan in California. In 2024, when Harry reportedly made an under-the-radar return trip to Britain to attend the funeral of the late Lord Robert Fellowes, he allegedly spent time with his Spencer cousins and stayed with their father, Earl Spencer, at Althorp, the Spencer family’s ancestral home near Northampton, while he was visiting from California.
“It is a truly special and beautiful place,” Eliza said of the 13,000-acre family seat. “Having spent the first three years of our lives at Althorp, exploring and discovering it as children, and being part of a long heritage of Spencers that have lived there, it has always felt like another home,” she explained to Tatler. “And, of course, it conjures up memories of family Christmases as children, with our extended family all together.”
As Harry prepares to come to the UK this week, for the start of his High Court legal action against Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), he will once again be looking for the support of those left in his inner circle in the UK. His allegations against the newspaper group: the hiring of private investigators to place listening devices inside cars; the “blagging” of private records; and the accessing and recording of private phone conversations, which ANL denied, all fundamentally hinge on privacy. Diana and her tragically turbulent relationship with the media will no doubt be at the forefront of Harry’s mind throughout proceedings. For him, this feels personal.
Eliza and Amelia are two people whom he knows he can depend on. The sisters have acted with the neutrality of Switzerland throughout the entire family feud, offering both brothers a safe space when they needed it. This may be down to their sense of not just family, but perspective too. They didn’t return to live in London until 2021. Amelia married personal trainer Greg Mallett, whom she met while studying corporate communications at the University of Cape Town, in 2023. Meanwhile, Eliza told W magazine this June that “marriage is definitely on the cards” with her entrepreneur partner of nine years, Channing Millerd. They opted to live 15 minutes away from each other in west London’s leafy and affluent Fulham.
“I think the last year or two have been some of the best years we’ve ever had,” Amelia told the publication about her life since choosing to settle in the UK. “Since moving to London, we’ve had the most incredible lives and experiences. Life is full and exciting for us right now.”
Of course, the twins’ return to the UK coincided with a deepening rift between their cousins. By 2021, Harry had given his infamous Oprah interview, alongside his wife, Meghan Markle, in which they alleged an unnamed family member had expressed “concerns” about “how dark” their baby’s skin would be. Royal correspondents reported William was “devastated” by the interview. “We are very much not a racist family,” the Prince of Wales later told Sky News.
The pair have since only reunited a smattering of times: at Philip’s funeral in April 2021, to unveil a statue of Diana at Kensington Palace in July 2021, and to attend the thanksgiving for the Queen’s platinum jubilee in June 2022, where they sat on opposite sides of the cathedral and were reported to have “spent no private time together” to repair their “broken relationship”.
Following Queen Elizabeth II’s death that September, William and Harry walked side by side in a procession, only for Harry to then make damning claims in his 2022 Netflix documentary, saying he was left terrified by having William “scream and shout” at him during an emergency meeting at the Sandringham Estate about his royal duties in 2020.
By 2023, Harry had gone all out and labelled William his “beloved brother” and “archnemesis” in his tell-all book Spare. “There has always been this competition between us, weirdly,” he told ABC News at this time, adding that Diana “would be sad” about the state of his relationship with his older brother. Still, he later conceded to ITV that he would “like to have my brother back” but that William had “shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile”. The pair were last seen together at their father’s coronation in 2023 and reportedly “kept their distance” during Harry’s last visit to the UK this September.
The twins have never shown any sign of taking sides and have publicly displayed support for Prince William, attending the Centrepoint Awards, a youth homelessness charity of which William is a patron, alongside their sister Kitty in October 2024. The twins repeated this show of support for William in November last year, stepping out at the Tusk Awards, a celebration of the conservation and education charity, of which William has also served as a patron since 2005.
“I’m extremely proud of my cousin Prince William,” Kitty told Tatler in an interview alongside Kitty and Eliza this time last year. At the time, the magazine lauded the trio as “funny, frank and charming” and praised their “blonde elegance and can-do attitude”. Could this proactiveness perhaps be enough to bring William and Harry back together?
Experts say that extended family members can provide emotional, social and informational support, helping to alleviate the stressors that contribute to conflict within families. But as speculation grows that William will give Harry the “ultimate snub” during this week’s visit, and again when he travels to the US for the Fifa World Cup this summer, it remains to be seen whether the twins’ can-do charm will be enough to spark the healing that so many close to the Princes hope will one day happen.
