How Prince William and Harry’s friendship group fell apart and who has sided with whom

The princes had a close-knit friendship group when growing up, but what has happened to the old crowd since their well-documented fall-out? Photo / Getty Images

Had the Duke of Sussex been browsing news websites earlier this week, he’d have been forgiven for thinking he’d entered a time warp.

There the increasingly sensible Prince of Wales was, captured on video two days after his 41st birthday, dancing to electronic dance music in London nightclub KOKO with old friends Guy Pelly and James Meade.

Prince William is spotted enjoying a night out at KOKO nightclub in Camden https://t.co/xqTc56CAn4

— Daily Mail Australia (@DailyMailAU) June 28, 2023

Harry’s surprise might have been peppered with regret. Rewind a decade or so and he too would have been partying with Meade and Pelly, along with the rest of the young princes’ close-knit friendship group.

The crowd, which also included Tom Inskip, and brothers Thomas and Charlie van Straubenzee, had supported the princes from childhood.

But rumours of a rift have swirled since William and Harry’s well-documented fall-out.

Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand wrote in 2020′s Finding Freedom that “Harry, sensitive to even the slightest hint of prejudice, had fallouts within his own circle,” and on the basis of this recent nightclub jaunt, at least, it looks like William has acquired custody of the old gang.

Harry Aubrey-Fletcher, Thomas van Straubenzee, Guy Pelly and Tom Inskip. Photo / Getty Images

So have some of the princes’ oldest friends been forced to take sides? And if so, who has proved most popular? Pelly, 41, one of Prince Louis’s godparents and the organiser of William’s 2011 stag do, is perhaps a surprising choice of party partner, given Kate, who didn’t attend the former nightclub owner’s 2014 wedding to Holiday Inn heiress Elizabeth Wilson, is said to distrust him.

He reportedly organised William’s controversial 2017 skiing holiday with Meade and Thomas van Straubenzee, which culminated in a PR disaster when the prince was spotted dancing in an Alps nightclub hours before other senior royals attended a Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey.

Yet he was friends with William before bonding with Harry, meeting the future King when both were junior members of the Beaufort Hunt. It was only when William was travelling during his gap year, that Pelly, whose sculptor mother Vanda is a member of the Tate & Lyle sugar dynasty, is thought to have befriended Harry.

With a similar nose for trouble as the younger prince, he and Harry continued to be friends after Megxit, with Pelly, Elizabeth and their daughter Willow reportedly invited to visit Harry and Meghan in California in 2020 – the only member of the old set known to have done so.

“Despite what’s been said about Harry losing touch with his old friends, he was keen to see Guy,” a source told one newspaper.

Prince William and Prince Harry with Guy Pelly sing the national anthem before the game between England and Ireland. Photo / Getty Images

Meade, meanwhile, is arguably on better terms with Kate – he accompanied her to the Badminton Horse Trials in 2007 during her split from William, at the Prince’s request – making loyalty to William more likely.

Having befriended William at Eton, he is later said to have taken William drinking at Piccadilly’s Cuckoo Club. He and his wife Lady Laura Marsham, daughter of the 8th Earl of Romney, at whose 2013 wedding William was an usher, are both godparents to Princess Charlotte.

The son of Olympic gold medallist equestrian Richard Meade, he has long been close to Harry too – it was his 2005 “Colonials and Natives” themed bash to which Harry wore his notorious Nazi outfit.

Tom Inskip, Charlie van Straubenzee, Prince Harry and Thomas van Straubenzee attend the 2015 Rugby World Cup Semi-Final match between Argentina and Australia at Twickenham Stadium. Photo / Getty Images

Harry recently revealed in Spare that it was Meade and Thomas van Straubenzee who were William’s best men at his 2011 wedding, not Harry, as had always been believed. Reports that Harry assumed the role, the Duke of Sussex wrote with perhaps a hint of rancour, was a “bare-faced lie.” There have been no recent sightings of Meade and Harry together.

While the princes’ old social circle are notoriously tight-lipped, emotion following the rift seems to have run high.

According to one report this January, some friends were said to be furious at Harry’s “outrageously disloyal” betrayal of William in Spare, in which he wrote of their fight in his Nottingham Cottage kitchen and revealed that William had been circumcised as a baby.

Harry, for his part, was said in Finding Freedom to have “immediately” cut off an unnamed male friend after finding out he had “spent an afternoon gossiping about Meghan.”