It was a voice of puzzlement, concern, even love. “Makes you wonder the people he’s hanging around with,” tweeted the Royal Marine veteran Ben McBean. “If it was good people, somebody by now would have told him to stop.” The simplest squaddie, the most cash-strapped kiss ’n’ tell — almost any one of us — would have more people guarding our reputation, happiness, safety, than the royal blurter. Where the hell are Harry’s friends?
The greatest irony of Spare is that a man driven to avenge the stories allegedly planted against him by Buckingham Palace has sown himself a vast, poisonous forest. For someone who detests the press, its games and gotchas, he has played straight into its hands.
Did no one around him consider how coldly claiming he’d killed 25 Afghans would play? Harry’s two key fanbases are military veterans and the race-fixated American left. The first is aghast at his unseemly notching of scalps: special forces veterans who were shot, tortured or suffered PTSD, such as Andy McNab or Ant Middleton, never crudely tallied victims. Every Helmand comrade would have warned him not to disrespect the war dead.
And what of US liberals who loved his anti-colonial Netflix series, laden with black historian gravitas? Such as the Kennedys who just awarded him a Ripple of Hope for exposing royal family racism? How will they process a princely brag that he took out 25 people of colour like “chess pieces”, maybe civilians caught in crossfire as well as Taliban? Why has a man so preoccupied with his family’s security put bigger targets on their backs?
Reading these misguided revelations, I thought of the late US writer Joan Didion. She was asked on TV about a famous moment, recorded in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, when she saw a five-year-old hippy child tripping on acid. You expect her to say it was awful or upsetting. Instead she cries: “It was GOLD!” Because journalists coldly pick off victims too. An interviewee tells a story that will enhance a piece but blow up his life, and an icy voice whispers: “Gold!”
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Letting his naive, damaged, vengeful subject vomit up his life, Harry’s ghostwriter JR Moehringer must have felt he was stuffing ingots into his bag. These extracts suggest Harry shares the self-awareness of his Uncle Andrew, who believed his kamikaze encounter with Emily Maitlis had gone really well. But the vital difference here is that Harry had control. This was “his truth”: in opening his heart, revealing all the dastardly deeds done against him, he thought the world would take his side.
I wonder if he even read the finished manuscript, let alone bunged it over to an old mate, someone with no financial interest, to run a second eye. Or did Moehringer and the bullion-eyed publishers spin him some flattering guff: “It’s so raw, so honest, don’t change a thing. No, not even the bit where you think the bathroom bin is talking to you when you’re high on ’shrooms . . .”
Maybe he was told Spare evoked his sainted mother’s frankness. Diana via the Morton memoirs described her bulimia and despair. But she’d been cruelly traduced and betrayed. It is harder to justify Harry’s deflowering behind a pub — “I mounted her quickly, after which she spanked my ass and sent me away” — beyond titillation. And even this frolic Harry files as “humiliating”.
Why else does his own story make him look so bad? Well, there’s gold, of course: $15 million at least. But surely some booby traps he laid himself could have been defused. Blaming your Nazi outfit on Wills and Kate would always spawn “I voz just following orders” gags. Claiming you didn’t know “P***” was an offensive word would inevitably rile black Britons previously on your side. And in describing your frost-bitten penis, maybe don’t reveal both you and William are circumcised, because you’re literally monetising your brother’s knob.
A “gratitude journal” Spare is not. His endless envy is unpalatable when the only thing he’s ever been denied is the British throne. He complains Wills got the bigger half of their Balmoral childhood room, that the Cambridge Kensington Palace apartments had walnut shelves while H&M’s new pad had Ikea lamps; that Oprah thought their Windsor cottage tiny. Except, Harry, it was all free! You paid not a penny of rent. Why not check your privilege — as Meghan’s followers would say — as you bank that cheque.
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Those who see Spare as a crisis for the monarchy couldn’t be more wrong. As we pick our way through this broken country, hoping we won’t need a train or an A&E bed, that a cold snap doesn’t play hell with our heating bills, this is what royalty are for. A national soap, where we gawp at the principal characters and feel lucky we have more sense and grace.
If you never crowed in public that you have more hair than your baldy bro. If you wished your widowed dad joy with his new partner rather than begged him not to remarry. If you have more tact than to tell your sleepless sister-in-law she has “baby brain”. If you keep your drug and virginity yarns for private late-night laughs. If you didn’t miss your grandmother’s last moments because you were arguing about travel plans. If you can resolve a brotherly beef without an unseemly bundle or, having had one, not speed-dial your shrink.
If you disdain the wittering of psychics, can tell greedy sycophants from loyal counsel and, above all, cherish loving friends who sometimes tell you to shut up for your own good, then you are better than those who live in royal palaces. Take a bow.
