Spare me: Prince Harry’s book is a crock of solipsistic self-pity

“The Count of Montecito: A Tale of Revenge.” This is the War and Peace of misery memoirs. Around the world, its contents have shamed Ukrainian widows, Uyghurs in Chinese camps, Iranian protesters on death row and patients in terminal care hospices into the realisation of how self-indulgent their own concerns are, when compared to the “pain and suffering” endured by this multi-millionaire prince.

The horrors exposed are not for the faint-hearted: when it reaches university libraries, as its woke status demands, there will be a trigger warning on every page. “My brother had a bigger bedroom than mine…” “My stepmother (The Villain) planted stories against me in the press…” “I took psychedelic drugs to see the truth…” “My brother and sister-in-law forced me to wear a Nazi uniform…” And, most heartbreakingly: “He broke my necklace.”

Granted, an insensitive world may have reacted with derision to such revelations, but it behoves us all to remember that at the heart of this maelstrom there is a victim, for whom few seem to have spared a thought: the dog. Picture the scene from his point of view. The footman has just deposited on the kitchen floor the Royal Doulton bowl bearing the monarch’s coat of arms, filled with succulent Yum-Yum, the Ethically Sourced Food for Environmentally Aware Dogs, and you crane your neck to take a first luxurious sniff.

In the same instant, following an unexpected scuffle, your master crashes down onto the bowl, almost crushing you and smashing the precious vessel. When he rises, the back of his coat is pierced with shards of Royal Doulton and impregnated with most of your dinner; the surviving fragments of Yum-Yum on the floor are too heavily contaminated with beads from a broken necklace to be edible. Cue Einstein’s First Law of Canine Dynamics: a dog with neither dinner nor a bowl from which to eat it is not a happy bunny.

That is the sole incident recounted in “Spare” which could inspire in any intelligent person a scintilla of sympathy. Otherwise, the unrelenting litany of grievance from The Hostage, as the Palace staff referred to the Duke of Sussex after his marriage, is a catalogue of narcissistic paranoia. Central to his narrative is the codpiece, about whose accident-prone contents the world now knows infinitely more than is necessary, while this prince, so jealous of his privacy, has shared similar information about his brother, our future king.

Yet, we were told, the one great aspiration of the Sussex duo was privacy and a quiet family life. For that reason they gave up their royal duties and retired to the United States, where they sought obscurity: just Harry, Meghan, the children and Sunshine Sachs, the PR company (until last October). Harry has defended his privacy through a scandalous Oprah Winfrey interview, six Netflix episodes and now a 416-page book, describing such episodes as having sex for the first time with an older woman in a field behind a pub and suffering from frostbite in a very private place (the North Pole).

There is no trivial detail of his life so far that remains untold: his method of defending his privacy appears to be to put so much on public view that there is nothing remaining for others to expose. Unfortunately, in the course of implementing this cunning plan, he reveals intimate details concerning other members of the royal family.

Beyond privacy, his other great concern is security. On Netflix he confided: “I wonder what would have happened to us, if we hadn’t gotten [sic] out when we did.” To which his wife chimed in: “Our security was being pulled. Everyone in the world knew where we were… I wasn’t being thrown to the wolves, I was being fed to the wolves.”

Harry took prompt action to resolve the security question by revealing in his book that he had killed 25 Taliban fighters. Has Harry ever heard of Salman Rushdie – the man whose security routine will provide the template for his future existence? For this wholly self-absorbed Californian therapy freak, the one preoccupation for which most people accorded him credit – the safety of his family – was cast aside, so that he could indulge in some schoolboy bragging wholly foreign to the ethos of British servicemen.

His ungallant attack on his stepmother and present Queen revealed the extent of his divorce from reality. He claimed that she was seeking rehabilitation in public opinion after her marriage to the now King: obviously true and a necessary exercise. However, here comes Harry’s “truth”, or “lived experience”, or whatever: “That made her dangerous, because of the connections that she was forging within the British press. And there was open willingness on both sides to trade off information. And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her on the way to being Queen Consort, there was gonna be people or bodies left in the street because of that.”

Don’t worry, Harry. So long as the bodies in the street were fewer than 25, you are still ahead in the body count. This allegation in one of the Sussex interviews, compounded by the claim in the book that the Duchess of Cornwall leaked the conversation she had with Prince William at her first meeting with him, is already comprehensively discredited. The conversation with William was allegedly retailed by one of Camilla’s aides to her husband, who repeated it to someone he knew at a sports club, who had newspaper connections. The aide then resigned.

The idea that the present Queen, when Duchess of Cornwall, would have been so naive as to enter into conspiratorial relations with the press, effectively rendering herself a hostage to the tabloids, is beyond absurd. Royal correspondents of the period have reacted with incredulity: “I wish!” is the classic response. In fact, the Duchess of Cornwall sensibly recognised that the best way to support her husband and, in the process, gain the confidence of the public, was to fulfil her official duties conscientiously and with a good will – a dedication that eluded the jet-setting Sussexes.

But there is something else that the professional royal correspondents are asking and which we should all be interested to know: what stories? What stories against Prince Harry is the Palace supposed to have leaked? There were no anti-Harry narratives in the British press until he made clear his antipathy to the media, his royal duties and, in the final analysis, his country.

Until Megxit reared its head, the British media were in one of their periodic states of infatuation with a particular unit of the royal family: Harry and Meghan. The lead-up to their marriage was a saccharine extravaganza, the fairy-tale wedding in which the British people, of every condition, pullulating with goodwill towards the new Duchess of Sussex, cheered them to the echo, was an experience that would have overcome any less calculating character than Meghan Markle. Their early round of royal duties further cemented their popularity.

Harry, never the brightest bulb on the chandelier and anxious to discredit as many members of his family as possible in a scattergun attack, gave the game away when, at different times, he accused his father, his brother and sister-in-law of being jealous of the Sussexes’ high profile and media popularity. If the media had been sniping at them and assailing the Duchess with racist-tinged abuse, the other family members would hardly have been jealous, would they?

Pompously, Harry claims he wants “accountability” and “an apology” from his family. For what? Not once has he been able to give a concrete instance of ill treatment of himself or his wife. She was welcomed with open arms into the House of Windsor, but, from the first, disdained any advice. The pettiness of the alleged rows, over bridesmaids’ dresses, tiaras, lip gloss, all have a most un-royal resonance of prima donna rows in Hollywood powder rooms.

Some commentators are still trying to excuse Harry on the grounds he lost his mother tragically, at an early age. Yes, and the nation sympathised with him for years afterwards. But a man of 38, who has killed his country’s enemies and founded his own family, should have disciplined himself to put the past behind him. His brother lost the same mother, but has disciplined himself to dedicate his life to the service of the nation.

Harry, in contrast, was pictured, grinning, on his “freedom flight”, leaving Britain just as his country was bracing itself for its worst ordeal since 1945, the long Covid pandemic and lockdown. Meanwhile, his nonagenarian grandmother was preparing to sustain the nation with the quiet authority of her presence and a caring, but emotionally disciplined, address to her frightened people.

Harry should have been told to “man up”, but instead he has been drawn into the worst possible environment: the Californian solipsistic cult of therapy, endless self-absorption among the most self-centred society on earth, where “feelings” range free and undisciplined, therapists form a priesthood and, behind a mask of concern for modish “issues”, money is the ultimate preoccupation.

The Duke of Sussex is a wholly controlled subsidiary of the Duchess of Sussex: the dependency of Edward VIII on Wallis Simpson is being re-enacted. Much harm was done by the dishonest claim that the royal family is “racist”. Harry now denies his wife ever made that allegation: as usual, it was invented by the British press.

It was during the Oprah Winfrey interview, on American television, with no involvement whatsoever by the British media, that the Duchess of Sussex claimed her son Archie was not made a prince because of his racial heritage: “The idea of the first member of colour in this family not being titled in the same way that other grandchildren would be…” In fact, of course, Archie at that time was not a grandchild of the Sovereign, Elizabeth II, but a great-grandchild through a younger son and therefore outside the scope of the 1917 legislation regulating the title of prince.

That was the sole reason he was not created Prince Archie; but the sinister aspect of that claim – and Harry seems belatedly to have tumbled to this – is that, if it had been a discriminatory decision, the person responsible would have been the late Queen – an intolerable slur. Although the Duke seems to be recoiling from the explosive implications of attaching a “racist” slur to his own family, it remains to be seen whether the Duchess will pursue this theme under her own steam.

It is all such a load of nonsense; and so mercenary. Nobody understands what the alleged Sussex grievances are because, even in a book of 416 pages, they are never spelled out clearly, just vaguely alluded to: “They were happy to lie to protect my brother. They were never willing to tell the truth to protect us.” Who were happy? Why did your brother need protection? From what? What truth needed to be told to protect you? What on earth are you rambling on about?

“I’ve always felt this was a fight worth fighting for.” That, at least, makes sense: $100m in Netflix and Spotify deals, another $20m in a book deal, on the Faustian bargain of trashing your own family, in every intimate detail, before the whole world. And this man once held the Queen’s commission.

His chronicle of drug-taking and macho military mayhem is almost congenial, compared to the long, lingering whine that has become his identifying characteristic under his new Californian owner. But this synthetically manufactured victim has a problem: having thrown even the kitchen sink into “Spare”, what trick can he turn to secure his next $100m?

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