Reporter reveals claims about Harry’s book Spare

A royal veteran says that the Duke of Sussex used the passing Queen Elizabeth in 2022 in a way he should not have.

Prince Harry, Prince William and King Charles at the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

Call it piece of royal irony #33: That the two most devastating books that have ever come out about the House of Windsor were written by the two family members with the least intellectual reputations.

Diana, Princess of Wales, who self-deprecatingly called herself “thick as a plank”, was the deep throat behind Andrew Morton’s 1992 marmalade-dropper, and Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, a man who got a B in Art and D in Geography in his final school exams would go on to write the combustible Spare.

Now a veteran royal biographer has made some pretty extraordinary claims about Harry’s authoring of said literary IED, claiming that the duke was “taking notes” for the title after his grandmother, the late Queen, died.

Prince Harry, Prince William and King Charles at the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

Robert Hardman is the author of Charles III: New King, New Court, The Inside Story in which he writes in detail about the events of September 8 when the UK’s longest reigning monarch went to her just reward.

Speaking at the Hay literary festival a few days ago, Hardman told the audience, according to the Independent, “It’s not what Harry said, it’s the fact that he said it, and he gave away so many secrets. And he was, effectively, at the time of the Queen’s death, you know, he was taking notes.”

“Taking notes”? Record scratch.

While the image that might come immediately to mind is of the duke furiously scribbling in a well-used spiral notebook while crouched behind a potted fern, really what I think Hardman is saying is that the final draft of Spare had yet to be submitted at that point in time.

The duke and his ghostwriter, JR Moehringer, started work on the book, unbeknownst to the world, in the northern summer of 2020 with Penguin Random House (PRH) waiting a full year, until July 2021, to reveal their literary coup de grace and that Harry was beavering away on a memoir.

(Let us all now remember the Penguin promised that the book would be “intimate and heartfelt” and you can’t get more “intimate” than the sections concerning him losing his virginity in a field or ending up with a frost-bitten “todger” or more “heartfelt” than dropping various family members in it like revealing Kate, the Princess of Wales, isn’t one to share lipgloss.)

Anywho, a year on from that, in the northern summer of 2022, Operation: Book was still chugging along with no publication date set. In early September, Harry and wife Meghan the Duchess of Sussex, packed up their travel crystals and flew to the UK for a series of charity events.

Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex on the long Walk at Windsor Castle on September 10, 2022. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

On the morning of September 8, Buckingham Palace put out a statement saying “the Queen’s doctors are concerned for Her Majesty’s health”. The 96-year-old would die peacefully at 3.10pm.

Thus ingredients for a right ol’ mess were in place: The Sussexes in the UK, tempers were short (Harry writes in Spare about clashing with his father over whether Meghan was allowed to go to Scotland), and the duke’s manuscript was sitting on his dinged Macbook.

When Spare came out four months later the vast majority of the attention was devoted to Harry’s claims that William had attacked him and that the Prince and Princess of Wales had encouraged him to dress up as a Nazi.

But, Hardman has a point. What was largely overlooked was that the Duke of Sussex wrote about entering his grandmother’s bedroom and seeing her body: “I braced myself, went in. The room was dimly lit, unfamiliar – I’d been inside it only once in my life. I moved ahead uncertainly, and there she was. I stood, frozen, staring. I stared and stared… I whispered to her that I hoped she was happy, that I hoped she was with Grandpa.”

I suppose you can’t get any more “intimate” than that.

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and Queen Elizabeth II on June 14, 2018 in Widnes, England. Picture: Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images

If you think about it, it’s pretty extraordinary that Harry saw fit to, in weeks or months after Queen Elizabeth’s funeral, to return to the keyboard to detail being in the same room as his recently deceased granny. (Well that or his publisher ordered him back to work to add it in.)

Then again, the Sussexes’ Netflix share-a-thon of a TV series revealed that they had taken a photographer inside Buckingham Palace in 2020 without permission.

Needs, I suppose, and content must.

The consequences for Harry of all this, the repeated breaching of the sanctum sanctorum of royal life, are still very much a life issue.

Spare might have ended up selling like hot cakes but, at what cost exactly? Its publication and the duke’s willingness to write about a bevy of private moments concerning not only his father and brother but Queen Camilla and Kate has reportedly dealt a devastating blow to any chance of anything like a mending of fences.

As Hardman told the Hay festival audience: “The problem that exists is, at the moment, there is still a trust issue. People are still very wounded, particularly Prince William, that these intimate private childhood family moments all spilled out in Harry’s book.”

Copies of Prince Harry’s book, Spare.. Picture: Tara Croser

These are sentiments echoed by intimates of William and Kate’s speaking to the Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes. One has previously told Sykes that the Prince of Wales “absolutely fucking hates” his bother.

Elsewhere, another friend of the Waleses’ told Sykes, “William will never trust Harry again. How could he?... [William] will never forgive him for the damage he has done to the family.”

The $30 million question here is, which is how much Harry is reported to have been paid by Penguin Random House is, is there a second memoir in the works?

Hardman told the Hay-goers that the brevity of certain chapters of Harry’s life suggest that “part two might be on its way.”

So, buckle up, kiddos. Possibly coming to the bestseller lists for 2025, Spare 2: Sparer Still.

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.