Spare exposes bad blood between Harry and William
In his memoir, mistakenly released early in Spain, Prince Harry alienates himself further from his family.
Prince Harry told his father King Charles that he was being disrespectful by not allowing Meghan to travel to Balmoral Castle in Scotland when Queen Elizabeth II was hours away from dying.
In an extraordinary passage in his book Spare, mistakenly released five days early in Spain despite onerous security measures, Harry has unveiled the deeply personal exchange with his father conducted during the emotionally fraught hours as the queen was severely ill and being made comfortable by doctors around midday of September 8. Harry, 38, confirmed what most suspected: Charles had told him not to bring deeply unpopular Meghan to Balmoral.
An announcement had been made by Buckingham Palace that the queen was “under medical supervision after doctors became concerned for her health”, and Harry and Meghan, in London for a charity event, announced that they would be going to Scotland to see her.
But only Harry went, travelling by private charter plane after missing an earlier flight that had included Prince William, Prince Andrew, Prince Edward and his wife Sophie, who was extremely close to the queen. The queen died before either of the brothers arrived at the castle.
Harry wrote of that day last year, when he was told the queen was ailing: “Then my father called again. He told me I was welcome at Balmoral, but … without her (Meghan). He started to explain his reasons, but they didn’t make any sense at all, and it was disrespectful as well. I did not tolerate it from him. Don’t even think about talking about my wife like that.
“Repentant, he said, stammering that he simply didn’t want the place to be full of people. Nobody’s wife was going to go, not even Kate, he told me, so Meg shouldn’t either.” Kate had remained in Windsor to pick up her and William’s three children from their first day of attending a new school after moving house from Kensington Palace to the Windsor estate earlier in the week.
However, Harry’s misplaced sense of entitlement and faux outrage on behalf of his wife – remember, the couple couldn’t find a gap in their schedule to see the queen despite her invitations earlier in the year – came as his father was going through the most tumultuous emotions.
It is not the only self-obsessed narrative in the book.
Despite Harry’s paranoia about security – he is still suing the British government to have taxpayers provide security for him and his family whenever they are in Britain – he was not smart enough to rein in his boast about killing 25 Taliban insurgents during one of his tours of Afghanistan as an Apache helicopter pilot.
Harry described the removal of the Taliban as taking “chess pieces off the board” and that he returned to the military base and then watched videos of each kill.
Harry wrote: “with exactness (I know) how many enemy combatants I had killed. And it seemed to me essential not to be afraid of that number. So my number is 25. It’s not a number that fills me with satisfaction, but nor does it embarrass me.” Military experts say his pronouncement now elevates his security risk, as well as ignoring a longstanding military tradition to remain low-key about accomplishments in battle.
Embarrassingly, Harry also recounts losing his virginity when he was 17 to an older woman, crudely describing it thus (in the translation from Spanish to English): “I mounted quickly, after which she spanked my ass and sent me away” – around the same time as he started taking cocaine and other drugs.
Harry’s bitterness is riven throughout the 540 pages of the Spanish edition of Spare, the only version that has found its way into the hands of eager journalists before Tuesday’s official release date. In Britain the memoir was under such tight security it was to be delivered to bookshops only late on Monday night to avoid any scoops. But in what was an enormous mishap in the carefully orchestrated publicity drive, major news outlets were able to get their hands on copies of the Spanish book before it was quickly whipped off the shelves, upending already pre-recorded interviews Harry has done for US 60 Minutes, Good Morning America and Britain’s ITV, which begin airing from Sunday.
So far, Harry’s unrestrained war-hero gloating, tattle tales and increasingly boring woes of being the spare to his older brother Prince William have done little for his plummeting reputation in Britain, and is even having a negative impact in the US.
Where once Harry may have attracted sympathy, he is now openly mocked in Britain for having had a necklace broken by the “bad-ass future King William”.
Doing the rounds of social media is a mock medieval tapestry, inscribed in Latin “Princeps William Princeps Haroldvs in pateram caninam impulit” (He pushed him into the dog bowl). This relates to the incident in the book where William fought with Harry over Meghan’s bullying of staff, calling her “difficult, rude and abrasive”, resulting in Harry smashing into the dog bowl and cutting his back. Harry’s first call wasn’t to Meghan but to his therapist, raising questions about why he later insisted he couldn’t seek help for his wife’s suicidal thoughts despite having a mental health expert on speed dial.
The book also reveals the deep mistrust between the brothers and their wives; that Harry snarkily hailed his brother’s baldness as “alarming and more advanced than mine”; and his similarly catty observation that William’s resemblance to their mother had faded.
William will be furious about Harry’s treachery, and Charles will be saddened.
Harry even goes so far as to mock his father carrying around his beloved old teddy bear, alluding to Charles being so bullied as a child that he is deeply scarred. He says that in 1997 a shocked Charles woke him and informed him that his mother, Diana, princess of Wales, had been in a car accident in Paris, calling him repeatedly “dear son” and touching his knee.
Then follows one of the most astonishing parts of the book, where Harry believes that the drunk driver who was at the wheel when his mother died “wouldn’t have had any problem driving through such a short tunnel, even drunk, unless paparazzi were following him and dazzled him”.
Harry wrote “why had those paparazzi got off lightly, why weren’t they in prison and who had sent them? And why weren’t those people in jail either? What other reason could there be apart from corruption and cover-ups being the order of the day?”
He said he and William were “dissuaded” by “those who decided” from asking jointly for the investigation to be reopened.
The French investigation into Diana’s death found that the driver, Henri Paul, had been speeding and he had a blood alcohol reading of 0.175, well over the legal limit.
Harry continues to be so sad after his mother died that he has sought solace in a clairvoyant who had “powers” to relay a message.
“You’re living the life she couldn’t,” Harry said the woman told him. “You’re living the life she wanted for you.”
Harry also takes aim in the book at Queen Camilla, seemingly surprised that Charles didn’t take his advice not to marry her because Harry (then aged 20) feared she would be the wicked stepmother. Harry said meeting Camilla for the first time when he was a younger teenager was like having an injection, writing: “Close your eyes and you won’t even feel it.”
These intimate revelations have created an immediate problem for Charles, who has wanted to have Harry, still a duke, at his coronation in May. But Harry has been so raw and so brutal that having him part of such a glittering occasion risks overshadowing the pomp.
It seems highly unlikely that William will allow Harry to be anywhere near the rest of the royal family if he does arrive for the coronation. William told off Meghan for informing Kate she had a “baby brain because of her hormones” shortly after giving birth to Prince Louis in 2018, apparently the source of the argument about who made whom cry on the eve of Harry and Meghan’s Windsor Castle wedding in May 2018.
After upsetting Kate, Harry said Meghan apologised and insisted that was how she speaks to her friends. But Harry wrote that William then pointed a finger at Meg and thundered: “Well, it’s rude, Meghan. These things are not done here.” Meghan wasn’t too thrilled, responding with a withering riposte: “If you don’t mind, keep your finger out of my face.”
And in another disclosure Harry insists that what he described as the worst decision of his life – wearing a Nazi uniform to a party when he was 20 – had been encouraged by both William and Kate, who “howled with laughter” at his decision. Harry wrote in the book: “I phoned Willy and Kate, asked what they thought. Nazi uniform, they said.”
This vignette is intriguing because Harry is both deflecting responsibility and willing to divulge the most intimate family conversations, thinking it will garner sympathy for himself. Remember, this is a man who wants to be a leader in mental health and has publicly declared that he wants to have his father and his brother back into his life.
Perhaps the book should have been titled Delusional.
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