Hanging out with Harry: his ghostwriter speaks out

The man behind Spare says his subject wanted to rebut ‘lies’. Really? What Harry wants isn’t to tell the truth, it’s revenge and slagging off his family.

Prince Harry at King Charles III’s coronation. Picture: AFP

So now we know. If we are to believe Prince Harry’s ghostwriter, JR Moehringer, the five-year ginger whinge fest is because people thought he was a bit thick and his mum died.

So to be clear, the Oprah interview, the hours of Netflix, the 400-page book, the endless swipes and grotesque indiscretions and freelance royal nonsense, it isn’t about making millions and building Brand Harry. It definitely isn’t because he’s one of those people who want to have the last word, all the time, everywhere. It isn’t because he’s spent too much time staring at his navel while the rest of us go to work. No, the whinge fest was because people “belittled his intellectual capabilities” and because his mum died.

Thirty years and living happily ever after in California evidently isn’t enough to get over it and move on.

The book Spare, by Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex. Picture: AFP

Moehringer’s account in The New Yorker of how he tackled the writing of Spare gives us an insight into quite how tedious it would have been if Harry had written it himself. This is a grown man whose specialist subject is apparently Moana “and his favourite scene is when Heihei the silly chicken gets lost at sea”. What Harry wants isn’t to tell the truth, as Moehringer claims, it’s revenge. Think about it: slagging off his family is a funny way of proving how clever he is and it definitely won’t bring his mum back.

“Even at the most peripheral moments of his life, his central tragedy intrudes,” Moehringer writes about Diana’s death. Harry wanted Spare to be “a rebuttal to every lie ever published about him … he dreams of endless retractions”.

For the love of God, man, just don’t read it all! Lots of people have grim childhoods with divorced or dead parents. Very few of them have the privileges Harry had.

And besides, he doesn’t want to rebut all the “lies”. He wants to edit out his own lack of judgment in playing strip billiards with strangers in Vegas, or wearing a Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party. Spare, Moehringer writes, was “Harry’s comeback” but he at first “wasn’t sure how much he wanted to say”. He seems to have got over that pretty well. There were tears in his eyes at the publication party, apparently because it felt incredible to have the “truth” out there. There were probably tears in his father’s eyes as well, and his grandmother would have turned in her grave, but hey-ho, eh?

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in Edinburgh in 2018. Picture: Getty Images

“The way he’d been treated by both strangers and intimates was grotesque,” Moehringer writes, but Harry’s self-obsession is epic. We’ve all been let down and traduced. That’s life. He’s also being a tad disingenuous when he adds that a memoir is “a particular series of events chosen because they have the greatest resonance for the widest range of people”.

Come on. Not many people will resonate with being thumped by a prince in a palace and smashing a dog bowl.

But what I find odd is this. Harry goes on and on about the living hell that is being royal, the sheer unrelenting intolerable awfulness of it, but William and Kate seem to live very nice lives. By and large, nobody bothers them when they’re not on duty.

Contrary to what Meghan once claimed, there are no banks of paparazzi waiting in the bushes of rural Berkshire to ambush them on their way to school every day. They brush up well for high days and holidays, then they go back to normal life.

They spent the weekend in robes and jewels and on Tuesday they took the kids to school. They stand on the touchline at sports matches. They go on nice holidays. They dress up for film premieres and wear jewels and tiaras but, for the most part, they spend their days bringing up their children and doing interesting things with interesting people, talking about subjects that interest them.

“Telling is how we cement details, preserve continuity, stay sane,” Moehringer writes, defending Harry’s score-settling. Oh, please. No, it is not. Most of us don’t have a publishing deal or a slot with Oprah, or a streaming giant paying to “tell our story” and “stay sane”.

For most of us, cracking on is how we do it. You should try it, Harry. You might like it. But it won’t sell many books, so I guess you won’t.

Prince William kisses his father, Britain's King Charles III, during the coronation ceremony. Picture: AFP

The Times