Spare memoir: Prince Harry rebuked over pot shots at press
Prince Harry put his father and protection officers ‘in a difficult spot’ when he used drugs during a period of teenage rebellion at Eton, a royal source says.
Prince Harry’s anger at the way a newspaper was allowed to report him taking illegal drugs is understandable but he should remember the “difficult position” in which he put his father and protectors, a royal source has said.
The Duke of Sussex wrote in his memoir Spare, which was published last week, that he had been thrown “right under the bus” when a newspaper discovered that he had been taking cannabis while at Eton.
The Prince said that his father had failed to tell the editor “to call off the dogs” and had instead allowed staff “to play ball with her”.
The insider said that Harry’s teenage rebellion had dealt his father and staff a difficult hand. “As Harry says himself, what was being written was basically true,” they said. “There was clearly a lot of stuff going on which put everybody involved in a difficult position, including his protection officers who, remember, are all members of the Metropolitan Police.
“Behaviour has consequences, doesn’t it? A lot of people that age do experiment with drugs. It’s not unusual and I don’t think anyone ever condemned him for it. It was more that they worried about him.”
The source said that the press had exercised restraint in publishing stories about Harry and Prince William while they were at school but could not be expected to ignore a criminal offence.
“There’s such a thing as privacy but there’s public interest as well,” they said. “Breaking the law is quite a strong public interest justification for any newspaper.”
The insider, who asked not to be named, said that Harry seemed to be striking out at the Queen because he believed that his father had done things for her but not for him. Harry wrote in the book that with Camilla “there was open willingness on both sides to trade information . . . [and] there was going to be people or bodies left in the street because of that”.
The source said: “If you read the book there are quite a lot of lateral references, rather than grenade strikes, where he clearly implies or alludes to his father’s life and his happy life with Camilla, comparing the effort that went into making that a reality with his own situation at times. He seems to be saying: ‘You put all this effort into sorting your own life out and all this effort into Camilla but what did you do about me? Why didn’t all of you do more for me, not only when I was young but more recently as well?’ ”
The King and Queen drove to Crathie Kirk at Balmoral on Sunday for their first joint appearance since the publication of Spare. Harry told The Daily Telegraph on Saturday that his family should apologise for their treatment of Meghan, saying: “You know what you did.”
The source added that Buckingham Palace would have to respond to Harry’s allegations at some point, perhaps when feelings were less raw. “It can’t stay in stasis. There’s going to have to be some kind of further explanation of all this.
“That may mean more accounts given of some of the things he’s talked about.”
The source also said that Harry’s account ignored the success of the Press Complaints Commission under Lord Wakeham in asking newspapers to leave them alone during their time at Eton and, in William’s case, at St Andrews University.
“Many doubted that agreement would work - including many at the Palace - but it did work. It showed how much the press cared about the princes’ privacy. The press, a highly competitive industry, worked closely together to protect them during a formative part of their lives.
“Some wise older heads at the Palace who were around at that time thought that they had been too protected. The princes hadn’t got used to what the press would be like, in the way their father and his siblings had when they were growing up. They had got used to never being scrutinised. Maybe that played into some of this, not equating behaviour with consequences.”
On Sunday other royal sources suggested that reconciliation was possible and should ideally happen before the King’s coronation. One source told The Sunday Times: “It’s going to take flexibility on all sides, but it can be done . . . Both sides need to hold their hands up and admit we didn’t get everything right, and we got a lot wrong, and we have to say to him: ‘We understand the pain you’ve been through.’ ”
The Times
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