Here’s a piece of wisdom Prince Harry has clearly missed: It’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak up and remove all doubt.
Now that we’re all getting an early look at his memoir, Spare — which was first published in Spain, so these quotes are translations — there’s no doubt: The Harry we’ve come to know, the Duke of Shame and Disgrace, is accurate that irrelevant. For all his rants and reckonings (William pushed me!), nobody on these pages looks worse than Harry himself.
No offense is too small not to be recorded: William took the better bedroom at Balmoral, the larger one with a view. “My half was smaller and less luxurious,” writes our fallen prince, because – wait for it – “Willy was the heir while I was the spare.”
We know. We got the memo a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
But if there’s one unifying theme in Harry’s otherwise gilded existence, this is it.
His entire family, writes Harry, used those terms, and so Harry, with all his wealth, privilege, and access to the world’s most powerful people, has chosen instead to wallow in a warm bath of wanton self-pity at the age of 38.
“I was the shadow, the supporting actor, Plan B,” writes Harry. “You brought me into this world in case anything happened to Willy. My mission was to provide a source of distraction, entertainment, and a spare in an emergency. Maybe a kidney. A blood transfusion, a pinch of bone marrow.”
The melodrama!
In wicked retaliation, Harry writes of William’s “familiar scowl that had always been the norm in dealing with me” – wonders why, asks a weary world – “his alarming alopecia, more advanced than mine; his famous resemblance to our mother, which faded over time. With age.’
Bitter, bitter, bitter. And this is a man who sees himself as a thought leader in the mental health field.
For all his rants and reckonings (William pushed me!), nobody on these pages looks worse than Harry himself.
There are words and concepts in this book that honestly could only have come from Harry’s ghostwriter. Do we think our lowly Duke, who struggled to complete high school and who in these pages shows ignorance of anything unrelated to his “genetic pain” is familiar with Arthurian legend? druid groves? Astronomy, the Webb telescope, the Earendel star? The physics of contrails? The definition of equal?
According to Harry’s own account here, his history professor once asked him, “What could be stranger . . . than a British prince who doesn’t know his country’s history? . . . We’re talking about your relatives, blood of your blood; doesn’t that tell you anything?’
Harry’s response: ‘Less than nothing, sir.’
The book’s motto, which reappears in the text, is William Faulkner’s famous phrase: “The past is never dead. It’s not even over.”
Bless Harry’s ghostwriter – who really deserves his paycheck – for convincing Harry these lines should stay in the book:
“When I recently discovered this quote on BrainyQuote, I was shocked. I thought, ‘Who the hell is Faulkner and how is he related to us Windsors?’
Oh god my sides this is too funny and what we all think isn’t it Harry the product of England’s finest school and such a determined useless git.
The Harry we saw after Mexgit – angry, petty, spoiled, jealous, full of resentment, abuse and disrespect, narcissistic and angry at his brother for just existing – was always like that.
These history lessons, which Harry writes as boring him to tears, only manage to reawaken his gigantic inferiority complex.
“My family had annulled me; the Spare,” he writes – after we have seen in these pages examples of King Charles’ paternal love and care, of the bond with William forged in the crucible of Diana’s death.
But moving on: Charles and William, he writes, could never travel together for fear of a plane crash. But Harry?
“No one gave a damn who I traveled with; the spare part could always be replenished.’
To the right. His father and brother, who have kept their mouths shut while Harry relentlessly shames and sells them, clearly don’t care about our Harry.
He reveals more about himself here than he probably realizes: he wants so badly to be seen not just as a man but as a warrior who will stop at nothing to protect his family and his rightful place in the royal lineage. Actually, it’s pathetic. Especially since he so clearly possesses none of the qualities that really make a man or a decent person: loyalty, kindness, honor, generosity, discretion, trustworthiness.
Here’s a piece of wisdom Prince Harry has clearly missed: It’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak up and remove all doubt.
No wonder Harry begins this book with a “secret meeting” he requested with Charles and William post-Mexgit after Prince Philip died and the trio stood over Wallis Simpson’s grave, “our feet almost on her face”, he writes.
In case you missed the metaphor, Meghan is supposed to be Wallis. Yes, big bad Charles and William won’t be happy until Meghan is dead and buried and they can stand on her face.
And for agreeing to a secret meeting with Harry, William and Charles were rewarded with the “private” meeting recorded in his book.
Did he lie to her? Of course not!
Harry tells us that there is no such thing as “the truth” – only his truth, sifted and molded according to his worldview. “My memory is my memory: it goes at its own pace, collecting and arranging what seems appropriate to it, and there is as much truth in what I remember and as I remember as there is in the so-called objective facts.”
In other words: You can’t get through to Harry, who lives like a child in Harry’s World.
It follows that there is no real self-assessment in this memoir of not taking responsibility for any of those relationships that Harry – along the lines of “be nice” – has so viciously destroyed.
Zero self esteem. No understanding of what “hypocrisy” means or how he and Meghan embody that term.
The most striking thing about this book isn’t the revelations. No, it’s the dissonance between the way Harry moves through the world – it’s all pretty somber, boring and obvious – and the writing, which tries to inspire a much more refined, well-read, brighter, nimble and inquisitive mind communicate.
And so “Spare” is another major self-inflicted wound, a broadside against #BrandSussex: these two always sell totally inauthentic versions of themselves. Here are echoes from Meghan:
The Harry we saw after Mexgit – angry, petty, spoiled, jealous, full of resentment, abuse and disrespect, narcissistic and angry at his brother for just existing – was always like that.
“Motherland,” writes Harry, “what a problematic expression.” The crown: colonialist, imperialist, racist. And how to bring down Charles, who so graciously walked Meghan halfway up the aisle at their wedding?
Harry tells us that his father still carries his childhood teddy bear – everywhere.
It’s one thing for Harry, as he’s doing here, to introduce Camilla to these pages as The Other Woman (and wow, William is doing well here seeing his father’s happiness). But in my opinion it is unforgivable to write that his father, the reigning monarch, is still drawn to the fact that he was bullied as a child, that he still wants his teddy bear.
“Teddy went everywhere with my dad,” Harry writes in part. “It was a pathetic thing, with broken arms, frayed and stained.”
You know what pathetic is? Take the private pain and vulnerability of those closest to you, mock them for public consumption and profit, and then demand their apologies.
I can’t wait to see “Spare” where it belongs: the residual waste bin.