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LONDON – The top news story in Britain on Friday was all about Prince Harry. A handful of news organizations have received early copies, mostly in Spanish, of the prince’s memoir, Spare. To their top takeaways? They report that the prince lost his virginity… in a field.
Behind a pub. With a woman who treated him “like a young stud.”
The memoir is the latest installment from a couple who left royal service to live their own best, financially independent life in California, mostly by telling tales of their estrangement from their families and the palace.
Many Britons claim they’ve heard enough, thank you, from Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex. But the pre-sale has propelled Harry’s book, which is due to be officially released on Tuesday, to the top of Amazon’s best-selling list. The Harry-hating tabloids here are mad about the story, and social media in the UK is filled with dueling hashtags on the couple’s pros and cons.
Prince Harry’s memoir details his brother’s attack
Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace still declined to comment.
Harry killed 25 Taliban fighters in Afghanistan
The prince said he killed 25 Taliban members during his two tours of duty with the British army in Afghanistan. “When I was thrown into the heat and confusion of battle, I didn’t consider these 25 to be human. They were pawns removed from the board. Bad people are eliminated before they can kill good people,” he wrote, according to the BBC account.
Harry served five months as a forward air controller and Apache helicopter pilot. The Ministry of Defense declined to confirm the details of his account, saying: “We are not commenting on operational details for security reasons.” Former British military officers have told the media that boasting about killings is not smart and could expose the prince and his family to heightened security threats.
William and Kate promoted his Nazi costume
Harry claims he made up his mind whether to go to a Native Americans and Colonials-themed party in 2005 as a pilot or a Nazi, and that he asked his brother and future sister-in-law to help him decide. “I called Willy and Kate and asked what they thought of it. Nazi uniform they said,” said Harry, who writes that they laughed when they saw him in disguise.
The tabloid photos of him in that costume were one of the biggest Harry headaches in the royal family — at least before he gave up his royal role and left for California. In previous interviews, Harry said he would always regret his decision when he was 20.
Harry sought a psychic to communicate with his dead mother
Harry writes about using a psychic who claimed to have “powers” to communicate with his mother, Princess Diana. She told him Diana was “happy he lived the life she never could,” according to the BBC.
His Eton days included drugs and sex
Harry confesses that he smoked marijuana and snorted cocaine from the age of 17 while attending Eton College, England’s most elite boarding school. This revelation has drawn yawns in the UK in particular, where few believed Buckingham Palace’s earlier denials about Harry’s drug use.
The story of his loss of virginity attracts more attention. It was “a humiliating episode with an older woman who liked macho horses and treated me like a young stud,” writes the prince. “One of my many mistakes was letting it happen in a field, just behind a very busy pub.”
He opposed his father’s marriage to Camilla
Harry writes that he and William begged their father Charles not to marry his longtime partner Camilla, according to The Sun. The prince recalls fears she would become an “evil stepmother” and be unfairly compared to Diana.
It is unclear when he objected. Charles and Camilla, now King and Queen, married in 2005.
Bridesmaid dresses and Easter gifts created tension between Meghan and Kate
Web’s headline on Friday focused on the saga between Harry and William’s wives: ‘What REALLY is behind Meghan and Kate’s long-running feud: Harry’s memoir claims arguments over bridesmaid dresses, Easter gifts and lip gloss drove them apart (but memories may vary’) .”
The British tabloids were quite obsessed with this story, including who made who cry first, Meghan or Catherine.
Harry and William got into a physical fight over Meghan
In a passage leaked to the Guardian this week, Harry writes that his older brother physically assaulted him during an argument in the kitchen in 2019 after William called Meghan “difficult”, “rude” and “abrasive”.
During their argument, Harry writes, “his older brother grabbed my collar, tore my necklace and threw me to the ground,” according to the Guardian. Harry says he landed on a dog bowl, which hurt him, and that his brother urged him to fight back, but he didn’t.
Who commented on their baby’s skin color remains a mystery
None of the book’s accounts so far reveal the answer to an open-ended question: Who in the family has raised questions about what Harry and Meghan’s multiracial baby would look like when born? That story was one of the headlines from Harry and Meghan’s 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey. They declined to say at the time who prompted that conversation – only that it wasn’t Queen Elizabeth II or her husband Prince Philip. And Harry might not be ready to go any further in the book either.
But Harry will also be doing the rounds of interviews this week and pocketing the book. Does he have anything else to reveal?
The prince is saddened to have lost touch with his father and brother and says he wants “a family” and “not an institution”. In an ITV teaser, Harry talks about wanting a “reconciliation” with his father and brother, but says: “First there has to be some accountability.”
In another clip from an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, which will air on Sunday, Harry admits he was “probably bigoted” before he started dating Meghan that he was “incredibly naive” like the British Tabloids would turn the relationship around and that the “race element” of the couple’s relationship “sprung up immediately”.