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LONDON – Tuesday marks the publication debut of Prince Harry’s memoir Spare, a book described by the press as a bridge-burner and flamethrower, with its insightful – heartfelt? awful? banal? – Portraits of his family and the inner circles within the circles of the House of Windsor, which he portrays as a devious coven of insidiousness, jealousy and bottomless need.
It’s safe to say that the book release didn’t turn out the way Harry and his publisher had so meticulously planned. Early copies in Spanish became available last week, and so were days of dizzying revelations in the very tabloids the Duke of Sussex so loathes.
Harry lost his virginity in a field, we learn. Harry shot 25 Taliban. Harry and his older brother, the heir, Prince William, feuded — a lot. Also, William looks older and is balding, and their wives have been fighting over lip gloss, “baby brains,” and bridesmaid dresses, Harry writes.
Takeaways from Prince Harry’s leaked memoir ‘Spare’
So what now, what’s next?
In the book and in the interviews he’s given on CBS’ 60 Minutes, on ITV in London and on ABC’s Good Morning America, it’s hard to know exactly what Harry and his wife Meghan are doing Duchess of Sussex , really want.
Following the Netflix series Harry & Meghan, Prince Harry went on a media tour for his new memoir, Spare, due out on January 10. (Video: Allie Caren/The Washington Post)
“I don’t think my dad or my brother will read the book,” Harry said on ITV in the UK after writing in the prologue that he was writing the book so they would understand and why he and Meghan made his ” Motherland” for California “out of fear for our sanity and physical safety”.
Harry told an interviewer he would always be a part of the family, brushing aside a question about giving up their royal titles. He said he couldn’t see a way back, but who knows? Members of the House of Windsor are very long-lived.
Early reviews describe the book as a cry for help, for change, from Harry to a family he describes as “trapped” in their roles. Others see whining indulgence — and quite the opposite of the late Queen, who for her duty, service, honor and unfathomable silence about all things family: Elizabeth has never given an interview to the press in her 70 years on the throne.
Harry and Meghan have said their origin story hasn’t been told — until now. But in the 2021 Oprah Winfrey interview, the many sessions promoting the memoir, the six-hour documentary Harry and Meghan produced about themselves called “Harry & Meghan,” called “Harry & Meghan ‘ they certainly won out.
Either way, the book will sell. It’s already at the top of the bestseller lists. It’s a bang. It’s great for Michelle Obama. And there will likely be more books by Harry and Meghan, who have swapped jobs from working “senior royals” to former senior royals who keep their titles while talking about the family that doesn’t talk about them.
And what about the reconciliation, peace, or reckoning that Harry talks about so much? Is that a possibility? Not very likely, say the royal correspondents, who Harry also loathes – and ridicules.
Harry’s father Charles is set to be crowned in May. It is currently unknown whether Harry and Meghan will participate.
It’s true that the couple achieved one of their goals by taking back control of their own narrative. No member of the royal family has ever gone as far as Harry and Meghan in describing family troubles and naming names.
How Prince Harry and Prince William’s Relationship Broke Down: A Timeline
Harry really seems to have it with his stepmother, Camilla, Queen Consort, the wife and longtime lover of his father, now the new King Charles III. She, in Harry’s opinion, is a schemer who “played the long game. A campaign aimed at marriage and ultimately at the crown.”
While many Britons have become furious with the prince and his American wife, many have also shared their story, particularly the accusations that the royal family and the British tabloid are either racist or suffer from “unconscious bias”.
A few minutes after midnight on Tuesday, Sarah Nakana, 46, a property surveyor who lives in south London, was one of the first in the country to buy a copy of ‘Spare’ from a nearly empty bookshop on Victoria station.
“I look forward to hearing about Prince Harry’s life from Prince Harry,” Nakana said, holding a hardcover copy of the 417-page book.
“I want to get ahead of the British press…in the morning there’s going to be anti-Harry and Meghanism because hate sells…and it’s important to me to hear his story in his words,” she said.
As if on cue, this first book buyer was surrounded by about 30 photographers and journalists. “It’s a bit ridiculous,” Nakana said of the crush, “but I understand the interest in the book because he’s the first prince of our generation to write his life.”
In his interviews, Harry admits that he has lost both his father and his brother, but that he craves—no, demands—their attention. He wants reconciliation and accounting, but on his own terms.
Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace have continued to decline to comment – as is their way.
“He’s an angry young man,” said Dickie Arbiter, a former spokesman for Queen Elizabeth II. “He’s making these allegations and these allegations and not backing them up with any further information about them. He’s just saying they did, and he’s saying it knowing full well they won’t respond.”
Imagine if William responded publicly, Arbiter said. “If William came out and denied that he pushed Harry at Nottingham Cottage, there would be a question from a reporter. “Okay, what happened?” I mean, that continues the story, doesn’t it?”
It would descend, Arbiter said, to “He says he says she says she says.”
In the book, Harry says Charles begged the two brothers to end their never-ending argument, saying after his father Prince Philip’s funeral in 2021, “Please boys. Don’t make my final years a misery.”
It’s a sad line in the book full of sadness.
Valentine Low, author of Courtiers: Intrigue, Ambition and the Power Players Behind the House of Windsor, said that while Harry has made an “amazing” series of revelations and allegations, the damage may not be as bad as some had feared.
He said that after the death of Harry’s mother, Princess Diana, in a car crash in a Paris tunnel in 1997, “the reputation of the royal family was at rock bottom,” but even then “they kind of got through it all.”
The monarchy, he said, “has an amazing survivability… I feel like the royal family appears to have enough goodwill and is managing to weather this crisis.”
Buckingham Palace’s silence is prompting people to “fill in the blanks” for what they think could be Charles and William’s answer, said Pauline Maclaran, a monarchy expert at Royal Holloway, University of London.
“Harry said so much that people probably think, oh poor Charles, it’s like a Shakespearean drama with a wayward son,” she said. “I think people can relate very clearly to those battles but they can’t relate to Harry that much, at least on the British side, because he doesn’t acknowledge any faults, really everyone else is to blame, even his famous wearing of the Nazi Uniform is William and Kate’s fault.”
On the downside, Maclaran said, the royals “are pretty boring by nature, but suddenly now, with the emotional commitment, if they were gone, we’d miss them. We connect with our neighbors and say, ‘What has Harry done now?’”
Things that seemed shocking when first released feel less so a few days later, and many commenters have said, well, families fight.
Unless the circumstances of their birth are extraordinary – and that’s how it works with the hereditary monarchy. William is heir. Harry is spared. And every day more is left with every child that William and Catherine, Princess of Wales have.
“William doesn’t come across very well, seems to have a temper. Was he a bit presumptuous towards his brother? Possibly, but we only have Harry’s word for it,” Low said. “But on the other hand, they’re brothers, and that’s the kind of fights that brothers have. Harry also complains about everything and everyone and people start to ignore that.
Prince Harry says his father, brother and stepmother conspired against him and Meghan
A YouGov poll released on Monday, a day before the book’s release, found that just 26 percent of people had a positive opinion of Harry, up from 49 percent in December – a record low for him. William’s popularity ratings have also taken a hit, with 69 percent saying they had a positive opinion of him, up from 77 percent last month.
Some monarchy authorities say Harry’s book will undermine the institution, weakening it at home and abroad and undermining the “soft power” the House of Windsor wields in both America and the Commonwealth countries.
Anna Whitelock, professor of history of modern monarchy at the City, University of London, said Harry’s claims were “uncomfortable for the royal family”.
But “aside from poor PR and a sense that British royal family drama is something of a boxset thriller, the damage to the institution of monarchy itself is harder to assess at this point.”
Whitelock added that “Harry, in addressing the issues of the toxic relationship between the press and the palace, the briefing of rival households, the treatment of ‘spares’ and the inherent misogyny and unconscious bias within the institution, certainly prompts the monarchy to consider reform.” . But whether it does, and whether the public is demanding it or not, remains to be seen.”