This week’s publication of Prince Harry’s autobiography, Spare, has been accompanied by a publicity frenzy that has barely been seen since the publication of the last Harry Potter title. Given how persona non grata JK Rowling now is in many circles, she might derive some wry comfort from the knowledge that the next author to have published to such a blitzkrieg of hype is a similarly polarising figure. To his admirers, in Britain and the rest of the world, the duke of Sussex is little less than a godsend: a liberal, socially conscious figure who is unafraid to call out the hypocrisies and pettiness of the royal family from a position of speaking truth to power. And to his detractors—a similarly vast number—he is something between a hypocrite and a traitor, selling out his family for a hefty sum of money (estimated at around $20m).
Spare is unlikely to make either side reconsider their position. It’s elegantly written (and ghosted by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author JD Moehringer, who also offered his services to Andre Agassi for his memoir Open), replete with introspection and incident, and also chock-full of the kind of Californian therapy-speak and psychobabble that the duke has embraced since his immersion into American life and culture after his quasi-abdication from Britain and the “Firm” three years ago. It takes aim at the expected targets—mainly the media, but his brother “Willy” gets a spectacular kicking, too—and presents its narrator as a confused, angry figure who has finally found peace and satisfaction as a family man in another country.
A charge made against Prince Harry repeatedly by conservative commentators and the right-leaning press is that he has betrayed his birthright by daring to speak out against those around him, and that he should be ashamed by the cynicism of his actions. Anyone reading Spare will be struck by how sincere the book is—its heart on sleeve sentiment is very un-English, let alone something familiar to the royal family—but also it seems extraordinary that he should be so criticised when both his late mother and his father both gave similarly high-profile media interviews, rich in emotive content and designed to make them seem like accessible human beings, rather than distant and isolated figures. They cooperated fully with authors who, although they were not writing ghosted autobiographies of their subjects, still were offered unprecedented access and information in exchange for a positive portrayal of their collaborators.
While there was a frenzy of media attention when early copies of Spare leaked, thanks to a bookshop in Spain mistakenly placing them on sale nearly a week before publication date, it soon became clear that there was no revelation here anything like as jaw-dropping as the then-Prince Charles’s admission of adultery with Camilla Parker Bowles (who is referred to as “the Other Woman” in his son’s memoir), or the grab-bag of Diana’s intimate details, ranging from life-threatening bulimia to suicide attempts. Charles at least had the sympathetic and understanding figure of Jonathan Dimbleby to confide to; Diana had to make do with Andrew Morton, whose journalistic approach always belonged more to the tabloid end of the market, and the disgraced charlatan Martin Bashir, who sold her down the river in order to further his own sordid career.
Harry has been much criticised for the various interviews that he’s undertaken in the last couple of years, whether it was the one-sided outpourings that he offered Oprah Winfrey and on the Netflix Harry and Meghan series, or, in the past few days, to Tom Bradby and Anderson Cooper. They both found themselves faced with the duke becoming riled and defensive as soon as they dared to cast the slightest doubt on his claims. Yet it is also possible to see matters from his perspective. His most consistent line is that he is telling the truth—even if it is “his truth”—and that anyone who dares to criticise him or picks him up on points of detail is somehow pettifogging, and refusing to see the bigger picture: the way in which his family has been complicit within media manipulation and the invasion of privacy for decades, if not generations.
The duke of Windsor notoriously had to be told to stop holding press conferences everywhere he went, because his unfettered public utterances long ceased to be helpful to either the Royal Family, or to him. And one can only hope that, now that Spare has exploded into the world, that Harry will embrace a similar period of purdah. Yet whenever anyone criticises him for selling out his family, or for bringing things into public that should have remained private, he has a perfectly reasonable riposte: “It’s what I was brought up to know.”
The motto of the Firm might be “never complain, never explain”, but, in fact, its members have been indulging in a surfeit of complaining and explaining, justifying the ways of royalty to man for decades. And so, amid the criticism that he will face, now and in the future, for writing such an explosive book, he can justify his actions by saying that all he has done is to follow in the family tradition. There’s a line in Spare when Harry bitterly criticises the then-Prince Charles for saying, jokingly, “Who knows if I’m even your real father!” His decision to monetise his pain confirms, as if there was any doubt, that he entirely is his father’s son.
