Charles, Camilla and the press all come under attack, but the charge sheet against William is long
Harry’s wrath. Harry’s revenge. Harry’s truth. The Duke of Sussex’s memoir Spare is finally hitting bookshops and its pages are dripping with accusation, anger and sorrow.
Harry’s brother, the Prince of Wales, the “heir” to Harry’s “spare”, is portrayed as taking sibling competitiveness to “Olympiad” levels, throwing tantrums over Harry encroaching on his territory: Africa.
“I let you have veterans, why can’t you let me have African elephants and rhinos?” William is said to have wailed, as the two squabbled over their causes. And even ordering Harry to shave off his beard for his wedding, because William was himself not allowed to have one. “Beardgate,” Harry says of the row that lasted days.
His father, the king, is largely well-meaning though distracted, and generally forgives his son’s transgressions while gently urging him to learn from his mistakes. But he fails in his younger son’s eyes in being too terrified to take on the press – “the same shoddy bastards who’d portrayed him as a clown”, “his tormentors, his bullies” – who were now “tormenting and bullying” Harry and Meghan.
Harry’s stepmother, Camilla, the Queen Consort, is accused of playing “the long game, a campaign aimed at marriage and eventually the crown” with the spin doctor she is said to have persuaded Charles to hire leaking her conversations with William. When she eventually married Charles, “in a funny way, I even wanted Camilla to be happy. Maybe she’d be less dangerous if she was happy,” Harry writes.
But when Camilla suggests one way the Sussexes can escape the “red-hot maelstrom” of press attack is by Harry becoming ”governor general” of Bermuda, Harry writes: “Right. Right, I thought, and one added bonus of that plan would be to get us out of the picture.”
Competitiveness, it seems, looms large within the royal palaces. When Harry suggests Meghan would give up acting and accompany him on royal duties, Charles, who funded his sons, is said to have replied: “Hmm. I see. Well darling boy, you know there’s not enough money to go around.” He was already having to pay for William and Kate, out of the millions he received annually from the duchy of Cornwall, Harry writes. But it was clear it wasn’t about money, he continues, “what he really couldn’t stomach” was someone “coming in and overshadowing him. And Camilla.”
The picture he paints is of the royals all bidding to top the court circular annual Christmas Eve list for most engagements. The family “tolerated, even leaned into the nonsense of the court circular for the same reason it accepted the ravages and depredations of the press: fear. Fear of the public. Fear of the future. Fear of the day the nation would say: ‘OK, shut it down,’” he writes.
It was suggested the then Duchess of Cambridge change the spelling of her name, Catherine, to Katherine with a K “because there were already two royal cyphers with a C and a crown above: Charles and Camilla. It would be too confusing to have another.”
“Pa and Camilla” also didn’t like William and Kate “getting loads of publicity”. Harry cites one example of Kate attending a tennis club on a day Charles also had an engagement. “Just make sure the duchess doesn’t hold a tennis racket in any of the photos,” Charles’s press team ordered, aware such a picture would wipe “Pa and Camilla off the front pages”.
Harry is excoriating on the press; absolutely venomous in his description of Rebekah Brooks, after a “drugs shame” story about him was splashed across the front pages. He doesn’t name her – writing only “an anagram of Rehabber Kooks”. In response to the drug story, Harry claims, Charles’s team had spun Harry “right under a bus”, making up a story about Harry being taken to visit a rehab centre; so it would “bolster” Charles’s reputation, which had “sagged” since Diana’s death. “No more the unfaithful husband, Pa would now be presented to the world as the harried single dad coping with a drug-addled child.”
Harry claims one small victory against his nemesis: the royal rota of media correspondents. He didn’t want a single royal correspondent inside the chapel at his wedding “unless [Rupert] Murdoch himself apologised for phone hacking”. The palace warned it would spark “all-out” war. But Harry won.
Fingers are pointed in all directions over leaked stories. When papers started writing about tensions between the Cambridges and the Sussexes, the four met to discuss their origin. William finally conceded he had mentioned “strife” between the two couples while having dinner with “Pa and Camilla”. Harry writes: “I put my hand over my face. Meg froze. A heavy silence fell. So now we knew. ‘I told you, Willy. You … of all people … should’ve known … ’” The inescapable implication is that the leaks emanated from Charles’s office.
Sources close to Camilla are reported to have denied that she leaked details of any private conversations.
On taking on the press, Harry said he told his father and brother: “I might learn to endure the press, even forgive their abuse, I might, but my own family’s complicity, that was going to take longer to get over. Pa’s office, Willy’s office, enabling these fiends, if not outright collaborating.”
Palace courtiers do not escape his loathing, “the Bee, the Fly and the Wasp”, understood to be senior courtiers in Buckingham Palace, Kensington Palace and Clarence House.
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The Duke of York gets a brief mention, buried deep in the book. It represents the first time a royal has commented on the Andrew debacle. When he and Meghan discussed the threat of losing their security, Harry writes, they thought: “Not in this climate of hate. And not after what happened to my mother. Also, not in the wake of my Uncle Andrew. He was embroiled in a shameful scandal, accused of the sexual assault of a young woman, and no one had so much as suggested that he lose his security. Whatever grievances people had against us, [accusations of] sex crimes weren’t on the list.”
But it is William who bears the brunt of his attacks: William, who Harry says, ignored him at Eton; William who “complained” when Harry set up his Invictus Games that it would use up all the funds in their joint Royal Foundation; William who refused to have Harry as his best man for fear he’d go off script in the speech; William who, when Harry suggested Westminster Abbey or St Paul’s Cathedral for his wedding to Meghan, instead suggested “Tetbury”. “Tetbury? The chapel near Highgrove? Seriously, Willy? How many does that place seat?”
Harry attended Sandhurst before William, as the latter went to university. At Harry’s “passing out”, William saluted. “He couldn’t resort to his typical attitude when we were sharing an institution, couldn’t pretend not to know me – or he’d be insubordinate. For one brief moment, Spare outranked Heir,” writes Harry.
There was competitiveness, too, over their mother. On the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death, at her graveside in Althorp, William said he thought their mother was there, guiding him and had been helping him “start a family” and that she was helping Harry, too. “I nodded. ‘Totally agree, I feel as though she’s helped me find Meg.’ Willy took a step back. He looked concerned. That seemed to be taking things a bit far. ‘Well now, Harold. I’m not sure about that. I wouldn’t say THAT!’”
The book opens with a scene set at Windsor, at the time of the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral, as Harry goes to meet his father and brother to seek understanding over his decision to leave the royal fold. He sees the two walking towards him. They looked “grim, almost menacing, shoulder-to-shoulder, tightly aligned, in lockstep – in league”. He was the outsider, now.
The meeting does not go well. He looks around his surroundings in the gardens of Frogmore House and at a gothic ruin. No more gothic than the Millennium Wheel, he writes.
“Stagecraft – like so much around here, I thought.”