DAN WOOTTON: After Spare, Prince Harry only has himself to blame for Sasha Walpole telling her story

Typically, in the hours after a true but unflattering story about the Duke or Duchess of Sussex is published, journalists brace for the predictable and inevitable legal threat or plaintive statement about some kind of horrible intrusion into their lives.

But there was no letter from Montecito yesterday after Sasha Walpole revealed in intimate detail how she took 17-year-old Prince Harry’s virginity.

The idea that the duped duke could ever complain about someone in his life publicly delivering his accurate version of events, thanks to the fabric of half-truths and outright distortions he’s expected us to swallow in recent months, is laughable.

After all, Harry is now the modern version of Lady Whistledown, author of the anonymous Bridgerton scandal sheet.

All private conversations are noted for publication at a later date.

Ordinary citizens going on with their lives can be thrust into the spotlight at his choosing without warning.

Family tragedies are publicly exploited to settle scores.

The Royal Family’s internal cone of silence, once unbreakable and so important to the late Queen, has been shattered.

Even the liberals-loving partakers in the Hollywood establishment, with Harry and Meghan’s so-called new friends (translation: work acquaintances), surely can no longer trust him to keep their big trap shut.

Happily married and mother of two, Sasha, a respectable private citizen who now works as a bulldozer driver, is one of the many victims of Spare, Harry’s grim autobiography designed to settle the score and make him very rich, to hell with the consequences. for anyone. the rest.

His revelations of a ‘quick trip’ with an ‘older woman’ who ‘knocked my butt’ sparked an international search for the identity of then-block girl Sasha, already an open secret in polo circles.

“No wonder Meghan, realizing the costly and long-term consequences for her prized brand of tacky last month, has launched a campaign to distance herself from Spare.”

Just 48 hours before he decided to go public, Hollywood actor Rupert Everitt upped the ante by claiming, “I know who the woman he lost his virginity to is,” before speculating that the romp didn’t actually take place in a field. outside a pub, as Harry had written.

In this cruel new world of social media, Sasha, now 40, knew it was only a matter of time before she was criticized, so she wisely decided to control how she revealed her version of events.

As Harry would probably now say, Sasha, who is actually only two years older than Harry, was reclaiming her own narrative after keeping her secret for 21 years.

She told the Mail on Sunday: ‘I didn’t invite any of this attention, but I know the search would have continued until people found me. I don’t understand why you went into so much detail. She could have said that she lost her virginity and left it at that. But she described how it happened: in a field behind a pub.

Dan Wootton

‘That’s fine if you’re not the other person involved. But if you’re me, you suddenly feel like your world is getting a little smaller.

Throwing Sasha to the wolves was just one of many stark and misogynistic revelations in the tedious Spare tome, where so-called feminist Harry gloriously revealed his true anti-woman color to the world.

He trashes ‘cold little’ Matron Pat at her school, whom he ‘stopped on the landing below… doing fancy dances, making faces, taunting her as she came down the stairs’.

He dismisses the country’s most successful newspaper publisher as a “disgusting toad” and an “infected pustule on humanity’s behind.”

But even the women Harry claims to respect, like his ex-girlfriend Cressida Bonas, were still subject to his poisonous pen.

In Spare, the duke admits that the actress was the first person he was able to open up to and reveal his true feelings about the loss of his mother.

But then he decided to reveal to the world that she was in tears when he left her, when the public had previously been led to believe that Cressida ended the relationship on her own because she couldn’t handle the spotlight.

While Harry might have successfully sought revenge, especially against his media enemies (full disclosure: he calls me a ‘sad little man’ in the book) and his brother, Prince William, and he has oodles of money to finance his flamboyant style life forever, any veneer respectability is now gone, which means he and Meghan will increasingly be treated like standard celebrities.

We saw it last night when he was the butt of jokes at the Grammy Awards, where Trevor Noah made a joke about Harry’s obsession with talking about his manhood while introducing his close friend James Corden onstage to present an award.

To laughter from celebrities present like Jennifer Lopez, the comedian said of the Late Late Show host in reference to Harry: “He’s also living proof that a man can move from London to Los Angeles and not tell everyone about his freezing”. penis.’

No wonder Meghan, realizing the costly and long-term consequences for her prized brand of tacky last month, has launched a campaign to distance herself from Spare.

Sources apparently close to the Duchess have told the Daily Telegraph, one of the few British titles with which the Sussexes have a working relationship, that she “may have raised concerns about whether it was the right move.”

One told the newspaper her take on the book: ‘Is this the way she would have approached things? Possibly not. But she will always support him and she would never have gotten involved in promoting such a personal project. It was about her own life, her own journey, and her own perspective.

But Meghan’s reputation is now inextricably linked to that of her husband, who has proven mean-spirited, vengeful and hypocritical in protecting their privacy time and time again.

Like the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson before them, it is now clear to me that the Megxit decision was selfish and financially motivated, not an altruistic gamble to better the world, as the Sussexes once tried to lead us to believe.

I predict that Harry and Meghan’s reputations will continue to decline as their proximity to the Royal Family fades and they will be remembered as the embittered and gossipy ex-royals who had a chance to modernize the monarchy from within and screwed it all up.