A.N. WILSON: Prince Harry’s Spare is pure malice

History is full of true stories in which princes quarrel. We know, for example, that King Edward VIII’s brother Bertie, the shy and stuttering Duke of York who never wanted to be King George VI, begged his brother not to abdicate.

The dissolute sons of George III fought like dogs. But none of them wrote a memoir to tell the public all about it.

We’ve been treated to a story in Prince Harry’s memoir about his searing fight with William, in which the current Prince of Wales allegedly knocked his younger brother down.

There are many who, after reading Spare, will sympathize with anyone who wants to beat up Harry.

Whatever it is, surely we can all agree that it would have been more decorous not to tell the story of the fight, along with so many others about real goings-on.

Having made the foolish decision to “go public” with his break with the royal family, Harry was no doubt under enormous pressure, from Netflix, from the publishers, from his publicists and agents, to spew as much venom as possible.

But it has cast it in a dire light. And whatever he intends, it makes us sympathize not with him, but with the Royal Family.

In previews of his ITV interview with Tom Bradby on Sunday night, Prince Harry says of his family: “They feel it’s better to keep us the villains in a way.”

As it happens, their father, brother, and late grandmother made almost no comment on the torrent of indiscretions and insults that flowed from Meghan and Harry, either before or after the notorious television interview with Oprah Winfrey.

The Queen rightly said of the couple’s allegations that “memories may vary.”

As for the royal family painting Harry and his wife as villains, the real villainy is surely the publication of these memoirs, an act of hostility against a family that cannot respond without making the situation worse.

Up to this point, many of us would still have given Harry the benefit of the doubt. I, for one, would always have said that he is a wounded individual.

My line of thought would have been this: ‘The little boy who publicly walked behind Diana’s coffin in front of millions of television viewers has been carrying a terrible trauma ever since.

“He was a brave soldier (although none of us knew that he had killed 25 enemy combatants in Afghanistan, as he rather disturbingly reveals in this memoir).

“He did his best to serve as second fiddle to his loving brother, but something had to break. The marriage to Meghan served as a catalyst for that.

This thought process would have cleared Harry of deliberate ill will. He would have seen him as a mild-mannered goofball who’d gone off the rails and gotten a little weird mingling with Californian gurus, chatty therapists, and B-list celebrities.

But Spare is not the work of a simple buffoon. Of course, he did not write it himself, but he has authorized it, and it is based on words that have come from his mouth.

It is not the work of an innocent idiot. It’s malice, pure and simple.

The stories in the book are designed to make us think less about Prince William, his wife, Catherine, the king and queen consort.

It’s all very well for Harry to invade his own private life by recounting what happened behind the palace walls, even if it means we learn unpleasant details, like how he lost his virginity to an older woman in a field behind a pub.

But invading the privacy of other members of your family, in an all-too-apparent attempt to demean them and polish your own credentials, is calculated and despicable.

His reflections on the King, his father, are a good example. True, it would seem that Harry’s words about Charles are less outright malicious than what he has to say about some of his other relatives. But the story of Carlos begging his two sons not to make their old age a misery, in a conversation that took place immediately after Prince Philip’s funeral, should never have been made public.

He talks about Charles as a mess, a past, who watches helplessly as his sons go to war with each other. How could a son betray a parent’s confidences like this?

The account of this encounter actually borders on the paranoid. When Charles and William approach Harry in the run-up, he says, “Finally, I saw them.” Shoulder to shoulder, they energetically advanced towards me, looking very serious, almost threatening. He adds that “my father and Willy had come looking for a fight.”

Even in his own distorted picture of this conversation, he doesn’t seem to realize how absurdly he contradicts himself. In the same way that he writes a revealing memoir to complain about the intrusion of the press, or his wife goes on television to say how much they deserve a ‘basic right to privacy’, he seems unaware that they were the ones who took the fight to the Palace. Those who, not getting what they wanted, fled to America.

He tells Prince William that he and Meghan hoped to live at Frogmore Cottage for the rest of their lives.

“You did, Harold,” William apparently replies.

Harry tells us that he and his brother agreed never to accept Camilla as their stepmother, that he and William begged Charles not to marry her, and said they would always think of her as that cliché cliché, ‘the wicked stepmother’. .

Indeed, anyone with eyes in their heads can see that our vulnerable King draws support and happiness from Camilla, that she has been the most wonderful bulwark to him for decades, and that marriage can only warm the cockles of any beholder’s heart. An obviously decent human being who, unlike Harry and Meghan, doesn’t blow her own trumpet, and is modest, humble and genuinely funny, Camilla hasn’t been an evil stepmother.

And any very understandable anxiety about the marriage on Prince William’s part has obviously been put to rest: look at the way Camilla and Kate appear in public, happily chatting together and clearly good friends.

The fact is that the vast majority of people in Britain want the institution of the monarchy to survive.

And we are optimistic. We believe that King Charles and his Queen Consort will be good for the monarchy, and that William and Kate, who discharge their public duties with modesty and joy, will hand over to Prince George in the hope that this institution, which has lasted for more than 1,000 years, it will continue.

Certainly the monarchy, which dates back to Alfred the Great and beyond, has survived worse damage to its reputation than anything Harry can throw at his family. We have seen the disgusting behavior of Henry VIII with his six wives; we have seen the disgusting greed and lasciviousness of George IV; we have endured the abdication of Edward VIII.

In addition to any of these calamities, the narcissistic bleating of two spoiled living in California will vanish without a trace.

But with that said, there’s no doubt Spare leaves a nasty taste in one’s mouth, one of the envious despite a younger brother.

We should have anticipated it, because the very title snarls this message. Playing second fiddle to someone who will one day wear the crown is a very difficult thing to do – witnessing the turbulent life of Princess Margaret. It was to the credit of both Margaret and the Queen, however, that despite any sisterly resentment, their bond was deep and warm.

Harry and Meghan are said to resent the fact that their children are not allowed to call themselves Her Royal Highness. But again, this is absurdly contradictory: wanting to have your cake and eat it after giving up your royal duties.

It would be nonsense of me, as a journalist, to say that I was not fascinated by this horrible story; It’s hypocritical to pretend that I don’t care about details. But this doesn’t stop me from wishing that Harry hadn’t authorized this book.

Washing the family’s dirty laundry in public is demeaning. In the case of royalty, it is unbearable.

I can’t help but be interested in the fact that the two princes had a fight, but that doesn’t mean I should know those stories.

It was Prince Albert and Queen Victoria who invented the modern constitutional monarchy. They took the great risk of turning the royals into a kind of ideal family, a role model.

It was asking for trouble, of course, as anyone was quick to see when watching his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, get into endless marital scandals.

There didn’t seem to be much about Edward VIII’s sordid life that audiences wanted to emulate either, even before we knew he was a Nazi sympathizer.

But with the arrival of George VI and Elizabeth II, Prince Albert’s idea that the Royal Family could be a model family seemed to advance a bit. The monarch had no power, but he could influence us to view any family as a sacred institution and family loyalties as sacrosanct.

That’s probably why Spare seems like a betrayal. It’s not just that Harry has soiled his brother, but also his partner in mourning for his late mother. He has debased the very idea of ​​brotherly love, and has told us things that, as much as we greedily lick them, it would have been better not to know.