JANET STREET-PORTER: Beware the rage of a big brother (or sister)

Harry can complain as much as he wants, but nothing will change the one thing that caused him to destroy his closest family: his father and his brother William. He is second best.

Spare represents 410 pages of reckoning, pettiness and pent-up fury released without guilt or regard for the privacy of others.

In terms of family relationships, this is Armageddon.

And all because he is not the eldest son. In his eyes, he is not the favorite, not the one with a predestined plan for life. I’m understanding, but does the end justify the means?

With no direction and no direction from his beloved mother, Harry has made up his own mission: to expose and enumerate the myriad “crimes” and mistreatment that have dogged his life since his mother’s gruesome death in 1997.

Diana did her best to treat both children as equals. She called the younger Good King, Harry, and told her youngest son that he was special, but seems to have failed miserably. And after his untimely death, Harry says Charles failed to provide the support his grieving 12-year-old son desperately needed.

Sibling rivalry, as depicted in Harry’s memoir Spare, has never been more mercilessly exposed in all its fussy details. As the eldest daughter of my own family, I’m an expert: despite their pathetic self-pity and her mind-numbing narcissism, Harry’s stories of second-best treatment could have been written by my own sister.

Harry has spent the 26 years since his mother died in a car crash in Paris dragging himself along desperately, a man without a plan, apart from his spells in the army, when someone else was telling him what to do and how to behave.

When he was in uniform, given orders and forced to obey, everything went smoothly. Returning to civilian life, everything went pear-shaped.

His brother had a master plan, though it wasn’t one he had chosen, but one he was born into. Not particularly bright, Harry reeled, feeling ignored, and railed against the establishment that had created the rules and discipline that his only sibling, once his closest friend, now had to abide by. .

Instead of feeling sympathy for the constraining force on his brother, Harry obviously felt nothing but resentment.

I can also understand why William got so mad at Harry that the heir (supposedly) grabbed Spare by his shirt collar, in the Dog Bowl debacle. Brothers and sisters are rivals, friends who love each other but also ruthlessly compete for attention, to be the favourite.

My relationship with my sister, two years younger than me, was strained. I resented her for being my mother’s special daughter. My sister had curly brown hair, a smiling personality, while I was an introverted girl who loved to read and paint. Also, my hair was straight, once baby blonde, faded to a sad beige. When we were 5 and 7 years old, we were forced to share a room in our small house in central London.

I drew a line down the middle and told my sister Pat that if she crossed it, I would kill her. One day, unable to tolerate her existence any longer, I pushed her down the stairs, but she just rolled on the floor, laughed, and ran off. He was furious. I even tried a second time, to no avail. We were doomed to grow up in close proximity in working-class London.

When we moved into a townhouse in the suburbs, I made sure I got the biggest bedroom. By then we were in different schools, had few or no mutual friends, and barely spoke to each other. When my sister disappeared and ran away for five days, she stole my bankbook to finance her mini-break. After that, we went our separate ways.

I went to university and then became a journalist. My sister worked in a photography studio and then in a supermarket when her son was born. We only saw each other at funerals and weddings. The more successful I was, the more my father was proud of me and the more my mother complained that I was ‘too big for my boots’.

It took my father’s death to unite us, because my mother was very demanding and did not want to move closer to London for us to support her.

But my sister, like my mother, deeply resented my success and even sold photos of me of her family to the press when I appeared on I’m a Celebrity. I paid my nephew’s college expenses and bought him the equipment he needed, but it didn’t make much of a difference. When we met for lunch or dinner at Christmas, I had to pay him for taxis, otherwise he wouldn’t bother to come.

But eventually we made it up, and when she got lung and then brain cancer, I paid for her treatment.

Harry is furious because he is the youngest. But that’s not William’s fault. His devastating memories are the product of decades spent recording and collecting grievances, but by airing them, Harry will make reconciliation nearly impossible.

They range from small incidents like being given a small room in Sandringham when he turned up for Christmas 2013, to William telling her she shouldn’t marry with a beard, even though the Queen had (supposedly) given her permission.

I’m not sure why a thirty-something man needs his grandmother’s permission to have a beard, but in many ways Harry seems stuck in his early teens.

He says they “didn’t want” him as best man at his brother’s wedding and forced him to emcee, adding that he got the job despite still suffering from frostbite on his penis after a trip to Antarctica. My God, poor Harry would say anything to make people love him as much as he thinks they love his brother!

Saying he killed 25 Taliban members during his second tour of duty in Afghanistan is another reckless attempt to conjure up sympathy, though it surely puts his life in great danger.

Harry seems unaware of the limits, of respecting the intimate details of family life, perhaps because his ‘journey’ demands that he reveal everything and cast off his misery in order to achieve fulfillment and happiness in his new life in California.

Even his father gets kicked, for daring to want to marry Camilla, even though Harry begged him not to. And then, she claims that the queen consort sacrificed her well-being to side with others against her and create a more positive image of herself.

Charles is said to have pleaded with his sons not to make their later years “a pittance”, something Harry seems to have ignored.

Harry has not only revealed too much about his tortured childhood and his difficult relationship with his father, but he seems to want those he tears apart to make the first moves to attempt reconciliation.

Back in Harry’s drug and alcohol years, when he was looking for ways to find ‘the truth’, he describes taking magic mushrooms and drinking tequila in California. Stopping, he imagined that the bathroom was speaking to him.

That vague recollection of a talking toilet is the closest she’ll get to a friendly chat with William for the foreseeable future.