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Meghan Markle’s friend Omid Scobie has launched a staunch defense of Prince Harry’s controversial memoir Spare, arguing that the prince was right to write his own story, just as King Charles and Diana did.
Write in a column for yahooScobie criticized media coverage for presenting the book, which details alleged feuds with Harry’s brother, the Prince of Wales, as “revealing in bad taste”.
He said: ‘Reading it cover to cover tells a much more nuanced and layered story. One with a heart as well as fire.
It came about when he shared photos of Prince Harry’s comments on Afghanistan, in which he revealed that he killed 25 Taliban memberssaying, ‘And that’s why context matters.’
Omid Scobie, a close friend of Harry and Meghan, argued that Prince Harry’s memoirs are no different from similar works published about his parents in the 1990s.
Scobie came to Harry’s defense on social media, arguing that “context is key” when he shared an excerpt from Spare describing the prince’s time in Afghanistan.
The memoir Spare, which was due to be published in a matter of days, leaked when Spanish stores began selling the Spanish version of the book ahead of its official release on January 10, despite being in clearly labeled boxes warning that it was not for sale before that. point.
The revelations so far include fights with Prince William, conversations in which he begged his father not to marry Camilla and his last words to his grandmother, the late Queen Elizabeth II.
The Duke of Sussex has been accused of airing ‘dirty laundry’ in public, but Scobie has once again stood by the couple.
Pointing to the “short-term memory loss” of the royal family, Meghan’s trusted friend pointed to biographies of Diana and Prince Charles written after their divorce.
He went on to draw parallels between the press and public response to the work of the then Prince of Wales, King Charles: ‘For Charles, the negative response from the British press and public was intense.
Accused of viciously attacking his family and dishonoring the monarchy, newspaper polls and opinion pieces declared him unfit to be king and some journalists even suggested he should be stripped of his titles. (Sound familiar again?).’
It added: “Harry has spent most of his life being written and spoken, a spare for the heir whose darkest secrets, regrettable moments and struggles have been repeatedly revealed to the world by a press with an insatiable appetite for him and his family.” .
“As he had never been able to share that life in his own words, it was inevitable that the prince wanted to put pen to paper the moment he stepped down three years ago.”
Omid Scobie tweeted in support of Prince Harry’s memoir, saying context “matters” when reporting the book’s content.
But Scobie went further with public statements on his own social media, criticizing the media in a similar way to the Sussexes’ own comments on their Netflix docuseries, Harry and Meghan.
Speaking of the series of revelations about Harry’s time in Afghanistan, which included the revelation that he killed at least 25 Taliban militants and saw them as “chess pieces” to be removed from the board, rather than people, Scobie said: “I am against the war, so talking about killing is not for me.
“But it’s amazing to see how in 2013, newspapers called Harry a ‘hero prince’, ‘man of action’, ‘royal bully’ when he talked about killing Taliban insurgents.
‘A decade later (and now the enemy) is attacked for repeating the same claim.’
In his tweets, Scobie continued: “And that’s why context matters. #SPARE may have been leaked before, but (as would be the case with any book) the little snippets that are reported don’t do the text justice.
He then shared a leaked excerpt from the book, which detailed Harry’s “troubled” military training to “otherize” Taliban insurgents.
Prince Harry wrote: “Afghanistan was a war of mistakes, a war of enormous collateral damage: thousands of innocents killed and maimed, and it always haunted us.
“So my goal from the day I arrived was to never go to bed doubting that I had done the right thing, that my aims had been correct, that I was shooting at the Taliban and only at the Taliban.”
He also described how helicopter technology allowed him to know exactly how many people he had killed, and that his kill count gave him neither “satisfaction” nor “embarrassment”.
The book comes just weeks after the explosive Harry and Meghan docuseries on Netflix, in which Harry accused the rest of the royal family of leaking stories about his wife to the press to divert attention from them.
The Prince Harry Memoirs will hit shelves on January 10 in the UK and around the world.
The Duke of Sussex wrote: ‘While in the heat and fog of combat I did not think of those twenty-five as persons. You can’t kill people if you think of them as people.
Some former soldiers have publicly criticized Harry’s candid comments, saying he has broken an “unwritten rule” by revealing his murder count.
In addition to his time in Afghanistan, Harry’s memoirs revealed details of an alleged incident in which his brother physically pushed him to the ground, leaving him dazed and lying on top of a smashed dog bowl.
He also claimed that the now Prince of Wales had called Meghan “difficult”, “rude” and “abrasive”.
Harry alleges that he and William told Charles that they would welcome the now queen consort into the family on the condition that he not marry her, and “begged” him not to.
The duke alleges that his father did not respond to his pleas.
In addition to royal secrets, the book contains a number of startling revelations about the young prince’s drug use, including cocaine and magic mushrooms, and that he allegedly lost his virginity to an older woman in a field behind a pub.
Omid Scobie wrote that the personal anecdotes contained in Spare’s pages ‘humanise’ the royals, who he says have been ‘reduced to caricatures in a very public circus’.
The book comes just weeks after Harry and Meghan’s explosive Netflix docuseries, in which Harry accused the rest of the royal family of leaking stories about his wife to the press to divert attention from them.
Buckingham Palace declined to comment on the allegations made in the series.