ROBERT HARDMAN: To quote our late Majesty… recollections may vary

His late Majesty nailed this book to the head before we even knew its title, Spare, let alone its existence.

“Memories may vary,” Elizabeth II said memorably after an earlier delivery of the longest lament in royal history (one that shows no sign of abating three years after the Sussexes fled the royal nest).

It is now certain to be the response of many people who remember and, in some cases, appear at the events described in Spare. Many of these people, from the humble school staff to colleagues and bodyguards, believed that they were only doing their part to help a young man who was in great need.

I suspect that many of them will now be as offended as the Duke of Sussex appears to be (about almost everything) but, in his case, without a best-selling book to respond to. Because this is a book that not only throws grenades at the Royal Family or the monarchy, but also at the ‘hateful’ media.

It also casually drags down countless innocent souls who have spent decades nobly refusing to say a word about Prince Harry. They know how much she treasures his privacy, they remember the pressures on a clearly troubled young man, and they’ve done the right thing by keeping it to themselves.

It remains to be seen how much longer they will feel compelled to maintain their honorable discretion. For now, I dare say most will take the lead from Harry’s father and brother and bite their lips. But despite Harry’s stated desire for ‘reconciliation’ (he said it six times in last night’s interview with Tom Bradby), it’s not just the royal family that he needs to reconcile with.

Midway through the book, in one of his many homilies on the horrificness of the media, Harry laments that the press, and especially the paparazzi, are “incapable of understanding nuance.”

It’s a telling line as no one seems more immune to nuance than Harry himself. The smallest non-mild amplifies into yet another cause for self-pity. He is given a comedic role in a school play, but he is upset when his father comes to watch and laughs in all the wrong places. Has anyone ever been to a school play where the parents don’t laugh in all the wrong places?

When the Prince of Wales takes Harry to South Africa for term, on a trip that includes Nelson Mandela and a Spice Girls concert, Harry says it’s all about generating positive PR for Prince Charles. What rot.

The Prince was there because the concert was in aid of the Nation Trust Mandela had set up with the Queen. Clearly, a photo of the Prince with the world’s revered statesman and most popular girl band of the day wouldn’t hurt, but that wasn’t the point of the exercise. My own recollection of this certainly varies because I was there (reporting on the trip for another newspaper).

Ditto when it comes to one of the most hurtful charges at the beginning of this book. Harry claims that his soon-to-be stepmother, then Camilla Parker Bowles, leaked the story of his first meeting with Prince William to look good. That absolutely did not happen.

I remember the chronology of that story well because it remains a classic example of conspiracy joke. It also contradicts Harry’s general excuse for writing this book, one he returned to again and again during last night’s ITV interview: that the Palace and the Press were, and are, in each other’s pockets.

In this case, Mrs. Parker Bowles was utterly mortified when the story of their meeting appeared in the Sun, owned by Rupert Murdoch. The only person she had spoken to about it was her personal assistant. However, her assistant later mentioned it to her own husband in confidence.

Then she’d let him get away during a tennis match with someone who had business dealings with the Murdoch empire. This all came to light when the private secretary did the honorable thing and immediately resigned.

However, Harry makes the same charge of conspiracy against his stepmother when he writes about his mixed feelings seeing his father remarry in 2005. He told ITV last night he was ‘100 per cent’ happy his father was happy, but he describes it in a distant and melancholic tone in the book. He also denies press reports that he and his brother put a “Just Married” sign on the car.

Again, this clashed with my impressions of the day. I remember it well because the happy couple’s departure was captured in some detail for a BBC documentary called The Queen’s Castle and I was the writer for the series.

My recollection is of an exuberant Harry in jubilant form, warmly kissing his stepmother, showering the happy couple with confetti and chasing the car through the Windsor Castle quadrangle yelling jokes through the car window. So I looked it up on the internet yesterday. In fact, that’s exactly how it was. As it happens, the car was also decorated with the words ‘Just Married’. The movie is online for everyone to see. He left the readers to form their own opinions about Harry’s state of mind that day.

In another section, Prince William is very ‘somber’ when the Queen dictates what uniform he will wear at his wedding: the full dress uniform of the Colonel of the Irish Guards. “He told me several times that he was frustrated,” says Harry.

Really? When I interviewed Prince William about his wedding a few weeks after the event for my book, Our Queen, I had fond memories of the Queen’s insistence on her choice of uniform. He was very funny about it and had a good laugh. Again, memories may vary.

However, it’s in his casual contempt for minor characters that Harry has been particularly harsh. For example, his story of his prep school, Ludgrove, paints several unsavory portraits of people.

A midwife is mocked and belittled for her physical flaws and character. Harry describes her grief at being taunted by a history teacher who mocks him for her lack of interest in real history. He composes the image of a child who appears to have been miserable through and through.

Ludgrove’s contemporaries have a very different recollection. They remember the way the school, the staff, and especially the principal’s wife, Mrs. Barber, supported Harry after the death of his mother.

They recall how annoying Harry could be, yet lovable, and describe the history teacher as having “the patience of a saint.”

They remember how the school did its best to soften the blow when Harry was held back for an academic year when it was obvious he wasn’t ready to move to Eton.

They all flatly refused to speak to the press when Harry first returned as an older boy and got into a fight with a viscount’s grandson, who was still at school, leaving the latter with a broken nose.

And they were all delighted when Harry returned for big occasions, even to open a new theater. That is why they are ‘stunned’ by some of these revelations.

Or take Harry’s equally adamant ‘surrogate big sister’, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, for example, another heroic stalwart who has resolutely refused to utter a word about her years as a shoulder for him to cry on.

She even had to endure the humiliation of false rumors about her and Prince Charles spread by Diana. These came to light once again during the recent investigation into the deplorable conduct of the BBC’s Martin Bashir in luring Diana into that notorious Panorama interview.

Although the BBC has paid substantial damages to Miss Legge-Bourke, she has refused to say a word on the subject and has even issued a legal notice warning the media not to ask for it. They don’t need to bother. Harry has splurged on detail in this book anyway.

From the bodyguard who was mocked for having a panic attack while protecting Harry in Afghanistan (your colleagues will have no trouble identifying him) to the royal staffer who dared to park in front of your apartment, they and everyone else will know. who are they.

Harry even snaps at an annoying journalist who was interviewing him while on tour in Lesotho and had the temerity to ask him about recent headlines involving girlfriends and drug abuse (in other words, doing his job).

“I could barely make out the journalist behind the red cloud that suddenly engulfed me,” he writes. ‘In Lesotho, no matter what you were going through, you were very rich compared to other people.

“I suddenly felt embarrassed and wondered if the journalist had the sense to be embarrassed too.” He was so furious about the interview that he then ran off and drowned his sorrows with ‘quarts of beer’ and ‘a grocery bag full of weed’.

Perhaps all that ‘weed’ has obscured your memory of that awful experience. Who was the scary reptile?

Looking back through the archives, I see that it was none other than ITV’s Tom Bradby.