SPARE - Prince Harry (Book Review by Stuart McKinlay)

April 2023

Stuart McKinlay

 “We are primarily one thing, and then we’re primarily another, and then another, and so on, until death – in succession. Each new identity assumes the throne of Self, but takes us further from our original self, perhaps our core self – the child… there’s a purity to childhood, which is diluted with each iteration.”

–– Prince Harry. Spare. Random House. Hardback. £28.

 Harry by gaslight

This is what Harry does and nobody does it better: He vomits his tormented guts in your face. He’s a self-seeking, self-absorbed, over-indulged self-serving narcissist who spews his troubles down your jacket when all you asked was: “Are you taking Meg?” Tell me truly: Would you invite this wazzock to your Coronation?

The recyclable floral invitation is carefully eyed by the Sussexes, rubbed between thumb and forefinger, as it were, and weighed for strategic utility. Perhaps a bargaining chip. Charles is trying discreetly to forget the treacherous outpourings splurged over the world’s eager press, the press Harry hates, but manipulates in retribution for supposed snubs and humiliations to him and his unconventional duchess.

His ruminations in Spare resonate of TMI, the “too much information” of some cathartic therapies, and Harry is on a revelatory roller-coaster. He is not only an anatomical spare part for his hierarchically superior brother but married to a voluble American actress who gives royalty the shivers. They haven’t forgotten Wallis Simpson: they even tried to have her buried elsewhere, he says.

Such deft slights are the inspiration of the book: that and his love of Meghan Markle, the woman he describes as “perfect, perfect, perfect”. His purpose is to explain his departure from “the Motherland”, “why my wife and I took the drastic step of picking up our child and just running like hell, leaving behind everything – house, friends, furniture.” Told in 150,000 words (Machiavelli managed his The Prince in 52,677, but who’s counting).

The press, encapsulated above, is the enemy if ever it were doubted, blunderbuss-happy with garish headlines touting tiaras and tantrums, broomsticks and bra straps, hormones and hissy fits. He says:

One day it was: Yuck – Meg’s bra strap was showing. (Classless Meghan.) The next day: Yikes – she’s wearing that dress? (Trashy Meghan.) The next day: God save us, her fingernails are painted black! (Goth Meghan.) The next day: Goodness – she still doesn’t know how to curtsy properly. (American Meghan.) The next day: Crikey, she shut her own car door again! (Uppity Meghan.)

Who was behind this caterwauling calumny? Was it Willy? Was it Kate? Was it a rogue PA? Or did the butler do it? His suspicions were twirling in a whirlpool of pretty colours and bewildered paranoia (see cocaine). Even blue blood was put up for microscopic examination:

…the Mail weighed in this time with an essay by the sister of London’s former mayor Boris Johnson, predicting that Meg would... do something... genetically... to the Royal Family. “If there is issue from her alleged union with Prince Harry, the Windsors will thicken their watery, thin blue blood and Spencer pale skin and ginger hair with some rich and exotic DNA.”

The papers were heroically pertinacious with hacks wheezing tenaciously in pursuit of Meghan’s mad social whirlerama too. Aha!

Next The Sun combed through Meg’s social media, discovered an old photo of her with a friend and a professional hockey player, and created an elaborate yarn about Meg and the hockey player having a torrid affair. I asked Meg about it. No, he was hooking up with my friend. I introduced them. So I asked the Palace lawyer to contact this paper and tell them the story was categorically false, and defamatory, and to remove it immediately. The paper’s response was a shrug and a raised middle finger. You’re being reckless, the lawyer told the newspaper’s editors. Yawn, said the editors.

Suddenly, there’s a counterblast as Harry and Meghan confide their accumulated insights in Oprah Winfrey (and 17.1 million CBS viewers). Result! Well, of a sticky-bomb sort. Even two years on from that celebrated alternative-reality show, the opprobrium clings.

He trashed his father, humiliated his brother, and threw down an accusation of racism (misconstrued, he insists later), but admits now: “Several close mates and beloved figures in my life had chastised me for Oprah. How could you reveal such things? About your family? I told them I failed to see how talking to Oprah was any different from what my family and their staff had done for decades – briefing the press on the sly, planting stories.”

Quite: The Guardian of 13 January, quotes the book, quoting the Independent, quoting “a source”:

In the memoir, Harry claims that William believed his brother was being “brainwashed” by his therapist. This language was echoed this week by a source “close to the royal family” who told the Independent: “The King, Camilla and William believe the situation will remain unchanged while the Duke of Sussex remains effectively ‘kidnapped by a cult of psychotherapy and Meghan’.” This is the kind of anonymous press briefing Harry suggests comes directly from his family, although we have no way of knowing if that is the case.

The familiar whiff of betrayal drifted over Frogmore Gardens as Charles, Willy and Harry walked together in the subdued hours after the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral. The Oprah interview a month earlier was greatly on their minds. Prince Charles, says Harry, “allowed that journalists were the scum of the earth. His phrase.” 

Harry explains his stream-of-blame outburst: “Since leaving Britain the attacks on us had been increasing exponentially. We had to try something to make it stop. Being silent wasn’t working. It was only making it worse. We felt we had no choice. Willy was really steaming, shouting it was my fault for never asking for help. You never came to us! You never came to me! Since boyhood that had been Willy’s position on everything. I must come to him – bend the knee. Otherwise, no aid from the Heir.”

Charles’s summary was succinct: “Please boys – don’t make my final years a misery.” Perhaps he should also have put in a plea for Camilla, though her stare, it is said, could wilt a gorgon. Anyway, the Netflix series dropped the portcullis on that.

Harry’s scattergun strategy was both profitable and painful. The outbreak of garrulously fruitcake interviews was backed up by this journal – a pedestrian peregrination in as voluminous a compendium of genial humbug and waffle as might handily hold a kitchen door ajar. Yet it contains some sweating nitroglycerine. He and Meghan had packed their Louis Vuittons and skipped this sceptered isle, yes. Forever and ever! But headlines? He’d give them headlines.

Spare gains some moral traction from that bland undercurrent of honest Joe Citizen and a surfeit of affable self-abnegation – though multi-million-dollar cheques tend to banish any illusion of fiscal innocence. None of it, though, blunted the renowned unsavoury knavery of newspaper inventiveness: the press doesn’t do ordinary, and didn’t. It carried on regardless with unabated vigor, gutting the book for provocative squibs and malleable conjecture.

It seems in a curiously oblique way, in the weft and weave of a multi-layered mind, this memoir is a substantial feint towards conciliation (failed), through sharing it all, his foes and woes, getting off his chest a tempestuous “reality” that gave him such shattering panic attacks. And with this, another iteration of Harry comes to the fore. Can this be a further accessional step to the “throne of Self” as his latest identity assumes a further dilution from childhood’s purity: the latest of his precisely posited succeeding realities, from “primarily one thing to primarily another”? In short, ageing.

The ordinary, “primarily another” Harry, he wants to be, and to be seen to be, seems eclipsed by his own vivid habitualization of the extraordinary. He tells of killing the Taliban like chess pieces. Of losing his virginity (in a field, near the Vine Tree pub, since you ask). Of dressing up like Hitler’s little helper. Of fretting about Camilla (again). He even tells all of telling all to Oprah.

How else was he to make at least a nominal switch from rebel without a clue to reappear as a safe set of waggling tonsils on the world stage, to recast himself and “that awful woman” from bellyachers to a quiet couple to have round for afternoon tea: Another scone, vicar? Thank you, most kind. This subtly cast scenario is necessarily directed towards securing an apology from the Palace for treating him and her indoors as whining jerks. All he needs is a laptop and the world’s best ghostwriter.

JR Moehringer is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist well qualified for his task: his own coming-of-age memoir, The Tender Bar, was turned into a film starring Ben Affleck and directed by George Clooney. It is through Clooney Harry met Moehringer. The agile hack’s staccato, single-sentence paragraph style suited Harry’s delivery and he goes to work. Sentence. Full stop. New par.

Of course, JR Moehringer and Harry Sussex could be JD Salinger and Holden Caulfield for all world’s news outlets should worry. Balance and verity flew out the window in a frenzy of hype and speculation exciting a frisson of prurient voyeurism. The expectation rose of a vast reservoir of bile bursting over in a blockbuster of spectacular sputum and spit. The royal effect is, as ever, efficacious: Spare flooded a gawping market. 

As the generic source blurb puts it: “One of the most searing images of the 20th century, two young boys, two princes walking behind their mother’s coffin…” The crux of interest is always the tragedy of his mother and thence her boys. Harry relates how Charles told him of Diana’s death:

[Pa] was standing at the edge of the bed, looking down. His white dressing-gown made him seem like a ghost in a play.

What is it, Pa?

He put a hand on my knee. Darling boy, Mummy’s been in a car crash.

Pa looked down into the folds of the old quilts and blankets and sheets.

Mummy was quite badly injured and taken to hospital, darling boy.

He was in shock, it seemed.

Oh. Hospital?

Yes. With a head injury.

I thought again: Injured… but she’s OK. She’s been taken to hospital, they’ll fix her head, and we’ll go and see her. Today. Tonight at the latest.

They tried, darling boy. I’m afraid she didn’t make it.

Harry deludes himself:

Her life’s been miserable, she’s been hounded, harassed, lied about, lied to. So she’s staged an accident as a diversion and run away.

The realization took my breath away, made me gasp with relief.

Of course! It’s all a ruse, so she can make a clean start! At this very moment she’s undoubtedly renting an apartment in Paris, or arranging fresh flowers in her secretly purchased log cabin somewhere way up high in the Swiss Alps. Soon, soon, she’ll send for me and Willy. It’s all so obvious! Why didn’t I see it before? Mummy isn’t dead! She’s hiding!

Even the blood and guts of his own royal genesis are itemised mercilessly, the analogous inspiration for the book’s title. He writes:

The Heir and the Spare – there was no judgment about it, but also no ambiguity. I was the shadow, the support, the Plan B. I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy. I was summoned to provide backup, distraction, diversion and, if necessary, a spare part. Kidney, perhaps. Blood transfusion. Speck of bone marrow. This was all made explicitly clear to me at the start of life’s journey and regularly reinforced thereafter. I was twenty the first time I heard the story of what Pa allegedly said to Mummy the day of my birth. Wonderful! Now you’ve given me an Heir and a Spare – my work is done. A joke. Presumably.

If a ghostwriter’s hand, however careful, can perhaps contaminate the purity of a subject’s stream of thought, it might be wondered whether another language could similarly tinker with verisimilitude. Perhaps not, yet it seems (to me) the butcher’s list of Harry’s guts is a little more ameliorative in the mellifluous cadence of French; a nice concern, but it helps. Here it is mirrored in Le Suppléant:

L’Héritier et le Suppléant – aucun jugement dans ces sobriquets, mais aucune ambiguïté non plus. J’étais l'ombre, la doublure, le plan B. J’avais été expressément conçu au cas où il arriverait malheur à Willy. Mon rôle était de soutenir, de distraire, de faire diversion et, si nécessaire, de fournir les pièces de rechange. Un rein, peut-être. Transfusion de sang. Un bout de moelle osseuse. On me l’a fait comprendre de manière explicite dès le tout début de mon existence, et répété avec de plus en plus d’insistance depuis. J’avais vingt ans la première fois que j’ai entendu l’anecdote selon laquelle Papa aurait dit à Maman, le jour de ma naissance : Merveilleux ! Voilà, tu m’as donné un Héritier et un Suppléant – mon boulot est terminé. C’était une blague. Sans doute.

No doubt however it is translated, that’s how destiny is carved up at the top table. Diana’s coyly delivered bombshell on her broken marriage is just as crisply relayed by Harry:

My mother legendarily said there were three people in her marriage. But her maths was off. She left Willy and me out of the equation. We sensed the presence of the Other Woman because we suffered the downstream effects. Willy long harbored suspicions about the Other Woman, which confused him, tormented him, and when those suspicions were confirmed, he felt tremendous guilt for having done nothing, said nothing, sooner. I was too young, I think, to have suspicions. But I couldn’t help but feel the lack of stability, the lack of warmth and love, in our home.

He frequently wondered where his mother was. He says: She’d either bolted or been thrown out, depending on whom you asked, though I never asked anyone. It is this distance, he admits, that brings the boys to accept Camilla at first, but the uneasy truce founders. The brothers, he says, pondered:

If she’d be like all the wicked stepmothers in storybooks. But she wasn’t. Like Willy, I did feel real gratitude for that. The only thing we asked in return was that he [Charles] not marry her... It would make the whole country, the whole world, talk about Mummy, compare Mummy and Camilla, and nobody wanted that. Least of all Camilla. Just please don’t marry her. Just be together, Pa. He didn’t answer.

Harry’s bitterness is acrid:

But she answered. Straightaway. Shortly after our private summits with her, she began to play the long game, a campaign aimed at marriage and eventually the Crown. (With Pa’s blessing, we presumed.) Stories began to appear everywhere, in all the papers, about her private conversation with Willy, stories that contained pinpoint accurate details, none of which had come from Willy, of course. They could only have been leaked by the one other person present. And the leaking had obviously been abetted by the new spin-doctor Camilla had talked Pa into hiring.

Against a background of such perpetual intrigue, the press remained ever alert: Harry’s confession he had killed 25 Taliban had the broadcasters frothing about his supposedly careless attitude to human rights. He is candid:

Twenty-five. It wasn’t a number that gave me any satisfaction. But neither was it a number that made me feel ashamed. Naturally, I’d have preferred not to have that number on my military CV, on my mind, but by the same token I’d have preferred to live in a world in which there was no Taliban, a world without war. Even for an occasional practitioner of magical thinking like me, however, some realities just can’t be changed.

While in the heat and fog of combat, I didn’t think of those twenty-five as people. You can’t kill people if you think of them as people. You can’t really harm people if you think of them as people. They were chess pieces removed from the board, Bads taken away before they could kill Goods. I’d been trained to “other-ize” them, trained well. On some level I recognized this learned detachment as problematic. But I also saw it as an unavoidable part of soldiering.

Another reality that “just can’t be changed”.

Amid the revelations of frozen personal parts in polar extremities, described in inordinate detail, cocaine snorting leading to unexpected forgetfulness (he more or less recalls), character-building expeditions, and the miscellaneous jollifications expected of his class, we have moments of personal and national solemnity.

When the Queen has gone:

She [Aunt Anne] led me upstairs, to Granny’s bedroom. I braced myself, went in. The room was dimly lit, unfamiliar – I’d been inside it only once in my life. I moved ahead uncertainly, and there she was. I stood, frozen, staring. I stared and stared. It was difficult, but I kept on thinking how I’d regretted not seeing my mother at the end. Years of lamenting that lack of proof, postponing my grief for want of proof. Now I thought: Proof. Careful what you wish for.

Or farce – that fancy dress party:

I went up and down the rows, sifting through the racks, seeing nothing I liked. With time running out I narrowed my options to two.

A British pilot’s uniform.

And a sand-coloured Nazi uniform.

With a swastika armband.

And a flat cap.

I phoned Willy and Kate, asked what they thought.

Nazi uniform, they said.

I rented it, plus a silly mustache.

The tabloids loved it: Heil Harry! Heir Aberrant! Royal Heil to Pay! Kate and Willy denied complicity, the Chief Rabbi “didn’t mince words”, and sulphurous outrage imperilled his admission to Sandhurst:

No matter what I did, the calls grew louder for me to be barred from the Army. The top brass, however, were holding fast. If Prince Harry had been in the Army when he dolled himself up as the Führer, they said, he’d have been disciplined. But he’s not in the Army yet, they added. So he’s perfectly free to be a thicko.

Moehringer has been, it seems, exquisitely careful, yet throughout the book the uneasy thought recurs: are we in sympathy with Harry or a protective amanuensis one step ahead of some charming, loopy quirk? Perhaps not – the ghost does let it run that Charles “was always sniffing things. Food, roses, our hair. He must’ve been a bloodhound in another life. Maybe he took all those long sniffs because it was hard to smell anything over his personal scent. Eau Sauvage. He’d slather the stuff on his cheeks, his neck, his shirt. Flowery, with a hint of something harsh, like pepper or gunpowder, it was made in Paris. Said so on the bottle.”

The blood has been sucked out of this magnum opus for inglorious headlines, with money to be made by anyone with an angle to dangle, but do not wither in despair. A second volume looms. At least some of the tears staining the pages of his first purging clear-out are persuasively Harry’s own; moments when his pain is your pain: the real thing, the kind of grief Harry calls simply “the stab of sorrow”. 

Where will it all end? A hummingbird flutters into Little Archie’s nursery. “You’re free. Fly away,” Prince Harry counsels the bird. “And then, against all odds, and all expectations, that wonderful, magical little creature bestirred itself, and did just that.”

Harry did, after all, bolt like his mother’s son.