Spare: Prince Harry vs Just Harry
‘If you tell the truth,’ Mark Twain famously said, ‘you don’t have to remember anything.’ Yesterday’s piece [subscribers] looked at some of the factually false ‘memories’ that Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, has been serving up in ‘Spare’; today’s piece looks at things that can’t be fact-checked, but where Harry is contradicting himself.
Walking across this bridge at Frogmore House, after Prince Philip’s funeral, Prince Harry held a private, secret meeting with his father and brother, which he details in excruciating detail in the prologue to ‘Spare’
Part of what makes ‘Spare’ so maddening is this total inability to detect - what? Irony? Accountability? Basic contradictions? Harry’s ghostwriter clearly did him no favors whatsoever in pointing this out. The book is based on more than 50 rants that Harry threw at J.R. Moehringher, and, judging from Harry’s wafer-thin skin, it would appear the accomplished ghostwriter had no intention of upsetting his man baby subject by pointing out how he was contradicting himself. Starting, unfortunately, with the very first moments of the book.
Princes in the Prologue
For most of us, the funeral of a beloved grandfather would be a sorrowful, even heartbreaking occasion. For Harry Sussex, it was an opportunity, one that he would eagerly monetize to the tune of $10m per book, $40m total, in a four book deal. After burying the Duke of Edinburgh, when Harry and William had walked with his other grandsons, Harry asked for a meeting with his father and brother, both destined to become King of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand (four nations out of FVEY, the Five Eyes intelligence alliance) and of Her Majesty’s other Realms and Territories.
So, though I'd flown home specifically and solely for Grandpa's funeral, while there I'd asked for this secret meeting with my older brother, Willy, and my father to talk about the state of things.
Emphasis mine. The secret meeting. The one that Harry asked for. At no point, before now, have we read what words were said between father and sons. They are in the global press spotlight because of Prince Harry, and only because of him. Because “secret”, which he, Harry, promised, meant sod all to him with $40m on the table from a publisher.
Or, to put it another way: we know it was a “secret meeting” only because Prince Harry says so in (checks notes) his best-selling book. Let’s continue:
More, I'd vowed not to let this encounter devolve into another argument. But I quickly discovered that it wasn't up to me. Pa and Willy had their parts to play, and they'd come ready for a fight.
… Willy in particular didn't want to hear anything. After he'd shut me down several times, he and I began sniping, saying some of the same things we'd said for months--years. It got so heated that Pa raised his hands. Enough!
He stood between us, looking up at our flushed faces: Please, boys don't make my final years a misery.
Do we need to play ‘spot the difference’ in these passages? Prince Charles had come “ready for a fight”. Yet, a second later, and much more believably, Harry describes himself and his brother getting into a huge fight and his frail father saying “Please, boys, don’t make my final years a misery”. Harry goes on to say:
His voice sounded raspy, fragile. It sounded, if I'm being honest, old.
I thought about Grandpa.
So… first you say Prince Charles came to your “secret” meeting spoiling for a fight. But then you describe how Charles stepped in between you and your brother, not blaming you, not favoring William, but just saying “boys” and appealing to you both. Full-grown men, but his boys, as you will always be to him.
“I thought about Grandpa [Prince Philip].” Harry continues. But, did you? Did you really? Because this prologue is 98% me, me me. Did you, in fact, think about the fact that your grandfather had just been buried and therefore, your Dad had lost his father? His father. Harry doesn’t seem even upset, let alone distraught, and is here, in these pages, selling out his grandfather’s funeral for cash money. But for all his touchy-feely BS, Harry seems not capable of understanding or even seemingly considering his father’s acute pain. Age made Philip no less Charles’ beloved Dad than it made Harry Sussex one of Charles’s “boys”.
The Duke and the Drugs
Her Majesty the Queen, an incredible and beloved public servant, has been described as the “villain of Spare” but that’s wrong; the press is the villain of Spare. Yet again and again Harry Sussex attacks the press for “lying” and then describes events or facts that prove the press were in fact both correct, and acting in the public interest.
Harry pathetically attacks Rebekah Brooks, a Fleet Street editor, by scrambling her name to read “Rehabber Kooks” because Brooks contacted Buckingham Palace and warned that she had information that HRH Prince Henry of Wales was heavily abusing drugs, and had been to rehab. This is responsible reporting. Prince Harry was way over the age of criminal responsibility in the UK, was committing crimes that others go to jail for. Harry was almost an adult, 17 years old. Incredibly privileged and wasting his life, Henry Wales bitches at the free press for accurately reporting the facts and lies that they “smeared” him:
But then I woke to the actual nightmare.
A blaring front-page headline: Harry's Drugs
Shame.
January 2002.
Spread over seven pages inside the newspaper were all the lies Marko had presented to me, and many more. The story not only had me down as a habitual drug user, it had me recently going to rehab. Rehab! The editor had got her mitts on some photos of Marko and me paying a visit to a suburban rehab center, months earlier, a typical part of my princely charitable work, and she'd repurposed the photos, made them visual aids for her libelous fiction.
Only it wasn’t libelous. Harry’s own previous chapters have detailed that he absolutely was an habitual drug user. He was even getting high enough, in the expensive halls of Eton, to believe that he was spiritually communing with a fox:
I DON'T REMEMBER how we got the stuff. One of my mates, I expect. Or maybe several. [But obviously not Harry - he’s never guilty of anything - LM]. …I knew this was bad behavior. I knew it was wrong. My mates knew too. We talked about it often, while stoned, how stupid we were to be wasting an Eton education. Once, we even made a pact. At the start of exam period, called Trials, we vowed to quit cold turkey, until after the final Trial. But the very next night, lying in bed, heard my mates in the hall, cackling, whispering. Headed to the loo. Bloody hell, they're already breaking the pact! I got out of bed, joined them.
As the assembly line cranked up, bath to basin to loo, as the weed began to take effect, we shook our heads.
What idiots we were, thinking we could change.
Pass the spliff, mate.
Harry Sussex is a liar. He’s literally described himself as an addict who could not give up weed (and there is no reason to believe that weed is all he did). He’s described extensive illegal underage drinking in his Highgrove Palace “private club” for teens, where he was in charge. Harry goes so far as to describe his young, high-ass Highness communing with a fox at school:
A fox! Staring straight at me! Look!
What, mate?
Nothing.
I whispered to the fox: Hello, mate. How's it going?
What are you on about?
Nothing, nothing.
Maybe it was the weed - undoubtedly it was the weed - but I felt a piercing and powerful kinship with that fox. I felt more connected to that fox than I did to the boys in the bathroom, the other boys at Eton, even the Windsors in the distant castle. In fact, this little fox, like the leopard in Botswana, seemed like a messenger, sent to me from some other realm. Or perhaps from the future.
If only I knew who sent it.
And what the message was.
I can help Your Grace there. Nobody “sent” it, and the “message” was that you are a goddamn liar and a self-obsessed pillock.
Eton College’s rich quadrangles with the bog-standard fox Prince Harry converted to a mystic messenger from the future, before and after he smoked industrial amounts of weed
The following chapters recount how his trusted bodyguard told Harry that the gig was up, that Rebekah Brooks had the story that Harry Wales was doing industrial sized quantities of drugs and had gone to rehab. Harry then, insanely, blames his loving father and Camilla, then still only Charles’s companion (‘girlfriend’ seems silly) for ‘planting’ this substantively true story in order to ‘rehab Camilla’s image’. In Planet Princeling, Harry’s loving family had leaked against him. He has zero, less than zero, proof for this, nor does he care. He also rages that his Dad and Camilla would not badger the paper into suppressing their story.
In fact, Hazza should read his own bloody book. As he recounts the “industrial” line of Eton toffs doing weed and blowing the smoke out of the bathroom window, he also describes, as he was sitting there smoking weed, looking out of that same window and seeing the Thames Valley Police Officers assigned to his protection 24/7, strolling in the very courtyard below him. The reek of entitlement on Harry’s pages is even stronger than the reek of drugs was that night:
One night, straddling the loo, I took a big hit and gazed up at the moon, then down at the school grounds. I watched several Thames Valley police officers marching back and forth. They were stationed out there because of me. But they didn't make me feel safe. They made me feel caged.
Oh no! The police officers having to work a three am shift, fully armed, their eyes scouring the cold horizon, prepared at all times to take a bullet for you, as you, HRH Prince Henry of Wales sat above them smoking a fattie out the window and communing with a fox you liked better than people and said was “sent from the future” because you were stoned out of your rich, spoiled mind, made you “feel caged”?
Armed Thames Valley Police working round the clock to keep a rich teenager safe may have disapproved of the Prince’s constant, “industrial” strength drug abuse
Has it occurred to you, Harry Sussex, that working-class members of that rural police force in Thames Valley got sick of patrolling underneath your rich boy Eton windows as, night after night, you got off your face with drugs, and they, being direct eye-witnesses to your selfishness and wastrel mentality, therefore acceptable sources to any newspaper, called it in to Ms. Brooks office because they’d had enough of you breaking the bloody law in their faces night after night?
Rebekah Brooks, Harry says, got it wrong that he went to rehab. OK, and so what if she did? That was the part of the otherwise accurate story that flattered you, you selfish git.
Regular drug user - ✅
Cannot stop doing drugs - ✅
Went to rehab - ❎
Guess what, Harry Sussex? You just smeared Her Majesty the Queen, His Majesty the King, and the free press. Not only did Charles and Camilla not plant the story, you raged at them then and now for not going to war to counter a story that was absolutely true. They can’t and should not do that; not moral, not ethical. It’s not the job of the Palace to lie for you and bully the press for you. It would have been “libelous fiction” to say you were a habitual drug user if it was false, but it wasn’t false. It certainly was not libelous to say you’d been to rehab when you had not. You can’t beat up on the press, Rebekah Brooks or anyone else, Harry Sussex, for paying you a compliment you didn’t deserve.
More on this, for subscribers, tomorrow.
