The title of Prince Harry’s long-awaited memoir will be enough to make the royal family nervous. Spare, which was originally due out this year, will be released in January. “His Words. His Story,” the tag-line of the book promises.
The Queen’s death this year — and the coming together of the British royal family in their shared grief — led to suggestions the book would be toned down. That looks like a faint hope. Spare suggests we will see a presentation of the same old Harry: cast out from a family that had no need for him as he fell down the line of succession.
“With its raw, unflinching honesty, Spare is a landmark publication full of insight, revelation, self-examination and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief,” the promotional fluff for the book promises. Early next year, we shall find out whether it is indeed a landmark publication or one destined to end up in the reduced section of discount bookstores across Britain and the US.
But Harry shouldn’t delude himself about why people will be buying this book. Let’s be frank: it is incendiary insider gossip people are after. If the book does not contain full-frontal attacks on his father, brother, stepmother and every other member of the British royal family who he considers to have wronged him, it will be both a welcome surprise and a disappointment.
The mantra of the royal family has traditionally been “never complain, never explain.” The major exception to this in the past century has been the Duke of Windsor, briefly known as Edward VIII, who, far from coincidentally, is the only other major member of the “Firm” to publish his memoir, vaingloriously entitled A King’s Story.
That book was a bestseller, thanks to its mixture of apparent plain talking about the events that led up to his abdication in 1936, and splendidly bitchy asides about everyone from the prime minister Stanley Baldwin to the Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang; had it not been toned down by various concerned friends of the Duke, it would have been even more incendiary.
It is unclear whether Harry has had similar counsel from wise heads, or if he is instead thinking of the Netflix and Spotify deals the couple have signed, which will thrive on a book that is as revelatory and score-settling as possible.
Since Harry and Meghan staged their mini-abdication nearly three years ago, Harry has given the impression of being an angry man with much to be angry about. But his public appearances have tended to lack a certain articulacy. With the help of the respected ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer, this should no longer be a problem when it comes to Spare. If I was a member of the royal family, or a courtier, I would be regarding January 10 with the dread that most people might reserve for major invasive surgery. The rest of us can sit back, open the popcorn and relish the next extraordinary development in a soap opera that shows no signs of resolving itself.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
