No doubt you’ve been inundated with royal news this week after the many revelations from Prince Harry’s memoir, but here’s a round-up of things you might have missed:
Cast out of coronation
When asked in his interview with ITV’s Tom Bradby if he would attend King Charles’s coronation next year, Prince Harry said “maybe.” Now it looks like he doesn’t have a choice in the matter. Per the royal editor of London’s Sunday Times, Roya Nikkhah: “I can reveal that Prince Harry has been written out of the script for the coronation, with no official role in the service if he attends. Breaking with tradition, Charles will scrap royal dukes kneeling and paying homage to the monarch. Only William will perform that role.”
An insider claimed that the family is “hoping” that the prince will do the right thing and “steer clear” from the historic event.
Harry’s hangxiety
Have you ever blurted something out, to be met with instant regret? I know I have, but at least I can take solace in the fact that my audience is usually friends as drunk as I am that likely won’t remember in the morning. Prince Harry’s faux pas is a little bit different. Yesterday it came out that the Prince had wanted to cancel publication of his bombshell book, Spare, after visiting the UK for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations. Apparently seeing his dear granny was enough to give Harry second thoughts, and it was rumored Harry wanted Penguin Random House not to publish while his grandmother was alive.
Sex, drugs and stallions
So now we know that Prince Harry lost his virginity in a muddy field with an older woman that treated him “like a stallion.” “I mounted her quickly, after which she spanked my ass and sent me away,” the randy royal wrote in Spare. But even those intricate details can’t satisfy the insatiable British press. The location of the sexy scene has now been identified as the aptly named Rattlebone Inn in Wiltshire.
It’s said that his deflowering wasn’t the only wild night Harry has had in the pub. Allegations have been flying that the duke, then aged seventeen, often frequented the Rattlebone for raucous drinking lock-ins and smoked cannabis in the pub’s outdoor area. There were even reports in the early aughts that during one drunken episode, Harry called the French chef a “fucking frog” when he asked him to leave the pub. Sacre bleu!
Cocaine and crown jewels
Spare mentions Harry’s sporadic cocaine use over the years, but drug taking among the British royal family and their circle is nothing new. In 1999, Queen Camilla’s son, Tom Parker Bowles, was caught giving cocaine to a fellow journalist while working at the Cannes Film Festival in France in a sting operation by a tabloid.
Lord Frederick Windsor, Queen Elizabeth II’s cousin, also admitted to taking cocaine after being bamboozled by snappers on the floor of a London club when he was twenty-two. Lord Freddie later retold the story and said he regretted it.
One of Charles’s godchildren, Nicholas Knatchbull, the great-grandson of Earl Mountbatten of Burma had a liking for partying and drugs which saw him drop out of Edinburgh University after just six weeks.
Does Harry’s ghostwriter even like him?
Prince Harry comes across so poorly in the book that you do have to wonder if even his own ghostwriter holds a low opinion of him. And he’s not even trying to pretend. A Twitter account that appears to belong to the writer, J.R. Moehringer, has recently liked a tweet that said of Harry, “It is all me me me.” The tweet was a reply to Spectator chairman Andrew Neil, who pointed out that “Harry’s claim that he killed twenty-five Taliban is a nightmare — an absolute nightmare — for his security teams.”
