Spare

Product Information

Colonel Richard Kemp believed that Harry's "words will be fed into Jihadist propaganda to carry out attacks against the UK". He mentions that for 10 years he believed his mother was in hiding to escape press intrusion and alleges that his brother William also used to have those thoughts. If even a celebrated intellectual could dismiss us as animals, what hope for the man or woman on the street?

In the revelation stakes, Moehringer has done his job; when Harry thanks him in his acknowledgments for having spoken with “such deep conviction about the beauty (and sacred obligation) of Memoir”, you can only wonder what manner of mesmerism he deployed (“Look into my eyes, Harry, and tell me how many Taliban you killed…”).

Had we been given a glimpse of this story he is now pedalling, (with the exception of the media) then the book might have felt more credible, his version more believable. For example the royal family have chosen a different approach to dealing with the press instead of Harry’s unwinnable war and his 20+ lawsuits.

In his review for The Times, James Marriott labelled the book "a 400-page therapy session for mystic Harry" who "was looking for an escape route, a way to blow up his coddled, caged panda bear life", while his wife Meghan is shown "with her talent for victimhood and offence". In its first week, the book sold a total of 467,183 print copies and 750,000 copies across all formats in the UK, becoming the fastest-selling nonfiction book in the UK since Nielsen BookData began recording official printed book sales in 1998.Had he seen more of the golden jubilee year of 2002, he would have observed that his impression that “Britain was intoxicated … Everyone wore some version of the union jack” was quite wrong; swaths of the UK were indifferent, some hostile. Penguin Random House has helped him out and we can only hope he’s happy with his end of the deal, a pact more Faustian by far than anything his father or brother have ever signed. I am not condoning the paparazzi nonsense nor the rigid authority control of the monarchy, however if this is what you loathe, it is time to move on.

Some maybe because of the charity work they do and the causes they champion like William's 'Earthshot' programme, which is the stuff we really should be focused on.

Now you can see why I struggled with this so much, yet much of my own personal views will remain private. Advance clips from the interviews saw Harry telling Cooper that "Every single time I've tried to do it privately, there have been briefings and leakings and planting of stories against me and my wife" and that "The family motto is ' never complain, never explain', but it's just a motto . So all of this has exacerbated an already strenuous relationship and makes any kind of reconciliation unlikely, but certainly more difficult. Yet one thing I know for sure, we will never get to the real truth because one side will not resort to the petty and sometimes damaging allegations made by Harry, in this book. In her review for The Telegraph, Anita Singh gave the book three out of five stars and thought it was "well-constructed and fluently written".