Will I read Prince Harry’s Spare? Probably (What am I saying? Of course I will), even though the next “royal” book on my reading list is meant to be the (reportedly) remarkably enjoyable The Quest for Queen Mary, one of the many unread books piled up at home. This particular Queen Mary was married to George V, Elizabeth II’s grandfather.
The Quest, which was published a couple of years ago, is based on the notes taken by her biographer, James Pope-Hennessy. The biography is apparently very well written, if somewhat constrained in the way that authorized biographies tend to be. But the notes don’t seem to be.
Moira Hodgson, writing in the Wall Street Journal:
Pope-Hennessy describes Queen Mary’s third son, the hard-drinking Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, as “one of the finest and most authentic specimens of the race available for study today. He is tall and bulky, and his head is wonderfully Hanoverian, flat at the back and rising to the real pineapple point of William the Fourth. He has protruding Guelph eyes.” The Duke’s laugh was “an hysterical piglet squeal which becomes uncontrollable and which I found very infectious.” Prince Henry disliked the constant handshaking required of royals. “It broke my father’s hand once. And the Duke of Windsor’s hand. Broke ’em.” And he comes up with one of the book’s best lines. “Funny shape for a country, Holland. Damn funny shape.”
But back to Harry. As I mentioned, I have not read his book, but I have read enough leaked extracts to agree with a friend, whose first reaction after reading some of those extracts was to suggest that Harry’s ghostwriter was not exactly a fan, a theory that has since gathered pace.
In fact, 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. As if to confirm this, Mr S notes that 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’.
It doesn’t seem, to put it mildly, as if Harry has done himself any favors (other than monetary) with Spare. Producing this book, appears (again, based on those extracts) to have been a massive error of judgement on a number of grounds, but that’s a discussion for another time.
Meanwhile, the British press has had fun, not least over the Battle of Nott Cott (the confrontation when Prince William allegedly pushed Harry to the ground at the latter’s place, Nottingham Cottage):
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Guy Kelly:
“It all happened so fast. So very fast. He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace…” Harry writes, breathlessly. You can picture the beads, bought in Goa but discoloured from a thousand wild swims, crashing to the floor and scuttling across the scandalously small kitchen of Nott Cott. You can hear the shark’s tooth flying and embedding itself in Guy the beagle, who’s suffered enough.
“Not the necklace!” is the subtext. “You can attack me, my wife – wait no not my wife – my dignity, the lot. All fair game. But if you touch the necklace, you’ve gone too far. This is war.”
Another friend of mine, who went to Eton, the same school as Harry, described the publication of the words “ripping my necklace” as “the darkest day in Eton’s history.” Eton was founded in 1440.
Kelly:
“I landed on the dog’s bowl,” it’s reported that Harry writes, after being “knocked down” by his brother, “[the bowl] cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out.”
I wouldn’t dare doubt the veracity of this detail, but I would just say that I’ve spent the last 25 minutes Googling different dog bowls and am yet to find one that would break under the weight of a man falling on it, let alone smash into shards that get stuck in said bloke’s back, leaving visible scars.
To the Spectator’s Julie Burchill:
The brotherly bust-up is camper than I imagined – more Bette Davis and Joan Crawford than Elizabeth I and Bloody Mary . . .
Though it’s unedifying, it made me kind of fall in love with being English again – it’s just so silly. There’s a reason why we produced comic operetta while other cultures produced po-faced operatic epics of love and death; if this was many other countries, the brothers might well have shot each other. As it is, some dry goods got damaged.
For a reenactment of the battle (via Jimmy Kimmel), go here.