Day 127 of J.Crew Hamlet and Prince Harry’s memoir has finally dropped. It needed to. I feel like I’ve had babies I’ve been less organised for than this particular arrival. There have, it is fair to say, been one or two thousand pre-publication spoilers for Spare, each of which a lot of people have consumed without really meaning to. There’s something about it having all taken place over the turn of the year that reminds you of eating nothing but Christmas food for days and days and days. After about a week of it, you do find yourself screaming: “I never want to see this stuff again! Can we please, PLEASE have a Chinese or a curry?” That said, I do still have one box of mince pies and one royal tell-all left, and I think we both know I’m going to get through them. It’s called duty – look it up.
Anyway, on to the reaction. As I type this, Harry’s entire home of Montecito is under evacuation amid floods some will no doubt choose to see as biblical. We can only guess how the book has gone down in Windsor Elsinore. Some judge that Harry has opened a hail of literary gunfire on a royal family whose courtiers constantly emphasise are limited in the ways they can fight back. Maybe this is a metaphor. As one of the more eye-catching passages of Prince Harry’s book reveals, during the conflict in Afghanistan he killed 25 Taliban fighters out of his $50m helicopter, a form of warfare which even the most committed Taliban-loathers among us always had to admit was a bit asymmetric. Then again, the Taliban won in the end, so we should certainly consider the possibility that the monarchy will be the last ones standing in the rubble when Harry’s barrage ends.
