It’s now almost a week since Prince Harry’s memoir Spare was published and what thrillingly hectic days they’ve been: hard to pick a highlight. Amusing as it was to find Nicholas Witchell reporting for the BBC on the book’s release by filming the sole person queueing outside Waterstones’ London flagship to buy it, I think the sound of the ex-Sun hack Dan Wootton railing flatulently in the Daily Mail at Harry’s description of him as a “sad little man” just edged it for me (“no, YOU’RE the sad little man, Mister Prince!”). Meanwhile, in the US, Harry went on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, where he performed a skit with some trumpets and Tom Hanks and spoke of his “frost-nipped todger” – said todger being, by the way, just one of dozens of be-nicknamed rude mechanicals who appear in his masterwork (others include his mates Badger, Skippy and Chimp; the venomous royal courtiers known as the Bee, the Wasp and the Fly; and Rehabber Kooks, AKA Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News UK).
It has to be said, however, that none of this coverage, barmy and excessively fixated, is even half so unlikely as Spare itself, a book that must rank as one of the most bizarre I’ve ever read. Yes, it is – at moments – very sad. There’s ongoing shame in it for tabloid journalism. But for a title written explicitly in the cause of securing sympathy and understanding for its so-called author, boy, does it misfire. It’s not only that Harry is so petulant: a man who thinks nothing, even now, of complaining about the bedroom he was allotted for his summer hols in Granny’s castle. With every page, his California makeover grows less convincing.
