When Charles and Camilla married, Harry says he and William were sympathetic to the couple’s years of “star-crossed longing” but also that Camilla “played a pivotal role in the unraveling” of his parents’ marriage. Harry’s feelings for his stepmother are understandably complicated. Like his mother, Harry makes some shocking claims about Camilla in his memoir, writing that the Queen Consort leaked private information to the press. He hated the idea of me enjoying a perk he’d been denied.” Of the fact that the late Queen allowed him to keep his own beard for his 2018 wedding, he writes: “After he’d come back from an assignment with Special Forces, Willy was sporting a full beard and someone told him to be a good boy and run along and shave it. He also notes that the late Queen may have played favourites: “Willy always thought Granny had a soft spot for me, that she indulged me while holding him to an impossibly high standard,” Harry writes. For instance, Harry highlights his brother’s “alarming baldness, more advanced than my own,” and his “fading resemblance” to their mother. Some passages can certainly be seen as score-keeping – particularly when it comes to his “beloved brother” but also “arch nemesis,” Prince William. In Spare, Harry navigates this struggle imperfectly. If Harry’s claims are true, the monarchy is ripe for a reckoning. But I believe that readers should look past Harry’s heated prose to the bigger, and I believe valid, claims he makes. The book is spotted with a number of unnecessary slights, with Prince William bearing the brunt of them. I’m inclined to agree with Morton – to a point. Morton doesn’t think so, citing Spare’s propensity for “petty point scoring,” which risks overshadowing “the genuinely sad story of a son unable to come to terms with the premature death of his mother.” Were the Prince’s revelations about the Royal Family as revolutionary as his mother’s? Does this new book have the potential to challenge (or dare I say, change) people’s perceptions of the monarchy as the Diana book did in its own time? The book also set the tone of royals coverage and debate for a generation. Morton’s book about Diana altered the way people saw the monarchy and the “fairytale” marriage between her and Charles. No doubt the late Diana, Princess of Wales, would have understood Prince Harry’s desire to tell his story after breaking out of the royal fold, much like she herself did upon her separation from then-Prince Charles when she collaborated with Andrew Morton for his 1992 book Diana: Her True Story, In Her Own Words.īefore I sat down to review Spare, I reached out to Morton to see what he thought of Harry’s memoir. The Duke of Sussex has often remarked in television interviews that he is very much his mother’s son.

The spare man book