After much turmoil and anticipation, Prince Harry of the United Kingdom has finally released his memoir, ‘Spare.’
In the months before its release, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, have given multiple interviews accusing the monarchy of various, allegedly racially motivated slights.
At the core of their complaints is the accusation that the British royal family has been planting stories in tabloid media which endanger their young family. The couple gave up their titles and moved to the United States after marrying, where they now reside with their children.
“They drove me from my country,” Harry told Anderson Cooper on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”
During one of the last stops on his publicity campaign for the memoir, he detailed his anger toward a “callous” and “unaccountable” media which the royal family has allegedly used to their advantage to smear Harry and Meghan.
He maintains that the planted stories inspired threads against his wife and put his family at the risk of anti-monarchy extremists who might seek to harm them, citing a late 2022 column by Jeremy Clarkson in which he expressed his “hate” for Meghan and desire for the British public to publicly shame her.
He even alleged that the campaign against Meghan was designed to benefit the public image of Camilla, his father Charles’ longtime partner who is seen as a primary driver of Charles and Princess Diana’s divorce.
Camilla, who is now the queen consort beside King Charles, was massively unpopular up to and after Diana’s death, but her image has been steadily improving since she officially married Charles in 2005.
Harry alleges that her team has planted unflattering stories about Meghan to make herself look even better in the leadup to Charles’ coronation.
“She began to play the long game. A campaign aimed at marriage and eventually the crown,” Harry told Tom Bradby, a news presenter at British broadcaster ITV, in an interview that aired Sunday.
The memoir dropped in the wake of Harry and Meghan’s six-hour docuseries on Netflix and brings a whole new round of bombshell allegations to light.
Here are the biggest bombshell allegations revealed in Prince Harry’s memoir.
The Meaning of the Title: Spare
Harry says the insensitive term was used by everyone in his life since he was young, including his mother Diana.
“I was the shadow, the support, the Plan B,” he writes. “I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy. I was summoned to provide back-up, distraction, diversion and, if necessary, a spare part. Kidney, perhaps. Blood transfusion. Speck of bone marrow. This was all made explicitly clear to me from the start of life’s journey and regularly reinforced thereafter.”
Prince Charles’ Paternity Comments
The long standing rumor that Harry is not the biological son of Charles was apparently not ignored by the royal family.
“Pa liked telling stories, and this was one of the best in his repertoire. He’d always end with a burst of philosophizing … ‘Who knows if I’m really the Prince of Wales? Who knows if I’m even your real father?'” Harry recounts. “He’d laugh and laugh, though it was a remarkably unfunny joke, given the rumor circulating just then that my actual father was one of Mummy’s former lovers: Major James Hewitt. One cause of this rumor was Major Hewitt’s flaming ginger hair, but another cause was sadism.”
Harry maintains that Diana didn’t meet Hewitt until “long after I was born”.
William and Kate’s Approval of His Controversial Costume
One of Harry’s most notorious press moments was when he was photographed wearing a Nazi uniform to a “Native and Colonial”-theme party.
He claims in discussing the costume with his brother and Kate, both laughed uproariously.
“I phoned Willy and Kate, asked what they thought. Nazi uniform, they said,” Harry claims, alleging that when he went home and tried it on for them, “They both howled. Worse than Willy’s leotard outfit! Way more ridiculous! Which, again, was the point.”
Both Brothers Encouraged Charles to Ditch Camilla
Harry details how both he and his older brother repeatedly asks Charles not to marry Camilla, whose affair had plagued their late mother.
“Despite Willy and me urging him not to, Pa was going ahead,” Harry said about the April 2005 wedding. “We pumped his hand, wished him well. No hard feelings. We recognized that he was finally going to be with the woman he loved, the woman he’d always loved, the woman Fate might’ve intended for him in the first place. Whatever bitterness or sorrow we felt over the closing of another loop in Mummy’s story, we understood that it was besides the point.”
He noted that the ceremony had to be delayed due to the Pope’s death and wondered if it was Diana intervening from beyond the grave.
He Drove the Tunnel Where Diana Died
In a desperate attempt to find closure over his mother’s death, in 2007 Harry demanded his driver take him through the same Paris tunnel where Diana died while driving the same speed she was going.
“I watched his eyes in the rearview, growing large,” Harry writes of his driver’s reaction, saying he wanted to go through the tunnel at “the exact speed Mummy’s car had supposedly been driving, according to police, at the time of the crash. Not 120 miles per hour, as the press originally reported.”
He didn’t find the peace he was searching for. Instead, confusion.
“I sat back. Quietly I said: Is that all of it? It’s… nothing. Just a straight tunnel. I’d always imagined the tunnel as some treacherous passageway, inherently dangerous, but it was just a short, simple, no-frills tunnel. No reason anyone should ever die inside it.”
