It’s been more than two years since the publication of Prince Harry’s Spare. It was a huge publishing success, one of the most bestselling memoirs of all time. As much as the royalists try to nitpick it, Spare completely reset so many narratives about Harry, his wife and the royal family entirely. There is SO MUCH that the royalist media can no longer get away with claiming about Harry and the Windsors because Harry wrote the definitive account of his own life. Those people have been furious about that ever since, and they’re still trying to find a way to delegitimize Spare and they’re still trying to find a way to say that Harry is an unreliable narrator of his own life. Speaking of, Ingrid Seward is still shilling her dumb book, and she now claims that Spare is “completely untrue” and her books are more honest because something something she’s not the spare!
Playing second fiddle to William throughout his life seemed to take a massive toll on Harry, which culminated in his scathing 2023 book ‘Spare’ about his brother and the whole Royal Family. Ingrid Seward, who has spent 40 years following The Firm, claimed that Harry’s emotional problems had been caused by him allowing the ‘Spare’ label to ‘dominate his life – to the extent that he has now made a career out of it’.
She said: ‘He chooses to be the victim and wreak vengeance on the slights he thought he had suffered; on his family, on the press and through the courts.’
The editor of Majesty magazine claimed Harry’s account was ‘completely untrue’ but it was instead ‘how Harry chose to see himself’.
Seward, 77, has spent decades covering The Firm and its highs and lows – from the War of the Waleses, to Toegate to Megxit and beyond. Like many journalists of her generation, she would often find herself invited to Kensington Palace for cosy chats with Princess Diana or to the ski slopes of Switzerland with Charles, William and Harry. She witnessed at close quarters ‘the boys’ grow into men, becoming one of the most qualified people to comment on why Harry couldn’t be happy in his position within the Royal Family.
After all, it wasn’t all bad being the Spare, as the role allowed Harry far greater freedom than his elder brother. Instead of always having to be the serious one and shoulder the responsibility for the whole family business, he was allowed to enjoy his life more – all the while in the lap of luxury. Harry would play the fool and get away with childish antics, such as standing behind visitors and pulling funny faces behind their backs to make William laugh when he had to meet them. At the age of nine, Harry turned to his brother and declared: ‘You’re going to be King; it doesn’t matter what I do.’
Put another way, according to Seward in her most recent book My Mother And I, he saw this as a licence to do almost whatever he wanted. Perhaps due to their thirst for attention of their mother, Harry also always felt like he needed to compete in everything with his brother, which was especially difficult given William was notably more successful at school.
It takes some kind of royalist audacity to sit there and say that Harry’s memoir is “completely untrue” because you know his life better than him. C-word’s argument is that Harry was absolutely treated as the spare, but it’s wrong for him to call himself that because… reasons. Honestly, did these people read Spare? Harry isn’t hellbent on vengeance at any point. In fact, there were so many places where I wished Harry had been colder towards his brother and father, both of whom showed Harry their true colors long before. Harry exposed himself as a neglected boy who desperately wanted deeper connections to his brother and father, despite the fact that he could see that they were sh-theads.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.
