We’ve gotten to know many of the boot-licking royalist commentators and columnists over the years, but it looks like a newish guy is trying to make a name for himself. The guy is William Sitwell, and he writes columns for the Telegraph. In recent months, he’s thrown screeching hissy fits about the Duchess of Sussex specifically. Remember when Meghan attended Emma Grede’s “A Seat at the Table” dinner last fall? Sitwell called the dinner – featuring powerful, wealthy and well-connected women – “vulgar and revolting.” He was also incandescent with rage about the vegan menu. He followed that up by throwing a tantrum about Meghan’s successful As Ever business after it was revealed that she’s likely made millions from jam sales alone. He called it “disturbingly wrong” that people would spend their money on… good-quality products. Well, Sitwell’s latest column is an attack on Prince Harry for… suing the British press while simultaneously correcting the record about his own life. An excerpt from Sitwell’s “If only Prince Harry could spare a tear for the father he mocked.”
Prince Harry was hounded. Which makes it all the more extraordinary – knowing the singular, agonising distress that is detailed press coverage of one’s private life – that he has done so much to hound his own family since leaving the fold. He reasoned in his mind that this was acceptable because they were party to the media onslaught. That his father, for example, the now King, had dallied with the press, as his agencies, his advisers, spun his future wife, Camilla, from national harridan to respected Queen at his personal expense.
And so he wrote his autobiography, Spare, which, naturally, spoon-fed the tabloids a constant drip of stories, his dirty laundry washed, tumble-dried, hung out, ironed and folded up week in week out throughout 2023. And that preceded and was accompanied by a carefully orchestrated campaign of a Netflix series and sit-down interviews. Such was its effect that only an amphipod at the bottom of the Mariana Trench could avoid details of the contents of Spare.
Of the many very much not spared was King Charles. In the cruellest passages of the book, narrated breathlessly by Harry himself, he reels his father in with seeming familial affection before ruthlessly stamping on his reputation.
Throughout the book, for example, Harry uses the affectionate moniker of “Pa”, as a child might, snuggling up to his daddy, but in this case for the benefit of millions, before exposing him. He’s a bore: “Pa launched into a micro-lecture about this personage over here, that royal cousin over there…”. He is a man who can’t get dressed without a valet, a fuddy-duddy who listens to the “wireless” in the bath. A man awash with Eau Sauvage: “He’d slather the stuff on his cheeks, his neck, his shirt”, someone with a backward love of Scottish peaty Highland baths, a person desperate to be photographed with the likes of Nelson Mandela and the Spice Girls because “his approval rating around the world was single digits”, or a wimp who, at Gordonstoun, spent his time “head down, clutching his teddy bear”.
At one point Harry even quotes his father as pleading to his sons, “Please, boys – don’t make my final years a misery.” Even Charles could not have imagined the flesh wound of distress that would one day cause, as those words were published by his own son.
And his abjectly cruel portrayals of his father are matched by exposures of private dealings with his brother – there are similarly endless cynical mentions of “Willy”.
The onslaught of prickly comments, asides and nuggets is relentless – a fact we should all be reminded of given that Prince Harry now spends his life subsumed in media litigation and demanding sympathy for his plight.
And all the while his wife Meghan, who he says lives a life of “misery”, appears to be making a very fine fist of it with her own brand of home-making TV shows and an astonishingly successful product business.
Prince Harry has endured a torrid time in the media spotlight, but to me his route out of it – hours of unresolved trauma therapy, newspaper bashing, a media campaign of unrelenting soul-searching and invading the privacy of his closest family – makes a very good case for the British stiff-upper lip. He can shed a tear for himself and his wife, it seems, but not those he dragged through the mud. At least the stories of his father seem to have backfired spectacularly. A teddy bear-hugging, Eau Sauvage-reeking fuddy-duddy is just the kind of king I like.
It’s worth noting that the attacks on Harry were coming in thick and fast over the weekend, following his testimony at the Royal Court of Justice, where he and several others are suing the Mail/ANL. There is collusion throughout the British media, and they all decided en masse to attack Harry’s credibility and whine about how he “sold out his family’s privacy” by writing his memoir. As if Spare justifies what they did to Harry and his family throughout his life. Sitwell was the only one (I saw) who took this angle though, the “pity poor Charles” BS. Which is bizarre, because anyone reading Spare with an open mind could understand that Harry loves and adores his father, while simultaneously being disappointed in Charles for not doing more to help him. Considering what Charles and Camilla did to Harry and leaked about Harry throughout his life, he could have gone much, much harder on them. But he didn’t.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
