Spare by Prince Harry: a ghostwriter’s verdict on this ‘seeping wound’ of a memoir

Not since The Godfather’s Fredo Corleone teamed up with Johnny Ola has a frustrated brother’s bid for self-respect blown up so spectacularly in his own face. (Stay away from boats, Harry! Your brother has already pushed you on to a dog bowl, so we know he’s capable of anything!) It would take an icier heart than mine not to feel some compassion for Prince Harry about this tragedy, because no matter how much he talks these days about “unconscious bias” and “my truth”, in my mind’s eye — and, it turns out, his — he will always be the little boy walking behind his mother’s coffin, head bowed. But even his most determined supporters must admit there is a Grand Canyon-size gap between what Harry so desperately wanted to achieve with Spare (vindication in the court of public opinion, control of the media narrative, apologies from his family) and what he has actually got (general mockery, headlines about dead Afghans and his frostbitten penis, presumably estrangement from his brother). And like so much in Harry’s self-centred but utterly unself-aware life, this gap is alternately comic and pathetic. Hamlet was the aspiration, the Fool is, heartbreakingly, the result.

You might think a book that resolves the matter of whether Harry and his brother are circumcised (“a matter of some public curiosity,” he writes, in one of several passages that begs for a fact-check) leaves no stone unturned. But even after 416 pages of reading Harry’s truth, I had questions.

Number one: does Harry have any friends any more? A single friend who could have said: “Mate, look. God knows your weird family put you through the mill. But do you really need to gripe about your stepmother turning your old bedroom into a dressing room? Or your father laughing at the wrong parts of your school play? Because honestly it makes you sound a bit of a tosser.” Apparently not.

It is poignant how banal so many of Harry’s complaints turn out to be, given how extraordinary his life has been. Perhaps someone told him this would make him relatable, and I guess it does, up to the point when he then includes them in his memoir, as if they were matters of historical importance. Moaning your brother had the better-furnished half of the nursery in one of your grandmother’s many palaces is surely the definition of — to paraphrase an American saying — being born on third base and raging it wasn’t a home run.

Like all people blinded by anger, Harry chucks all his complaints into the pot, failing to distinguish between the macro and micro. “You cheated on me! AND you were always rude to my mother!” an angry spouse might shout. For Harry, there is the unceasing pain of his mother’s death AND his sister-in-law not wanting to share her lip gloss with his wife.

A headline in The Spectator last week asked “Does Harry’s own ghostwriter dislike him?”, implying that the only reason the prince could come across so poorly in his own memoir was because his ghost sabotaged him. But this misunderstands the role of ghostwriters. I had a brief career as a ghost in my twenties and the hardest part was muffling my judgment about what I thought the book should be, because it wasn’t my book — it was the celebrity’s. JR Moehringer is one of the best ghosts in the business, the man behind probably the greatest sports memoir of all time, Open by Andre Agassi. But where Agassi’s memoir is all about interiority — Agassi’s self-loathing, Agassi’s shame — Harry’s book is entirely about externals: things are done to him and he is the passive recipient. He is never at fault, and even when he is, he isn’t really. (His brother and sister-in-law told him to wear the Nazi costume! Other people took photos of him naked in Las Vegas!) Harry has had a lot of therapy, but I would suggest he needs a better therapist, one who is at least as interested in developing empathy as blame. When Harry can’t talk to his brother about their mother, it’s because he’s too sad; when William can’t, it’s because he’s cold. A touch more self-awareness wouldn’t go amiss either. “It sounds posh and I suppose it was,” he writes about his childhood. Yeah, you think, mate?

● Read Camilla Long’s review of Harry on screen

Moehringer is known for his excoriating depictions of fathers, from Agassi’s book and his own memoir, The Tender Bar. But despite Harry’s fury that his father is not his mother, Charles has never looked better than he does in Spare, doing his best to give his boys the kind of love he never got from his own parents. Harry, by contrast, comes across as a man who will for ever be a sad, angry and confused 12-year-old boy, desperately trying to get from his father and brother the kind of attention he got from his mother. It is a ghost’s job to capture the truth about the celebrity, and with this strange, petty, self-inflicted seeping wound of a book we have to assume that Moehringer succeeded.

The book is frequently written in a flickering stream of consciousness that sounds less like how Harry has ever talked and more like, well, Moehringer. It’s a style suited to conveying trauma and works well for, say, Harry’s memories of his mother’s funeral (“the clinking bridles and clopping hooves of the six sweaty brown horses, the squeaking wheels of the gun carriage they were hauling”). At other times it descends into Wodehousian parody, such as when Harry remembers childhood japes at Highgrove with friends: “Names float back to me. Badger. Casper. Nisha. Lizzie. Skippy. Emma. Rose. Olivia. Chimp. Pell. We all got on well and sometimes a bit more than well.” (Whither Badger and Chimp now? Hard to imagine them in California.)

Like all spares, Harry careers around looking for an identity, and the lack of a credible or even a stable narrative voice reflects that. One minute he’s an idiot Sloane shagging in a field in an enjoyably sub-Jilly Cooper section; the next he aims for profundity when describing the time he saw an elephant: “Everything, for one half second, was one. Everything made sense . . . Shine a light.” Alas, he sounds more like his fellow nepo baby (the new term for those who owe their livelihoods to their parents’ celebrity) Brooklyn Beckham, who wrote in his 2017 book of photography: “Elephants in Kenya. So hard to photograph, but incredible to see.”

Harry never says this in the book — and is surely unaware of it — but Moehringer makes it emphatically clear that in Meghan, with her much discussed love of “humanitarian causes”, her touchy-feeliness and her devotion to him, Harry found a substitute for his mother. Then, in squirreling her out of tabloidy, racist England, he saved her, as he couldn’t save his mother. And now they live in America, which, famously, has no tabloid journalism or racism at all.

Perhaps the irony of his situation hasn’t hit Harry yet. The royals exist to distract and to be discussed, and in fleeing the palace his livelihood now depends on him doing both for ever. Harry has never been more royal than he has been since leaving the royal family. He could have made an attempt at a vaguely normal life and got a job, as Princess Anne and Princess Margaret’s children did. But you don’t get a massive house in Santa Barbara with normal.

So here he is, like so many before him, raiding the Windsor jewels for millions. One day maybe he’ll see it. Until then he might contemplate his own verdict on an earlier royal memoir, this one written by Paul Burrell, his mother’s former butler: “A tell-all which actually told nothing. It was merely one man’s self-justifying, self-centring version of events.”

Spare by Prince Harry
Bantam £28 pp416