Spare: A Swampland of Royal Intrigue and Unexamined Privilege

God, I’m honestly struggling to find the words with this one. If I were Harry, I would hire a ghostwriter to wax lyrical about my endless mummy issues and seemingly neverendingly-un-self-aware class privileges, all thickly lathered in a goopy layer of mush, to publish as my review. Abandon all hope of good writing without any level of self-reflection, all ye who enter here.

To think, I started reading this with an air of optimism. A largely ambivalent antimonarchist myself – who rarely cares about any story to do with the royal family unless, say, it was reporting their total downfall – I have found myself sympathetic to Harry and Meghan’s plight over the years.

Are the British tabloid press a cancerous tumour, leaching off the curtains-drawn judgement of the stiff-upper-lip British public? Absolutely. Is what they write about most individuals’ complete toilet water? Certainly. Are they largely right in claiming that Prince Harry is a complete buffoon? 100%.

Things invariably go tumbling downhill when Harry attempts to excuse himself from wearing a Hitler costume to a ‘Native and Colonials’ themed costume party.

The first 30 chapters or so (yes, there really are that many) were honestly quite good. If you, dear reader, trawling through the depths of book reviews seeking reassurance, want to curiously dip your head into this swampland of royal intrigue, make sure to close the book once you reach the end of Part One. Before this point, a much more sympathetic, young Harry is presented; indeed, the descriptions of palace life and the never-ending, stringent tradition that accompanies it, as seen through an “honest” narrator’s eyes, could even be considered of somewhat value to our overall understanding of royalty as individuals.

However, things invariably go tumbling downhill when Harry hits the early 2000s – specifically, a vomit-inducing passage where Harry, hack-ghostwriter in tow, attempts to excuse himself from wearing a Hitler costume to a – get this – ‘Native and Colonials’ themed-costume party.

Need anyone really say more? Harry, never one to give up after writing such an eye-burningly un-self-aware passage, then goes on to write about how he subsequently got in trouble for using an incredibly vile slur – on camera – to refer to one of his mates (where he genuinely claims he thought the word was as serious as calling someone an ‘Aussie’ – yikes x5); about killing 25 Taliban fighters whilst romping around in an Apache helicopter and not feeling any guilt or remorse; before, ah yes, endless discussion about his penis.

I realise the penis stuff was discussed quite a lot when this book came out. But seriously, I don’t think there is a more prominent character in this entire book than Harry’s frostbitten cock. The fact that there was a ghostwriter, nay, a single editor in the world who also laid their eyes upon the finished draft of this book and went “yep, that’s the ticket!” will never cease to amaze me. Forget the Frostnippistan interlude; I humbly put forth the “my mate hired a seamstress to make a bespoke cock cushion” line as the most horrifying string of English words ever published.

This book, dunked headlong in a sickeningly sweet gloop of excuses, turned my warm feelings towards Harry into a strong sense of dislike

What the tabloids wrote about Meghan was absolutely abominable, and, in my opinion, completely unforgivable. The lot of them should be strung by their toenails in central London, for sure; but still, this does not excuse Harry’s complete idiocy in the public eye as a young man, no matter how much he desperately tries to charge forth as the figurehead of anti-tabloid sentiment today. Quite frankly, if you think – as a 21-year-old man – my own age – that it’s acceptable in any way to strap on a swastika and prance around at your equally vile brother’s ‘Native and Colonials’ themed-costume party, you get what you get. Sorry; the tabloid press can have you at that point.

This book, having unveiled the horrific details of Harry’s many, many public controversies, all dunked headlong in a sickeningly sweet gloop of excuses like ‘I was just a young man!’ (you were an adult) and ‘it’s what everyone did then!’ (it’s still disgusting), turned my broadly warm feelings towards Harry into a markedly strong sense of dislike. Quite frankly, I don’t care about the royalists whinging that this book didn’t show the palace’s side of the story, or that some of the billionaires living at the top of the worldwide social hierarchy had their fee-fees hurt; but they are certainly right in calling this book, by and large, total rubbish.

One and a half stars from me; mainly stemming from Part One actually being quite good (before we get into the endless excuses for the author’s unforgivably bad behaviour and endless cock-related discussion), and as a reward for the ghostwriter who had to put themselves through writing this self-aggrandising, 400-page long exercise in Year 8 GCSE English Language prose composition. Also bonus points for the Harry-certified audiobook – it was very funny, and I laughed out loud a lot whilst listening to it.

Illustration by Daisy Cox