The monarchy relies on fiction. It is a constructed reality, in which grown-up people are asked to collude in the notion that a human is more than a human – that he or she contains something approaching the ineffable essence of Britishness. Once, this fiction rested on political and military power, supported by a direct line, it was supposed, to God. Nowadays it relies on the much frailer foundations of habit, the mysteries of Britain’s unwritten constitution, and spectacle: a kind of symbolism without the symbolised. Ceremonials such as the late queen’s funeral are not merely decorative; they are the institution’s means of securing its continuance. The monarchy is theatre, the monarchy is storytelling, the monarchy is illusion.
All this explains why royals are so irresistible to writers of fiction, from Alan Bennett to Peter Morgan: they are already halfway to myth. And, it seems, no one cleaves harder to the myths than the royals themselves. There’s a fascinating passage in Prince Harry’s autobiography, Spare, in which he describes his father’s delight in Shakespeare: how he would regularly take his son to Stratford, how he “adored Henry V. He compared himself to Prince Hal.” Harry himself tried Hamlet. “Hmm. Lonely prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with … parent’s usurper? I slammed it shut.” At Eton, he was cast as Conrade, one of Don John’s comic minions in Much Ado About Nothing. To his surprise, he was rather good. “Being royal, it turned out, wasn’t all that far from being on stage.”
Prince Harry portrays himself as no great reader. Studying invited reflection; reflection invited grief; emotions were best avoided. But he does himself an injustice. He is a voracious reader – of the press. For years, it seems, he devoured every syllable published about him, in outlets from the London Review of Books to the Sun to the faecal depths of below-the-line on social-media feeds. His father’s most oft-quoted refrain in the book is “Don’t read it, darling boy”; his therapist, he writes, suggested he was addicted to it. Spare is about the torment of a royal in the age of the smartphone and Instagram; a torment of a different order from even that suffered by his mother, and certainly by Princess Margaret, forbidden from marrying the man she loved by her own sister. (For Harry, Margaret is “Aunt Margo”, a cold-blooded old lady who could “kill a houseplant with one scowl” and once gave him a biro – “Oh. A biro. Wow” – for Christmas.)
The fiction of royalty can be maintained only if its characters are visible, hence its symbiotic but rarely straightforward relationship with the media. Spare contends that portrayals of the royals in sections of the press – aside from having at times involved shocking criminality, outright invention, intolerable harassment and overt racism – have also often depended on a kind of zero-sum game, in which one family member’s spokesperson will attempt to protect their client at the expense of another, trading gossip for favours. Harry, in his role as the expendable “spare”, has often been the victim of this process, he argues. Narrative tropes and archetypes as old as the hills have been invoked in the distortions: the wayward son; the warring brothers. In Meghan’s case, something even more corrosive: the witch-like woman.
It is the monarchist press for which Harry reserves special loathing. The Telegraph’s royal correspondent “always made me ill”, he writes; and he cannot bear even to name Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News UK, referring to her anagrammatically as Rehabber Kooks. As for her boss: “I didn’t care for Rupert Murdoch’s politics, which were just to the right of the Taliban’s”. Clueless as Harry may be about the sheer extent of his privilege – early in the book he writes, “It sounds posh and I suppose it was” of childhood meals of fishfingers served under silver domes by footmen – he isn’t remotely a snob, nor, I infer, temperamentally of the right.
A striking passage recounts the prince’s talking to his therapist about Hilary Mantel’s 2013 LRB essay about Kate Middleton. It became notorious, wilfully misread by the tabloids as being anti-Kate, even though it was the monstrosity of the representation of the now Princess of Wales that Mantel was skewering. Harry recalls his disgust at Mantel’s calling the royal family “pandas” – cosseted, fascinating animals kept in a zoo. “If even a celebrated intellectual could dismiss us as animals, what hope for the man or woman on the street?”
Still, he half gets what Mantel was driving at. The words “always struck me as both acutely perceptive and uniquely barbarous,” he writes. “We did live in a zoo.” Describing his unpreparedness for having his funding cut in 2020, he writes: “I recognised the absurdity, a man in his mid-30s being cut off by his father … But I’d never asked to be financially dependent on Pa. I’d been forced into this surreal state, this unending Truman Show in which I almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered anything online, never received a single box from Amazon, almost never travelled on the Underground.”
In her essay, Mantel remarked that “Harry doesn’t know which he is, a person or a prince”. Spare is clearly the prince’s attempt to claw back personhood, to claim his own narrative. Of his tabloid persecutors, he writes: “I was royal and in their minds royal was synonymous with non-person. Centuries ago royal men and women were considered divine; now they were insects. What fun, to pluck their wings.” That, of course, is half-remembered Shakespeare: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport,” says the blinded Gloucester in Lear. The gods in Harry’s version are neither Olympians nor kings, but paparazzi and reporters – and so the circle has turned.
Spare is by turns compassion-inducing, frustrating, oddly compelling and absurd. Harry is myopic as he sits at the centre of his truth, simultaneously loathing and locked into the tropes of tabloid storytelling, the style of which his ghostwritten autobiography echoes. Had he seen more of the golden jubilee year of 2002, he would have observed that his impression that “Britain was intoxicated … Everyone wore some version of the union jack” was quite wrong; swaths of the UK were indifferent, some hostile. His observations about the darkness of the basement flat he once occupied in Kensington Palace, its windows blocked from the light by a neighbour’s 4×4, will seem insulting to those who can’t find a home, or afford to heat one. The logical corollary of the views he now holds would be a personal republicanism, but needless to say that is not the path he takes: “My problem,” he writes, “has never been with the concept of monarchy.” What he shows, though – whether intentionally or not – is that the monarchy makes fools of us all.
Spare by Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex (Transworld, £28). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.