The Absurdity of Royal Experts
And the bravery of the exiled spare
The Prince Harry book, Spare, is important for what it broadly says about culture, fandoms, “stanning,” notoriety and fame. I’m only 28% of the way through the Kindle Edition of Spare. I’m digesting it carefully, taking time to really chew the food, veggies and all, so that I grasp the deeper meaning. I’m not interested in it as an exercise of fact checking. I’m not interested in what Harry might get wrong. He is very transparent about the faults of memory. He’s not a “dates” person. He recalls impressions gleaned from the senses. There are holes in his memory, especially around the death of his mother. He remembers how he felt and he might remember some of his thoughts, but he has difficulty in recalling the precise flow of events. His harshest critics love to say, “Recollections may vary.” Of course they do. Recollections are subjective, not objective. This is Harry’s book, Harry’s story, Harry’s recollections, all woven together with text by “ghostwriter” J.R. Moehringer.
The royal watching press is very fond of trotting out the “royal experts” to comment and keep tabs on what the royals are doing. These “royal experts” are fond of tooting their knowledge in people’s Twitter feeds. Almost all of them are presently in agreement when it comes to Harry–and Meghan, for that matter. Britain’s Royal Rota is still seething from his and Meghan’s condemnation of them as an institution in the Netflix docu-series Harry & Meghan. What Harry and Meghan had to say in that documentary comes down very hard on the modus operandi of the monarchy-media relationship. The royal beat, they say, is a soul-crushing game in which it’s every prince for himself. Harry’s mother called royal life a “sink or swim” game and she was thrown in the deep end.1 We see this Games of Thrones-esque culture play out in the fictional series The Crown, which Harry cheekily admitted to watching in his appearance on the Stephen Colbert show. (He does fact check it while watching it, he confirmed, laughing.) It was Anderson Cooper, that other inquisitor of Harry, who compared what Harry describes in his book (and in the docu-series) to the dragons in Game of Thrones. Harry told Anderson he never watched Game of Thrones, but there are definitely “dragons” in his world. He said the “dragons” are in the press.
It is unprecedented for a royal to turn on the press as Harry has done. It’s unprecedented, too, the way he’s playing against them at their own game. Most of his family (his brother, his father, to name a few) are still locked in that world where they play the game on the media’s terms: grant the photo shoot, play nicely, pose and smile, in exchange for positive press. Or else. After his mother’s death in the Pont de l’Alma of Paris, the world did loudly condemn the actions of the paparazzi, who kept taking photos of Diana as she lay fatally injured in the wreckage. Those photographers were charged with manslaughter, but in 2002, five years after the tragic event, France’s highest court dropped the charges. The next year, two of them were acquitted of the charge of “invasion of privacy.”2 So the motorcade of paparazzi who chased her and her companions to their deaths got off almost scot free. Sure, ok, they were just doing their reprehensible jobs. If your job is to photograph people as they lay dying in the street, it might be time to adjust your life goals and priorities.
If your job is to fact check Harry on his own autobiography, to call him out for misremembering a present as an Xbox instead of a Playstation, for instance, you might consider bringing some ego-awareness into your life. Harry himself admitted in the text that he did not remember actually receiving that present. His maternal aunt Sarah apparently gave him a video game console for the birthday he celebrated weeks after his mother’s death, and the story “appeared in many accounts of my life, as gospel” but he had no idea if it was true or not. “As a defense mechanism, most likely, my memory was no longer recording things quite as it once did.”3
I find Harry’s book to be refreshingly human. If it had been written by a “royal expert,” no doubt it would have more factual accuracy and precision in its timeline. But real life is not always precise! How we remember things is not always how they actually happened. The story was promoted as Harry’s subjective account, and that is what it is. So I don’t care if Aunt Sarah gave him an Xbox or a Playstation.4 Or did you think the brand name of the video console was the point? I suspect the larger point is that it was a very confusing and emotionally painful time in which he marked a birthday, his 13th, for the first time without his mother.
The problem with royal experts is that they are often so bolstered by their elevated importance, they forget that their subjects are human beings underneath all the pomp and pageantry. I think monarchy in general does that to us, no less, and perhaps more than broader celebrity culture. The people who have to live in what they call “the institution” or the “system” of royalty become objects of fantasy, ridicule, and idle speculation. We forget they have complex, unique emotions and perceptions. We confuse personality with being. There is moreover the problem of one-dimensionality: that is, we see them as we might see their wax figures in Madame Tussauds instead of the dynamic beings they truly are.
Harry talks about losing his “self” (identity, even) while in boot camp. I relate to this because I experienced it when I was in boot camp in 1996. Harry and I have that in common. We joined the military after secondary schooling. I know exactly what it means to be broken down and built back up again in the Navy Way—well, Army Way in his case; American in mine, British in his.
Losing the self is a powerful experience because it shows you what the “self” really is, and what it is not. A lot of people, maybe most, experience life entirely wrapped up in the false sense of self—the exterior reality, the superficial definitions, the names and labels and titles. It’s only when you lose an identity that you (might) recognize it for the trick pony that is is. (I emphasize might because it is by no means a given that you will recognize it, even if you lose it. Sometimes we just transfer identity to the sense of its loss.) There are some differences of opinion about what the true self is. Decartes famously said, “I think therefore I am.” Then Existentialism came along and told us that the observer (the one who thinks) is the true self. The New Age thinkers (i.e. Eckhart Tolle and Don Miguel Ruiz) propose other curious ideas about the true essence of our being. We are the consciousness behind the thought and the thinker, they say. Our egos trick us into a false sense of identity with thought and exterior reality. We feel lonely; we derive comfort in identifying with groups—in partisan politics, in religion, in hobbies, and in careers. In Harry’s case, the false of identity could derive from any number of things that we see on the surface—prince, duke, ginger. When all that broke down in army boot camp, he adopted a refashioned identity as a soldier. That’s what most of us do, I think. We adopt new layers. We make compartments for various aspects of our lives. I’ve got my “writer drawer,” my “bureaucrat drawer,” my “student drawer.” All of these “selves” have utility in this world we must function in, but the key is to remember that we are more. .
Harry often mentions his decade as an active duty soldier, his two tours in Afghanistan, and his assignment as an Apache helicopter pilot. I’m currently in Chapter 55, where he talks about training at Sandhurst Military College. So he hasn’t gotten to Afghanistan yet. But I am curious how his descriptions of Afghanistan will compare with those penned by “royal expert” Robert Jobson for the 2008 book Harry’s War: The True Story of Prince Harry’s Heroism in Afghanistan. Jobson is exactly the kind of “royal expert” who believes supremely in his own stellar qualifications. How will Harry’s subjective account (of his own experiences) stand up against Jobson’s “expert” and journalistic research? I must say, I am enjoying the way Harry is shaking up Royal Expert Land! The royal experts and the fans they write for thought they knew Harry, but Harry is telling them, Nope. You got it wrong. Try not to take it personally.
It was said somewhere in Andrew Morton’s book Diana: Her True Story. I don’t remember the page number, but I do remember very well that Diana related to Morton the idea of “sink or swim” in the royal system.
The Associated Press via CBS News. 28 November 2003. Archived. https://web.archive.org/web/20170831043832/http://mobile-feeds.cbsnews.com/news/diana-crash-photogs-acquitted/.
Harry, The Duke of Sussex, Prince. Spare (p. 27). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The Los Angeles Times. 12 January 2023. Archived. https://archive.vn/uKgex.