“‘Harold, you have to listen to me! I just want you to be happy, Harold. I swear…I swear on Mom’s life.” He froze. I froze. Dad froze. He had taken the leap. “The scene takes place a few hours after the burial of Prince Philip, who died on April 9, 2021. William (who calls his brother Harold), Harry and their father Prince Charles are then reunited, while Harry has left Great Britain with wife and child the previous year. The scene, which takes place at the end of The Alternatethe memoirs of prince Harry published this January 10 at Fayard, summarizes the work: rivalries between brothers, with the father, omnipresent memory of Diana and above, the heavy shadow of tabloids and communication advisers.
For just over 500 pages, Prince Harry settles his accounts. It explodes the communication conventions between Buckingham Palace, Clarence House or Kensington Palace – the various offices responsible for the communication of the royal family – and the press. No more stories tossed around off, that is, without citing the royal family as a source, “sources close to the palace” or failure to comment on stories that appeared in the tabloids. Gone is also the privileged access that the royal correspondents of British newspapers have to the royal family – a system that the Duke of Sussex says he abhors. The prince responds and we, on sometimes old stories. The Nazi costume he wore to a party in January 2005? Harry says he went there at the insistence of his brother, who doesn’t like fancy dress parties. The theme of this one was “settlers and natives”. He remembers going to a costume shop and hesitating between a British pilot costume or this uniform. Kate and William “screamed with laughter” when they saw him in this outfit
A “little game of blackmail and stratagems”.
The racist expression he used in 2006 towards a Pakistani soldier? “As a child, I had heard a lot of people use the word without it raising anyone’s eyebrows, and I had never thought of these people that they were racists, develops the prince, who confides having called the soldier to excuse. I didn’t know anything about unconscious bias either. I was twenty-one, I was swimming in a bubble of privilege and to me that word was like ” Aussie “used for Aussies. Innocent.”
His so-called teen rehab? Harry responds to this by writing a charge against the tabloids and his father’s advisers. The prince is still furious about it more than twenty years after the publication of the article. He says he wanted to answer it at the time, but that his father’s advisers had chosen to remain silent. They would have used the story targeting the son to restore the image of the father: “In all this disgusting story, this little game of blackmail and stratagems, the counselor saw an unexpected opportunity, a wonderful consolation prize for Dad: henceforth he would no longer be, in the eyes of the world, the unfaithful husband, but the poor single father helpless in the face of his offspring drugged to the marrow. »
Rupert Murdoch, the “evil incarnate”
The book is a violent charge against the tabloids. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Sun, is “evil incarnate” for the prince. It is hardly surprising that Diana’s son uses this qualifier, he who throughout his childhood saw his mother chased by paparazzi. To escape the targets, the prince says he hid in car trunks when he left a nightclub. When Meghan is due to give birth, they drive off to the hospital in an unmarked van.
He who denounces throughout the book these intrusions into his private life and that of his mother, shows himself open by recounting a number of intimate memories, such as his loss of virginity, described as an “inglorious” episode, or even the time where he ate magic mushrooms at actress Courtney Cox’s house. Was it important to write that the smell of a cream he was advised to apply to his cold-numbed penis after a polar expedition reminded him of his mother?
Harry defends himself from doing too much. After all, he pleads, the exercise is not unheard of in the royal family: the biography of his father published in 1994 was not written “by” but “with” the presenter and historian Jonathan Dimbledy, he points out. Diana had herself told her story to journalist Andrew Morton, an attempt, again, to report her truth, while she was in full separation with Prince Charles.
William and Harry didn’t want Charles’ marriage to Camilla
Harry has drawn red lines for himself: he says almost nothing about his children, apart from Meghan’s deliveries. Not a word either about his nephews and nieces, the children of Kate and William.
On the other hand, he scratches Camilla, whom he accuses of being close to the press. He accuses his father’s advisers of attacking the image of Kate and William, then Harry and Meghan, to favor Charles and Camilla. It paints the portrait of a loving, but distant Charles, who distances himself from him after his marriage to Camilla. William and he did not want this union, he writes.
The memory of Diana, common thread of these memoirs
He describes a loosening relationship with his brother over the years, with the two sometimes becoming rivals. Charitable support for Africa is mine, William proclaims one day, you have the veterans.
With his brother, Harry cannot bring up the death of their mother. Throughout the book, the Duke of Sussex emphasizes his pain, failing for years to believe in this disappearance. He says he cried only once for his mother in 1997 and will only manage to cry for her a second time years later, in the presence of a girlfriend.
If Harry defends his actions, he also takes the opportunity to defend his wife. The famous letter that Meghan sent to her father in an attempt to reconcile? An idea from the queen, he blurts out. His wife is accused of sending emails to employees at an undue hour? She was just awake to talk to friends in the United States and did not expect “an immediate response”.
Neither Charles nor William reacted publicly to the publication of the book. 400,000 copies of these memoirs have been sold this Tuesday, the day of its release.