Prince Harry faced a backlash in the United Kingdom and beyond yesterday over his memoir Spare, with criticism from the media, commentators, army veterans and even the Taliban, while Buckingham Palace kept silent on the widely leaked contents.
Days before the official publication on Tuesday, disclosures from the book dominated headlines and airwaves after a Spanish-language version of the memoir mistakenly went on sale in Spain.
Revelations such as how heir to the throne Prince William allegedly pushed Harry to the ground in a 2019 row to how he killed 25 people in Afghanistan prompted condemnation and derision.
Writer AN Wilson called the ghostwritten tome – the biggest royal book since Harry’s mother Princess Diana collaborated with Andrew Morton for Diana: Her True Story in 1992 – “calculated and despicable” and a work of “malice”.
Describing his decision to go public “idiotic”, Wilson said the book had merely succeeded in making the public sympathise with the royal family, “not with him”.
The book is the latest hostile blast from Harry and his American wife Meghan after they quit royal duties and moved to California in 2020.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, as they are formally known, have since cashed in on their royal connections with several lucrative contracts for tell-all books and programmes.
The Spanish-language version of the book was hurriedly withdrawn from shelves after the blunder on Thursday but not before it had been purchased by media outlets, wrecking the publisher’s strict worldwide embargo.
The Sun tabloid opined that while most people sympathised with the 38-year-old Harry over the trauma of losing his mother as a child and having to grieve in the public eye, “neither can justify the destructive, vengeful path he has chosen, throwing his own family under a bus for millions of dollars”.
In an editorial, it pointed to “countless discrepancies” in his claims and advised him to listen to friends who have urged him to “stop for his own good”.
The Guardian’s Gaby Hinsliff said that the memoir had moved beyond issues of “awkward public interest” into the “washing of dirty linen” in public.
The US edition of the left-leaning newspaper, which has questioned the monarchy’s role in modern Britain, was the first to publish a leaked extract of the book this week, in which Harry described his physical altercation with William.
“The details of the brothers’ alleged punch-up in a palace cottage are at once almost ridiculously trivial and heartbreakingly sad,” she wrote.
Harry’s claim to have killed 25 people in Afghanistan and likening his actions to removing “chess pieces” from a board, has been seen as boastful and inappropriate, and enraged some veterans.
“It wasn’t a statistic that filled me with pride but nor did it leave me ashamed,” Harry wrote, according to the Spanish version of the book. “When I found myself plunged in the heat and confusion of combat I didn’t think of those 25 as people.
“They were chess pieces removed from the board, Bad people eliminated before they could kill Good people.”
Retired Colonel Tim Collins, who led a British battalion in Iraq in 2003, condemned a “tragic money-making scam”, adding: “That’s not how you behave in the army.
“It’s not how we think.”
“Harry has now turned against the other family, the military, that once embraced him, having trashed his birth family,” he added.
Another high-ranking veteran who served in Afghanistan, Colonel Richard Kemp, said his comments would “feed (religious militant) propaganda”.
Senior Taliban official Anas Haqqani tweeted: “Mr Harry! The ones you killed were not chess pieces, they were humans; they had families who were waiting for their return.”
Abdul Qahar Balkhi, spokesperson for the Afghan foreign affairs ministry, also criticised the comments.
“The Western occupation of Afghanistan is truly an odious moment in human history and comments by Prince Harry is a microcosm of the trauma experienced by Afghans at the hands of occupation forces who murdered innocents without any accountability,” he said.
When asked about Harry’s comments, a spokesperson for Britain’s ministry of defence said: “We do not comment on operational details for security reasons.”
British media have gone through the books’ details in depth, but many people commuting to work in London yesterday said that they were not interested and did not want to talk about it.
Some of those who were willing to talk said they thought Harry had gone too far.
“I think he’s an idiot,” said Robin Parker, an entrepreneur. “My father was in the Second World War and I once asked him as a child if he’d killed anyone and he was very reluctant to say anything about it.”
As the hashtag #ShutUpHarry began trending on Twitter, The Sun quoted sources close to his father, King Charles III, as saying he had been saddened by the book.
However, there was no official palace comment.
The only previous royal reaction to Harry and Meghan’s complaints was after they accused an unnamed member of the royal family of racism in their 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey.
William told a reporter that the Windsors were “very much not a racist family”, while his late grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, witheringly said “recollections may vary”.
Craig Prescott, a constitutional expert at Bangor University in north Wales, told AFP that the “scale” and “ferocity” of the current royal rift was unprecedented but the royal family would probably “ride this out”.
He ruled out any moves to remove Harry and Meghan’s royal titles, which would require political intervention and new legislation.
The royals would likely regard that as “pouring fuel onto the fire” at a time when they wanted to focus on Charles’s looming coronation on May 6, Prescott said.