Prince Harry has written, in the words of his publishers, ‘the definitive account of the experiences, adventures, losses, and life lessons that have helped shape him’.
We don’t yet know the title, and it isn’t due in bookshops for another year at least, but speculation about its contents will be whipped up by publicists with leaks, extracts and teasers.
A glum prospect for the House of Windsor during what should have been a time of joyful celebrations to mark the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and the Cambridges’ 40th birthdays, as well as poignant remembrance of Princess Diana on the 25th anniversary of her death.
Predictably, there has been a storm of criticism. But all the sound and fury won’t change a thing.
Harry’s book is coming, part of a four-book deal as the Mail reports today, and so is a wave of potential damage to individual members of the royal family and quite possibly the institution of monarchy itself.
We know this because anything less would never have earned the Queen’s grandson a reported $20 million advance payout from his hard-nosed publishers and possibly quite a lot more.
Yet in forcing such a crisis on his family, Harry may have unintentionally offered them an opportunity to rediscover some home truths that just might secure the monarchy’s survival for years to come. It’s an ironic parting gift from the Sussexes but it’s within reach of royal advisers if they choose to take it, as I shall explain.
But first, why all the fuss about what the publishers are calling Harry’s ‘literary memoir’? It’s a safe bet that many of us will happily pay to read about the Duke of Sussex’s ‘experiences, adventures, losses, and life lessons’.
It’s an ironic parting gift from the Sussexes (pictured above) but it’s within reach of royal advisers if they choose to take it, writes Princess Diana's former aide Patrick Jephson
We may be pleasantly surprised. It is being ghostwritten by J.R. Moehringer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a memoir of his own, which revolves around his tough childhood spent raised by a single mum and his search for a father figure.
While it’s a shame we won’t get the Eton-honed prose of the Duke himself, in the hands of such an accomplished ghostwriter Harry’s raw material may very well make for an entertaining and even moving read.
Remember, for a large slice of their target audience, especially in their home market of the U.S., Harry and Meghan perfectly capture the spirit of the times with their earnest moralising and impeccably progressive politics. Red-faced condemnation from ‘bigoted’ Brits only validates their martyrs’ credentials.
Forget the ‘woke’ packaging: this is about making money, the more the better. So bring on ‘the highs and lows, the mistakes, the lessons learned’ which Harry promises us.
Brace yourself for the hot-cheeked shame he feels at his privileged birth.
Get ready for carefully calculated confessions about the swastika armband and unflinching man-guilt about what really happened in Vegas.
Fill your boots with self- critical sermons on Harry’s youthful follies, his sexism, racism and unconscious biases of every deplorable hue. Prepare to be shocked as he — in a spirit of compassionate self-education — is obliged to stick a knife into his less enlightened nearest and dearest.
Don’t feel bad about this kind of prurient, voyeuristic temptation: it’s all OK because, as Harry says, he is ‘deeply grateful for the opportunity to share what I’ve learned over the course of my life and excited for people to read a first-hand account of my life that’s accurate and truthful’.
Harry’s excitement may be thanks to all that promised accuracy and truth (‘his’ truth naturally) but, in the context of the wider publicity war he is waging with his family, it’s more likely to be caused by the illicit rush of settling half a lifetime of carefully cultivated grievances.
No doubt courtiers are even drawing up plans to play down Harry’s revelations as part of a wider campaign to sail on regardless.
Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, and Prince William pictured preparing to leave on a safari in Kaziranga National Park during their royal visit to India and Bhutan in April 2016
‘Some recollections may vary’, was the Queen’s dignified response to the Sussexes’ Oprah Winfrey interview — and that, or something like it, will probably be the official watchword whatever the coming year may bring.
But, despite their outward calm, Palace advisers can’t afford to be complacent. Such skilfully phrased press releases won’t reassure anxious royal supporters indefinitely.
They know the royal landscape has shifted: for the world beyond the UK there is now an alternative royal family. The Duke and Duchess of Montecito are just getting started and the Buckingham Palace wordsmiths may already have fired their best shot.
In short, this doesn’t feel like just another storm-in-a-teacup royal book. This time, the damage may go much deeper.
Long before publication date, favoured Sussex sources will activate a systematic plan to stimulate sales and skewer critics. Harry’s targets will have few opportunities to retaliate, even if they have the stomach for a fight in which they are bound to be cast as heartless oppressors — or worse. The weapons used by courtiers against unauthorised writers — hostile briefings and personal intimidation — have proved powerless against the Sussexes’ invincible victimhood.
Nor is it likely that the royal solicitors will be ordered into battle: the prospect of enforced disclosures under oath won’t appeal to a Windsor family already sitting on a hamper of dirty laundry.
Worst of all, this new threat has proved itself immune to the monarchy’s time-honoured weapon of choice for cowing internal dissent: good old-fashioned fear.
Princess Diana pictured with her former private secretary Patrick Jephson at the Burghley Horse Trials in Lincolnshire in September 1989
When the threat of incurring the Sovereign’s displeasure doesn’t bring mutineers to heel, all the pomp of royalty is suddenly revealed as so much make-believe and dress-up. For all the miles of newsprint and videotape devoted to analysing the royal family’s relationship with the media, it comes down to this: if the Palace news managers lose control of the narrative, monarchy’s symbolic power is replaced by real vulnerability.
To an unprecedented extent, control of the royal narrative is passing into the hands of some of the most fearsome news managers in the world. They’re American, they’re expensive, they’re ruthless — and they work for Harry and Meghan.
At their side stands the Sussex Squad — a social media Praetorian Guard relentless in its defence of all things Harry and Meghan. Perhaps not in Britain, but in much of the rest of the world there is now a risk that the Crown’s tribal potency is seen to be so feeble it can’t subdue its own progeny.
As a strategic response, just sailing on regardless looks like sleeping on the beach with your head in the sand.
It’s clear Harry’s project to reinvent himself is
