Before this weekend, it had been months since I’d bothered with “The Mail Remembers” series. For the past two years or so, the Daily Mail has been churning out retellings of years-old royal stories. Some of the retellings came from new royal books, but most of the pieces contain zero new information or gossip, and mostly consist of “remember when the Duchess of Sussex said something and everyone jumped down her throat and demonized her for months? Good times.” Well, this weekend, I ended up covering “The Mail Remembers: Kate refused to meet Meghan for months when Meghan and Harry were first dating.” Y’all seemed to enjoy remembering that gossip too, especially since so many of these retellings make Kate and William sound absolutely unhinged. Well, here’s another one which amused me, especially given the gossip in recent months about Prince William’s illiteracy and/or refusal to read anything. This piece also marks the three-year anniversary of the publication of Prince Harry’s Spare.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s decision to step down as senior royals was followed by a nearly two-year media blitz about their time in The Firm. This culminated in the release of the Duke of Sussex’s memoir Spare in 2023 that was notable for two reasons; first, it included several damaging claims about Prince Harry’s family members.

Writing about his older brother, the Prince of Wales, Harry, now 41, recounted how Prince William, 43, had ‘knocked him into a dog bowl that cracked and cut his back’ during a physical altercation about Meghan’s behaviour towards Palace staff. What was worse for The Firm was that these intimate revelations were being drip-fed in the press as translators pored over pages of the book’s leaked Spanish version in a spectacular publishing blunder.

In his book, Charles III, Robert Hardman noted how ‘the most carefully and expensively choreographed public relations operation in modern publishing history went careering off the tracks’ three years ago. While Spare was due to be released on January 10, a bookseller in Spain accidentally put a few copies up for sale ahead of the ‘globally enforced publication date’ – as translated excerpts spread like wildfire around the world.

Outside Buckingham Palace, these stories couldn’t be printed fast enough as fans hung on every word of what Mr Hardman described as ‘the most caustic and candid royal memoir ever written’.

Behind the palace’s closed doors, however, Prince William couldn’t bring himself to read his brother’s tell-all, as Mr Hardman revealed: ‘His staff remain adamant that he and the Princess [of Wales] refused to open a book which has caused so much pain.’

Prince Harry’s ghostwritten memoir became the fastest-selling non-fiction book ever in Britain after it went on sale on January 10, 2023. More than three million copies of Spare were sold around the world in its first week alone, 1.4 million in the first 24 hours. The book was said to have been the result of a $20 million deal with Penguin Random House and its widespread commercial success gave Prince Harry a new voice.

[From The Daily Mail]

Three years later and, honestly, the Firm never recovered. Harry saying everything in his own voice, creating his own historical record, writing the actual backstories on so many royal moments and tabloid stories, all of it was such a significant moment for the modern British monarchy. Reportedly, Charles refused to read Spare as well, although I would believe that somewhere along the line, he’s probably read some chapters or excerpts. But William making a point of NOT reading a memoir which credibly accused him of assault? A memoir which credibly accused him of some really creepy and disturbing behavior towards and around his brother’s wife? William is never beating the “illiterate rage monster” allegations.

Whenever this story comes up (and it’s come up a few times), I always think that it’s actually really f–king weird that William and Charles refused to read Spare. If they’re going to hold these years-long grudges over the memoir, why not actually learn what Harry actually wrote? But the point of holding those grudges is that they’re mad at Harry for breaking the Windsor omerta more than anything else. It’s not just that Harry wrote about this story or that story, it’s that he’s still free and speaking publicly, full stop.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.