The ghost in Harry’s machine

Who and what exactly am I reviewing here?

Apparently this book is ‘full of insight, revelation, self-examination and hardwon wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief’. It purports to be the memoirs of Prince Harry, but it is ghost-written by the Pulitzer-awardwinning writer J R Moehringer, a man well qualified to write about dysfunctional family relationships.

At the end of his own fine memoir, The Tender Bar, Moehringer acknowledges a number of friends who ‘spent hours confirming or correcting my memory, and helping me piece together long-ago conversations’.

In that book, he describes a scene when a ‘bull-necked, swag-bellied’ man in the bar, known as Smelly, came after him, grabbed his neck and all but strangled him: ‘I thought that Smelly might crumple my larynx and permanently damage my voice … He was a cross between Yosemite Sam and Son of Sam, and this, I was sure, would be my last thought ever, because Smelly was determined to kill me.’

But did he have time to think those thoughts as he was being strangled? No – it is a dramatic recreation of the incident years later and makes for gripping reading. It could be a novel.

Read the drug sequence pages in Harry’s book (pages 260-2) and you will see what I mean.

Moehringer also ghosted Open, the immensely popular memoirs of the tennis player Andre Agassi. Here we have the same technique: One-liners.

Reported dialogue; unspoken thoughts.

Sometimes in italics …

Moehringer’s trademark: Yep

It is the job of the ghost to extract facts from the ‘author’, especially an inarticulate one, and turn his outpourings into a book that justifies the many millions spent on it by the publisher. (I believe the publishers have to sell 1.7 million copies to make Spare commercially viable.)

Moehringer clearly had his work cut out with Prince Harry. The result echoes Kris Kristofferson’s The Pilgrim – ‘He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction…’ Contrast this well-crafted memoir, beautifully written, with the evasive splutterings of the real-life Prince Harry when confronted on TV by Messrs Bradby, Cooper, Strahan and Colbert.

If you are not convinced, try this line in which Harry explains a Page Three girl for the benefit of American readers. Does this sound like him? – ‘That was the accepted, misogynist, objectifying term for young, topless women featured each day on page three of Rupert Murdoch’s the Sun.’ Where did that come from?

I enjoyed Cecil Beaton’s The Glass of Fashion (1954), but when he writes about a ‘celebrated Taoist dictum’ or ‘the golden age of Plato and Phidias’, that is not Cecil. That was his ghost, a somewhat humourless intellectual called Waldemar Hansen.

This book opens with a quote from William Faulkner. On page 13, Prince Harry admits he has no idea who Faulkner was. I now believe in ghosts.

There have of course been royal memoirs before. Those of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were considered controversial when published in the 1950s. Again beautifully ghosted, they told their stories as they saw things yet without attempting to undermine George VI or Elizabeth II. Other royal memoirs, such as those by the two Princess Alices (Athlone and Gloucester) and Princess Marie Louise, have been informative without being controversial.

Having been a ghost myself, I have considerable sympathy for Moehringer. One of my efforts was ‘by’ Alexis, Baron de Redé, who lived in self-imposed luxury in the Hotel Lambert in Paris. He had the gift of remaining silent in eight different languages, which presented a challenge.

Desperate to get the tone right, I asked him what he most hated, wondering if he might say President Bush or the Iraq War. He said, ‘It is the man who after six o’clock at night does not wear the white shirt. It is the man who when he crosses his legs, he exposes between the trousers and the socks some pink flesh.’

At that point, I knew how to write it. I asked him if he knew the Marquis de Cuevas. ‘Of courssse I did.’ So in went some pages on Cuevas, researched and written by me.

Etti Plesch, the Austro-Hungarian countess (whose memoirs I also ghosted), had six husbands by the age of 40. Why did she marry the first? ‘Ach! He was so good-looking.’ Why did she divorce him? ‘He drank.’ On to husband number two. ‘He was so good-looking … He drank’.

And so on. I had to fill in the gaps.

I mistrust this book. Prince Harry admits to a shaky memory, apparently too traumatised to recall anything much before his mother’s death. He acknowledges the ‘superb fact-checking’ of one Hilary McClellen – but no! She has allowed numerous howlers to slip through, causing me to wonder how much else Prince Harry has got wrong or simply cooked up to sell his book.

The Queen did not consign the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to a remote grave in the Frogmore burial ground (page 2). This trivialises the Queen and misunderstands her sympathy. She even paid the Duchess the signal honour of commanding flags to fly at half-mast on public buildings on the day of her funeral.

Prince Harry could not have been offered a place in the Royal Vault in

St George’s Chapel (page 5). The Royal Family did not get out of the car on the way back from Crathie Church on the Sunday Diana died to look at flowers (page 20). They did come out on Thursday 5th September.

He seems in a muddle about what flag was on his mother’s coffin (page 23) (well, OK). He does not descend from Henry VI (page 43). He wouldn’t have known about Snowdon’s vile notes to Princess Margaret (page 73) until that was revealed years later by Anne Glenconner. He was not called at school about the Queen Mother’s death (page 75): she died during school holidays on Easter Saturday. He was in Klosters. So that scene was invented.

The Queen was not at the pop concert when Brian May played (page 78). May played at the beginning. She arrived just before the end. The Queen did not go to the Guildhall for the Charles-Camilla civil wedding in 2005, but she was most certainly at the Service of Blessing (page 99). (He talks of standing near the altar. He was sitting next to his brother.)

Need I go on? Yes – a lie on page 337 or another muddle: Meghan could not have bought her father a first-class Air New Zealand ticket. They do not run first-class seats from Mexico.

People will read this, as they watched Netflix – to salivate over the bile he pours out against his family. Enough has been written about that. I took additional exception to his unforgivable description of dumping lovely Cressida Bonas (page 240), but then who will not be moved reading of his burgeoning love for Meghan Markle (page 265 passim)?

Sylvie Krin can retire at last.

There are more dangerous messages here. On TV, the Sussexes gave a platform to articulate activists such as David Olusoga and Afua Hirsch who dished it out big-time, slagging off the Commonwealth. Via Prince Harry, they reached whole new audiences.

There is a line that shows just how hypocritical this whole exercise is. Harry is in therapy (page 310). He writes, ‘I vented about my family. Pa and Willy. Camilla.’ He stops when he thinks passers-by can overhear the conversation. ‘If they ever knew. Prince Harry in there yapping about his family. His problems. Oh, the papers would have a field day.’ I rest my case.

One further point. Prince Harry bases a large part of his premise on the idea that the only thing the Royal Family care about is being on the front page of newspapers. The enormous success of the Queen and Prince Philip (and the quiet success of Princess Anne) is that they did not care a jot what people thought. They got on with the job.

No doubt Moehringer and his team of shades were well-paid for their ghosting. But, given he comes from a considerably less privileged background than Harry’s, I wonder where his sympathies ultimately lie, and whether he is proud to have played a part in such an unpleasant exercise.

Hugo Vickers has written biographies of the Queen Mother, the Duchess of Windsor and Queen Mary

Spare by Prince Harry (Bantam, £28)