I don't take much interest in the doings of the royal family and I have no intention of reading Prince Harry's memoir Spare. But I've picked up enough about it in various articles and bits of commentary about it online to appreciate just how confused and contradictory it seems to be. I don't find that particularly surprising coming from someone with such a strangely distorted over-privileged upbringing. Indeed, it seems pretty much par for the course to me.
What has come as a small surprise is the sheer virulence of the reaction to this rather sad tome and just how repetitively obsessive that reaction is in some quarters. Most of the talking heads creating the fuss appear to see themselves as supporters of the monarchy and it's more than a little disturbing to see them turning on a guy they appear to have held in some respect a few years previously.
The obvious point that the episode illuminates exactly why the notion of 'royalty' is so deeply flawed has got lost in all the point-scoring. I wonder whether the depth of loathing now being expressed for Harry is related to a kind of panic as to what we might all learn from the mess he and his family have made of things if we viewed them with simple good sense.
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