Prince Harry hasn’t just blown the doors off. He has detonated a huge landmine under Buckingham Palace, shaking the royal edifice and the British establishment.
His allegations that he and Prince William pleaded with their father not to marry Mrs. Camilla Parker Bowles will cast a dark shadow over the Coronation on 6 May. Public feeling against Camilla that reached a peak after Princess Diana was killed will be reawakened with many people resenting the third person in her marriage ascending the throne that should have been hers.
I have known for years that Prince Harry has never accepted that his mother was killed in an accident caused by speed and alcohol. I was aware that he felt the paparazzi who photographed his mother as she fought for her life, mortally injured, lying in the back seat of the Mercedes S280 should not have been spared prison sentences, in defiance of all decency.
He thought she had been killed, a view shared by a London jury of 11 ordinary men and women who resisted pressure to return a verdict of accidental death and instead brought in the gravest verdict left open to them, “Unlawful killing”, after the Coroner Lord Thomas Scott Baker told them the verdict of “Murder” was not open to them.
They did their best. I am certain the two royal brothers accepted that, as did Mohamed Al Fayed, Dodi’s father. What I did not know was that Harry and Prince William both wanted the investigation to be re-opened, until they were persuaded by powerful unnamed people at Buckingham Palace not to call a Press conference announcing their demand that all the unanswered questions surrounding their mother’s death, at the age of 36, should be properly investigated.
In his book, Prince Harry states clearly that he does not think the chauffeur, Henri Paul, was responsible for killing not just Dodi and Diana but also himself, even if Paul had drunk alcohol earlier that evening.
Prince William, says Harry, was persuaded to drop their joint call for a new investigation. Clearly, Prince Harry still wants a real investigation.
He pulls no punches in his book. It contains the most sensational and damaging royal revelations since his mother sat down with the BBC’s disgraced reporter Martin Bashir in November 1995 and recorded an interview in which she questioned her husband’s fitness to be king - a stark case of lese majeste, or treason, punishable by death in an earlier age.
There is no doubt “Spare” will be a huge money-spinner. And in many ways, it is all about money for Harry now.
He has been paid $31 million for his the book. And the publisher now needs to get back that huge advance and turn a profit.
That’s what Sunday’s television interviews with Prince Harry were all about, selling the book. Buying that amount of time on ITV here and CBS in America would have cost the publisher, Penguin Random House, untold millions.
But they are getting massive publicity, free of charge. Why? Because this misery memoir bears the name of the King’s younger son, although it is actually the work of an American ghost writer.
Few would be interested if it were a merely famous actor slagging off his family. But because the family is the British royal family, the book is being published worldwide in 16 languages.
Harry and Meghan, who remain the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, have now sold out completely. They have abandoned the Crown and embraced commerce.
And commerce will grip them in a bear hug until the last drop of bile has been squeezed out of their juicy story of betrayal, bitterness and royal alleged racism.
Rebellion against the family that gave him life, love, fame and fortune is all they have to sell. It is their USP, unique selling point, and it will be exploited until the market has been saturated or the public grow tired of the bleating and shrug, “Oh, it’s just them again”.
For the time being, the money’s good. Harry and Meghan’s production company Archewell has a three-book contract worth a reported $62 million. That ain’t hay, as they say in her native Hollywood, and they are raking it in.
They will certainly need it. Their lavish lifestyle starts with private jets and burns through millions for bodyguards and the trappings of stardom which Meghan expects. Netflix has invested over $100 million in the Sussexes. Buoyed up by huge viewing figures for the six-part moan-a-thon “Harry & Meghan”, the streaming service will not fail to extract its pound of flesh in further videos starring the Montecito Two.
Their royal connection is all they have to sell. There is no way back now into the family fold. It is absurd for Harry to blame the rift on Prince William when it was he and his wife who ran away to create the most serious schism in the royal family since King Edward VIIII abdicated the throne in 1936 and left for France in a Royal Navy destroyer.
For Harry to claim that he wants his father and brother back is like Lizzie Borden saying she missed her parents after she killed them with an axe. Only really stupid people reach for a bigger shovel when they are in a hole but that is what Harry is doing by blaming his family for refusing reconciliation.
The King and Prince William are wise not to respond. Silence is powerful but Harry’s muddled mind misses the point of it. His family’s mute reaction to his litany of lurid allegations and repeated insistence that only he is right is the kindest and surest way to pave a path to a resumption of love and peace within the family fold.
But that path is going to be very long and there’s no happy ending in sight.
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