Harry and Meghan #299 Spare The book that makes Twilight look like Tolstoy

[Anna2020]

Most used words in the book:
MEG/Meghan 430/17 (and she only appears in the last part of the book)
Willy 345
Pa 309
Mummy/ Mum 203/31
Granny 192
Press 162
stories 121
Kate 104
paps 73
reporter 64
Camilla 60
spare 40
Archie 26
camera 25
Heir 18
weed/joint 18
penis/todger 16
leaks/leak/leaking 11
Lilibet 1
He used "me" 500 times

 

[Churchill's Ghost]

I WAS SUMMONED TO Buckingham Palace. A lunch with Granny and Pa.
The invitation was contained in a terse email from the Bee, and the tone wasn’t: Would you mind popping around? It was more: Get your arse over here. I threw on a suit, jumped into the car.
The Bee and the Wasp were the first faces I saw when I walked into the room. An ambush. I thought this was to be a family lunch. Apparently not. Alone, without my staff, without Meg, I was confronted directly about my legal action.
My father said it was massively damaging to the reputation of the family.
How so?
It makes our relationship with the media complicated.
Complicated. There’s a word.
Anything you do affects the whole family.
One could say the same about all your actions and decisions. They affect us as well.
Like, for instance, wining and dining the same editors and journalists who’ve been attacking me and my wife…
The Bee or the Wasp jumped in to remind me: One has to have a relationship with the press…Sir, we’ve talked about this before!
A relationship yes. But not a sordid affair. I tried a new tack.
Everyone in this family has sued the press, including Granny. Why’s this any different?
Chirping crickets. Silence. There was some more wrangling, and then I said:
We had no other option. And we wouldn’t have had to do it if you’d all protected us. And protected the monarchy in the process. You’re doing a
disservice to yourselves by not protecting my wife.
I looked around the table. Stony faces.
Was it incomprehension? Cognitive dissonance? A long-term mission at play? Or…did they really not know? Were they so deep inside a bubble inside a bubble that they really hadn’t fully appreciated how bad things were?
-For instance, Tatler magazine quoting an old Etonian saying I’d married Meg because “foreigners” like her are “easier” than girls “with the right background.”
-Or the Daily Mail saying Meg was “upwardly mobile,” because she’d gone from “slaves to royalty” in just 150 years.
-Or the social media posts about her being a “yacht girl” and an “escort,” or calling her a “gold-digger,” and “a whore,” and “a bitch,” and “a slut,” and the N-word—repeatedly.
Some of those posts were in the comments section on the pages of all three Palaces’ social media accounts—and still hadn’t been expunged.
-Or the tweet that said: “Dear Duchess, I’m not saying that I hate you but I hope your next period happens in a shark tank.”
- Or the revelation of racist texts from Jo Marney, girlfriend of UKIP leader Henry Bolton, including one saying that my “black American” fiancée would “taint” the Royal Family, setting the stage for “a black king,” and another averring that Ms. Marney would never have sex with “a Negro.” “This is Britain, not Africa.”
-Or the Mail complaining that Meg couldn’t keep her hands off her baby bump, that she was rubbing it and rubbing it as if she were a succubus.
Things had got so out of hand, seventy-two women in Parliament, from both main parties, had condemned the “colonial undertones” of all newspaper coverage of The Duchess of Sussex.
None of these things had merited one comment, public or private, from my family.
I knew how they rationalized it all, saying it was no different from what Camilla got. Or Kate.
But it was different.
One study looked closely at four hundred vile tweets about Meg. Employing a team of data specialists and computer analysts the study found that this avalanche of hate was wildly atypical, light-years from anything directed at Camilla or Kate. A tweet calling Meg “the queen of monkey island” had no historical precedent or equivalent. And this wasn’t about hurt feelings or bruised egos. Hate had physical effects. There was a ton of science showing how unhealthy it is to be publicly hated and mocked. Meanwhile, the wider societal effects were even scarier.
Certain kinds of people are more susceptible to such hate, and incited by it. Hence the package of suspicious white powder that had been sent to our office, with a disgusting racist note attached.
I looked at Granny, looked around the room, reminded them that Meg and I had been coping with a wholly unique situation, and doing it all by ourselves.
Our dedicated staff was too small, too young, grossly underfunded.
The Bee and the Wasp harrumphed and said we should’ve let it be known that we were under-resourced. Let it be known?
I said I’d begged them repeatedly, all of them, and one of our top aides had sent in pleas as well—multiple times.
Granny looked directly at the Bee and the Wasp: Is this true?
The Bee looked her right in the eye, and, with the Wasp nodding vigorously in assent, said: Your Majesty, we never received any of these requests for support.

Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex

I don’t know about the UK, but in the US, official government accounts are not allowed to delete comments on social media because they become part of the official records (due to my position, every email in my work account is considered official correspondence and captured each night - even deleted ones)I think they can hide them but they cannot delete them.

And I thought they didn’t read social media or comments about themselves…and what about the vile comments their sugars leave?

 

[Kezzle1]

I get the feeling they regret the name Lilibet as it really hasn't had the desired effect they were obviously after!

 

[LadyMuck]

I looked at the Gothic ruin.
What’s the point? I thought. Pa and Willy weren’t hearing me and I wasn’t hearing them.
They’d never had a satisfactory explanation for their actions and inactions, and never would, because there was no explanation.
I started to say goodbye, good luck, take care, but Willy was really steaming, shouting that if things were as bad as I made out, then it was my fault for never asking for help.
You never came to us! You never came to me! Since boyhood that had been Willy’s position on everything. I must come to him.
Pointedly, directly, formally—bend the knee.
Otherwise, no aid from the Heir.
I wondered why I should have to ask my brother to help when my wife and I were in peril.
If we were being mauled by a bear, and he saw, would he wait for us to ask for help?
I mentioned the Sandringham Agreement.
I’d asked for his help about that, when the agreement was violated, shredded, when we were stripped of everything, and he hadn’t lifted a finger.
That was Granny! Take it up with Granny!
I waved a hand, disgusted, but he lunged, grabbed my shirt.
Listen to me, Harold.
I pulled away, refused to meet his gaze.
He forced me to look into his eyes.
Listen to me, Harold, listen! I love you, Harold! I want you to be happy.
The words flew out of my mouth: I love you too…but your stubbornness…is extraordinary!
And yours isn’t?
I pulled away again.
He grabbed me again, twisting me to maintain eye contact.
Harold, you must listen to me! I just want you to be happy, Harold. I swear….I swear on Mummy’s life.
He stopped.
I stopped.
Pa stopped.
He’d gone there. He’d used the secret code, the universal password. Ever since we were boys those three words were to be used only in times of extreme crisis. On Mummy’s life.
For nearly twenty-five years we’d reserved that soul-crushing vow for times when one of us needed to be heard, to be believed, quickly.
For times when nothing else would do.
It stopped me cold, as it was meant to.
Not because he’d used it, but because it didn’t work. I simply didn’t believe him, didn’t fully trust him.
And vice versa. He saw it too.
He saw that we were in a place of such hurt and doubt that even those sacred words couldn’t set us free.
How lost we are, I thought.
How far we’ve strayed.
How much damage has been done to our love, our bond, and why?
All because a dreadful mob of dweebs and crones and cut-rate criminals and clinically diagnosable sadists along Fleet Street feel the need to get their jollies and plump their profits—and work out their personal issues—by tormenting one very large, very ancient, very dysfunctional family.
Willy wasn’t quite ready to accept defeat. I’ve felt properly sick and ill after everything that’s happened and—and…
I swear to you now on Mummy’s life that I just want you to be happy.
My voice broke as I told him softly: I really don’t think you do.

Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex.

Poor William. He genuinely seemed to care for the spoilt brat.

 

[Happy Lady]

Harry and Meghan #300 He wrote two chapters about his beard, don't you think that's terribly weird?

 

[Bolus]

LATE AT NIGHT, WITH everyone asleep, I’d walk the house, checking the doors and windows.
Then I’d sit on the balcony or the edge of the garden and roll a joint.
The house looked down onto a valley, across a hillside thick with frogs. I’d listen to their late-night song, smell the flower-scented air.
The frogs, the smells, the trees, the big starry sky, it all brought me back to Botswana. But maybe it’s not just the flora and fauna, I thought.
Maybe it’s more the feeling of safety. Of life. We were able to get a lot of work done. And we had a lot of work to do.
We launched a foundation, I reconnected with my contacts in world conservation.
Things were getting under control…and then the press somehow learned we were at Tyler’s.
It had taken six weeks exactly, same as Canada.
Suddenly there were drones overhead, paps across the street. Paps across the valley. They cut the fence. We patched the fence. We stopped venturing outside. The garden was in full view of the paps. Next came the helicopters. Sadly, we were going to have to flee.
We’d need to find somewhere new, and soon, and that would mean paying for our own security.
I went back to my notebooks, started contacting security firms again.
Meg and I sat down to work out exactly how much security we could afford, and how much house.
Exactly then, while we were revising our budget, word came down: Pa was cutting me off.
I recognized the absurdity, a man in his mid-thirties being financially cut off by his father.
But Pa wasn’t merely my father, he was my boss, my banker, my comptroller, keeper of the purse strings throughout my adult life. Cutting me off therefore meant firing me, without redundancy pay, and casting me into the void after a lifetime of service. More, after a lifetime of rendering me otherwise unemployable. I felt fatted for the slaughter. Suckled like a veal calf.
I’d never asked to be financially dependent on Pa.
I’d been forced into this surreal state, this unending Truman Show in which I almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered anything online, never received a single box from Amazon, almost never traveled on the Underground. (Once, at Eton, on a theater trip.)
Sponge, the papers called me. But there’s a big difference between being a sponge and being prohibited from learning independence.
After decades of being rigorously and systematically infantilized, I was now abruptly abandoned, and mocked for being immature?
For not standing on my own two feet?
The question of how to pay for a home and security kept Meg and me awake at nights.
We could always spend some of my inheritance from Mummy, we said, but that felt like a last resort. We saw that money as belonging to Archie. And his sibling.
It was then that we learned Meg was pregnant.

Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex.

Reflecting on the image Harry has created through this book, of his state of being when Megan popped up on his royal tinder roster, it is quite clear that for years the RF had written him off as a sponger-to-be-supported and given some nominal royal duties to keep him out of trouble once his stint in the military expired. He spent his entire time from age 18 to what…32…either pretending to fulfill a military ‘career’ or indulging his loafing habits…drink, drugs, shagging.

By his own admission, he was taking free lodgings, shopping once every 6 months for scundies and socks, eating takeaways, and scrolling posh dating sites for hookups, where he spotted HER! The petulant little twat even tries to blame his family/father for forcing him to take financial support. Most self respecting men would eventually say, right then, time to take responsibility for my own future, and just get trained up for something other than sponging. Yes, so occasionally they’d ask him to don his uniform and fake medals and perform some official duty, but it seems he was utterly unqualified or deserving of such privileges.

No wonder he was gobsmacked when a woman he chose out of the catalogue actually came to his house and took charge, no doubt utilising her full repertoire of ‘womanly skills’. She probably blew his socks off, literally and figuratively. What red blooded fool would say no to that. And in his little pea-brain, that was all a bloke really needs, huh, a live-in who is willing to perform as long as he has the dosh to support the arrangement.

A pretty boring, cringey “love” story. Nothing worthy of note…except perhaps “be careful what you wish for”.

 

[DoodlePoodle]

“ I also set a framed photo of my mother on a little table. Meg’s idea.”
Dear God. She really has infantilised him, trapped him and parentified herself, hasn’t she? I actually find this incredibly disturbing - it’s like 550 pages of Stockholm Syndrome. When she starts degrading him in preparation for dumping him, he’s going to need to be sectioned. I’m not taking the piss, here - I do think he’ll absolutely implode, and it will be horrible to watch.

He’s deified her. It’s all a bit weird
I do think that he’s loving this though. He’s finally the star of the show - even though it’s a shit show!

"our little visitor" ????? Who describes a baby like that? Is he saying the baby was only visiting and then went, back to his real family?

Visitor - surrogate?!

 

[Anna2020]

LATE AT NIGHT, WITH everyone asleep, I’d walk the house, checking the doors and windows.
Then I’d sit on the balcony or the edge of the garden and roll a joint.
The house looked down onto a valley, across a hillside thick with frogs. I’d listen to their late-night song, smell the flower-scented air.
The frogs, the smells, the trees, the big starry sky, it all brought me back to Botswana. But maybe it’s not just the flora and fauna, I thought.
Maybe it’s more the feeling of safety. Of life. We were able to get a lot of work done. And we had a lot of work to do.
We launched a foundation, I reconnected with my contacts in world conservation.
Things were getting under control…and then the press somehow learned we were at Tyler’s.
It had taken six weeks exactly, same as Canada.
Suddenly there were drones overhead, paps across the street. Paps across the valley. They cut the fence. We patched the fence. We stopped venturing outside. The garden was in full view of the paps. Next came the helicopters. Sadly, we were going to have to flee.
We’d need to find somewhere new, and soon, and that would mean paying for our own security.
I went back to my notebooks, started contacting security firms again.
Meg and I sat down to work out exactly how much security we could afford, and how much house.
Exactly then, while we were revising our budget, word came down: Pa was cutting me off.
I recognized the absurdity, a man in his mid-thirties being financially cut off by his father.
But Pa wasn’t merely my father, he was my boss, my banker, my comptroller, keeper of the purse strings throughout my adult life. Cutting me off therefore meant firing me, without redundancy pay, and casting me into the void after a lifetime of service. More, after a lifetime of rendering me otherwise unemployable. I felt fatted for the slaughter. Suckled like a veal calf.
I’d never asked to be financially dependent on Pa.
I’d been forced into this surreal state, this unending Truman Show in which I almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered anything online, never received a single box from Amazon, almost never traveled on the Underground. (Once, at Eton, on a theater trip.)
Sponge, the papers called me. But there’s a big difference between being a sponge and being prohibited from learning independence.
After decades of being rigorously and systematically infantilized, I was now abruptly abandoned, and mocked for being immature?
For not standing on my own two feet?
The question of how to pay for a home and security kept Meg and me awake at nights.
We could always spend some of my inheritance from Mummy, we said, but that felt like a last resort. We saw that money as belonging to Archie. And his sibling.
It was then that we learned Meg was pregnant.

Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex.

 

[Milliemoo99]

Yes, you are right. The other thing I was thinking is that in the excerpts from his book posted here, he mentions that she was overdue and so she was induced. Inductions are a planned, medical procedure . They can take some time. Pessaries may need to be administered and they need time to get to work. Patients need to be monitored. Drips may be needed as part of the process. Waters may need to be broken. This might all of happened for all I know, but he seems to give the impression that they just turned up at the hospital, she was induced and then she was straight into the bath. It just doesn't ring true.

no it doesnt ring true..

I am now heavily swaying towards the children both being born by surrogate. Its the only thing that makes sense with the lack of awareness of childbirth......

 

[Anna2020]

I RANG GRANNY TO TELL her beforehand.
Pa too. And I sent Willy a text.
I also told the Bee, giving him advance notice of the lawsuit, letting him know we had a statement ready to go, asking him to please redirect to our office all the press inquiries it would inevitably trigger.
He wished us luck!
It was amusing, therefore, when I heard that he and the Wasp were claiming to have had no advance warning.
In announcing the lawsuit I laid out my case to the world: My wife has become one of the latest victims of a British tabloid press that wages campaigns against individuals with no thought to the consequences—a ruthless campaign that has escalated over the past year, throughout her pregnancy and while raising our newborn son…I cannot begin to describe how painful it has been…Though this action may not be the safe one, it is the right one. Because my deepest fear is history repeating itself…I lost my mother and now I watch my wife falling victim to the same powerful forces.
The lawsuit wasn’t covered as widely as, say, Meg’s daring to shut her own car door. In fact, it was barely covered at all.
Nonetheless, friends took note. Many texted: Why now?
Simple. In a few days the privacy laws in Britain were going to change in the tabloids’ favor. We wanted our case to be heard before a crooked bat was introduced into the game.
Friends also asked: Why sue at all when you’re riding so high in the press? The South Africa tour was a triumph, coverage was wildly positive.
That’s the whole point, I explained. This isn’t about wanting or needing good press. It’s about not letting people get away with abuse. And lies. Especially the kind of lies that can destroy innocents. Maybe I sounded a bit self-righteous.
Maybe I sounded as if I was on my high horse.
But shortly after announcing our lawsuit I felt energized by a ghastly story in the Express.
How Meghan Markle’s flowers may have put Princess Charlotte’s life at risk. This latest “scandal” concerned the flower crowns worn by our bridesmaids, more than a year earlier. Included in the crowns were a few lilies of the valley, which can be poisonous to children. Provided the children eat the lilies. Even then, the reaction would be discomfort, concerning to parents, but only in the rarest cases would such a thing be fatal.
Never mind that an official florist put together these crowns.
Never mind that it wasn’t Meg who made this “dangerous decision.”
Never mind that previous royal brides, including Kate and my mother, had also used lilies of the valley.
Never mind all that.
The story of Meghan the Murderess was just too good. An accompanying photo showed my poor little niece wearing her crown, face contorted in a paroxysm of agony, or a sneeze. Alongside this photo was a shot of Meg looking sublimely unconcerned about the imminent death of this angelic child.

Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex.

 

[RatherBeRiding]

I have managed to leave a scathing review on Amazon despite not having bought the pile of rubbish! I got a message saying my review would be reviewed which might take several days - so will be interesting to see if it makes it onto the website!!

 

[Anna2020]

Is it all just about the money?
Isn’t it always?
All my life I’ve heard people saying the monarchy was expensive, anachronistic, and Meg and I were now served up as proof.
Our wedding was cited as Exhibit A. It cost millions, and thereafter we’d up and left. Ingrates.
But the family paid for the actual wedding, and a huge portion of the remaining cost was for security, much of which was made necessary by the press stirring up racism and class resentment.
And the security experts themselves told us the snipers and sniffer dogs weren’t just for us: they were to prevent a shooter from strafing the crowds on the Long Walk, or a suicide bomber blowing up the parade route.
Maybe money sits at the heart of every controversy about monarchy.
Britain has long had trouble making up its mind.
Many support the Crown, but many also feel anxious about the cost.
That anxiety is increased by the fact that the cost is unknowable. Depends on who’s crunching the numbers.
Does the Crown cost taxpayers? Yes.
Does it also pay a fortune into government coffers? Also yes.
Does the Crown generate tourism income that benefits all? Of course.
Does it also rest upon lands obtained and secured when the system was unjust and wealth was generated by exploited workers and thuggery, annexation and enslaved people? Can anyone deny it?
According to the last study I saw, the monarchy costs the average taxpayer the price of a pint each year.
In light of its many good works that seems a pretty sound investment.
But no one wants to hear a prince argue for the existence of a monarchy, any more than they want to hear a prince argue against it.
I leave cost-benefit analyses to others.
My emotions are complicated on this subject, naturally, but my bottom-line position isn’t.
I’ll forever support my Queen, my Commander in Chief, my Granny. Even after she’s gone.
My problem has never been with the monarchy, nor the concept of monarchy.
It’s been with the press and the sick relationship that’s evolved between it and the Palace.
I love my Mother Country, and I love my family, and I always will.
I just wish, at the second-darkest moment of my life, they’d both been there for me.
And I believe they’ll look back one day and wish they had too.

Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex.

 

[House of Tea]

I bet The Wasp and the Bee had a nickname for Harry too. The Snake.

 

[Diagnosis123]

Here it is folks, the infamous necklace which William allegedly broke.
"It's got my kids heartbeats on it (engraved cardiograms) and a friend of mine in Botswana made this piece, a tiger's eye"

 

[ChastityDingle]

This is a really good link

Also wanted to add that someone mentioned product placement........spot on, there are some really random name drops! I bet they are bloody making millions from it

The product placement thing is quite interesting.

I am laughing at the fact that TK Maxx contradicted his story though about their 'annual sale'

 

[Goldilocks3108]

Is it me or do they have an unhealthy amount of roast chicken?

 

[Rubez2812]

Apologies if already posted, she refused to leave yesterday, today she's calling emergency services

 

[Meisify2]

For days and days we couldn’t stop hugging the children, couldn’t let them out of our sight—though I also couldn’t stop picturing them with Granny. The final visit. Archie making deep, chivalrous bows, his baby sister Lilibet cuddling the monarch’s shins.
Sweetest children, Granny said, sounding bemused. S
he’d expected them to be a bit more…American, I think? Meaning, in her mind, more rambunctious.
Now, while overjoyed to be home again, doing drop-offs again, reading Giraffes Can’t Dance again, I couldn’t stop…remembering.
Day and night, images flitted through my mind. Standing before her during my passing-out parade, shoulders thrown back, catching her half smile. Stationed beside her on the balcony, saying something that caught her off guard and made her, despite the solemnity of the occasion, laugh out loud. Leaning into her ear, so many times, smelling her perfume as I whispered a joke.
Kissing both cheeks at one public event, just recently, placing a hand lightly on her shoulder, feeling how frail she was becoming.
Making a silly video for the first Invictus Games, discovering that she was a natural comedienne.
People around the world howled, and said they’d never suspected she possessed such a wicked sense of humor—but she did, she always did!
That was one of our little secrets.
In fact, in every photo of us, whenever we’re exchanging a glance, making solid eye contact, it’s clear: We had secrets. Special relationship, that’s what they said about us, and now I couldn’t stop thinking about the specialness that would no longer be.
The visits that wouldn’t take place.
Ah well, I told myself, that’s just the deal, isn’t it?
That’s life.
Still, as with so many partings, I just wished there’d been…one more goodbye.
Soon after our return, a hummingbird got into the house. I had a devil of a time guiding it out, and the thought occurred that maybe we should start shutting the doors, despite those heavenly ocean breezes.
Then a mate said: Could be a sign, you know?
Some cultures see hummingbirds as spirits, he said. Visitors, as it were. Aztecs thought them reincarnated warriors. Spanish explorers called them “resurrection birds.”
You don’t say? I did some reading and learned that not only are hummingbirds visitors, they’re voyagers.
The lightest birds on the planet, and the fastest, they travel vast distances—from Mexican winter homes to Alaskan nesting grounds.
Whenever you see a hummingbird, what you’re actually seeing is a tiny, glittering Odysseus.
So, naturally, when this hummingbird arrived, and swooped around our kitchen, and flitted through the sacred airspace we call Lili Land, where we’ve set the baby’s playpen with all her toys and stuffed animals, I thought hopefully, greedily, foolishly:
Is our house a detour—or a destination?
For half a second I was tempted to let the hummingbird be. Let it stay.
But no.
Gently I used Archie’s fishing net to scoop it from the ceiling, carry it outside.
Its legs felt like eyelashes, its wings like flower petals.
With cupped palms I set the hummingbird gently on a wall in the sun.
Goodbye, my friend.
But it just lay there.
Motionless.
No, I thought.
No, not that. Come on, come on.
You’re free. Fly away.
And then, against all odds, and all expectations, that wonderful, magical little creature bestirred itself, and did just that.

Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex.

So granny said to Harry his children are sweet children, and Harrry took that and twisted it in his mind and tells the world, the queen really thought they would have been more American and boisterous? And she can’t even defend herself. Sounds to me a loving great grandmother calling her great grandchild sweet, how can he make that into something bad

 

[Fliss122]

MEG AND I MOVED our office into Buckingham Palace. We also moved into a new home. Frogmore was ready. We loved that place. From the first minute. It felt as if we were destined to live there.
We couldn’t wait to wake up in the morning, go for a long walk in the gardens, check in with the swans. Especially grumpy Steve. We met the Queen’s gardeners, got to know their names and the names of all the flowers. They thrilled at how much we appreciated, and praised, their artistry.
Towards the end of April 2019, days before Meg was due to give birth, Willy rang.
Something had happened between him and Pa and Camilla. I couldn’t get the whole story, he was talking too fast, and was way too upset.
He was seething actually. I gathered that Pa and Camilla’s people had planted a story or stories about him and Kate, and the kids, and he wasn’t going to take it anymore. Give Pa and Camilla an inch, he said, they take a mile.
They’ve done this to me for the last time.
I got it. They’d done the same to me and Meg as well.
But it wasn’t them, technically, it was the most gung-ho member of Pa’s comms team, a true believer who’d devised and launched a new campaign of getting good press for Pa and Camilla at the expense of bad press for us. For some time this person had been peddling unflattering stories, fake stories, about the Heir and Spare, to all the papers
I suspected that this person had been the lone source for stories about a hunting trip I’d made to Germany in 2017, stories that made me out
to be some fat-bottomed seventeenth-century baron who craved blood and trophies, when in reality I was working with German farmers to cull wild boar and save their crops.
I believed the story had been offered as a straight swap, in exchange for greater access to Pa, and also as a reward for the suppression of stories about Camilla’s son, who’d been gadding around London, generating tawdry rumors. I was displeased about being used like this, and livid about it being done to Meg, but I had to admit it was happening much more often lately to Willy.
And he was justifiably incandescent. He’d already confronted Pa once about this woman, face-to-face. I’d gone along for moral support. The scene took place at Clarence House, in Pa’s study. I remember the windows being wide open, the white curtains blowing in and out, so it must’ve been a warm night.
Willy put it to Pa: How can you be letting a stranger do this to your sons?
Pa instantly got upset.
He began shouting that Willy was paranoid. We both were. Just because we were getting bad press, and he was getting good, that didn’t mean his staff was behind it.
But we had proof. Reporters, inside actual newsrooms, assuring us that this woman was selling us out.
Pa refused to listen. His response was churlish, pathetic. Granny has her person, why can’t I have mine? By Granny’s person he meant Angela. Among the many services she performed for Granny, she was said to be skilled at planting stories.
What a rubbish comparison, Willy said. Why would anyone in their right mind, let alone a grown man, want their own Angela?
But Pa just kept saying it. Granny had her person, Granny had her person. High time he had a person too.
I was glad that Willy felt he could still come to me about Pa and Camilla, even after all we’d been through recently. Seeing an opportunity to address our recent tensions, I tried to connect what Pa and Camilla had done to him with what the press had done to Meg.
Willy snapped: I’ve got different issues with you two!
In a blink he shifted all his rage onto me. I can’t recall his exact words, because I was beyond tired from all our fighting, to say nothing of the recent move into Frogmore, and into new offices—and I was focused on the imminent birth of our first child. But I recall every physical detail of the scene. The daffodils out, the new grass sprouting, a jet taking off from Heathrow, heading west, unusually low, its engines making my chest vibrate. I remember thinking how remarkable that I could still hear Willy above that jet.
I couldn’t imagine how he had that much anger left after the confrontation in Nott Cott. He was going on and on and I lost the thread. I couldn’t understand and I stopped trying. I fell silent, waiting for him to subside.
Then I looked back. Meg was coming from the house, directly towards me. I quickly took the phone off speaker, but she’d already heard. And Willy was being so loud, even with the speaker off, she could still hear. The tears in her eyes glistened in the spring sunshine. I started to say something, but she stopped, shook her head. Holding her stomach, she turned and walked back to the house.

Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex.

BIB - Such a gentleman to throw Tom Parker Bowles under the bus. Dick!

 

[carolinew]

So he expected the British taxpayer to continue funding his security in another country. And he would grace us with his presence for ceremonies and events. Not opening a sewerage factory on a wet weekend...like PP did.

So their plan was to live overseas and come back to the UK a few times a year just for the good bits - like James Bond red carpets, state dinners etc. And they didn't just want their security paid for - oh no - they would have their travel, clothing, everything paid for. What an absolute pair of entitled pigs.