Let’s be honest here – Princess Diana certainly wasn’t backwards in coming forwards and letting her true feelings about her experiences in The Firm be known. Along with her Panorama interview, she also collaborated on a tell-all book that rocked the royal family of her own, 1992’s Diana: her True Story. Suffering in silence wasn’t her style, that is undeniable.
And yet, still, it’s hard to believe that she would be happy Harry has written this exposé. As the famously, well documentedly, besottedly devoted mother of those two boys, it’s easier to think she’d be going… well, Spare.
Because it’s one thing to dish the dirt about a marriage that has broken down - the writing was on the wall long before appearing in book form, and it spelled D-I-V-O-R-C-E. But to publicly trash, in glorious technicolour detail, your sibling?
That’s a relationship which surely, despite all the anger and hurt, would hopefully have been repaired one day. That is unarguably – to trot out the trite cliché – not what she would have wanted.
The publication of Spare means that ship has now utterly sailed, underneath a bridge that has been completely burnt. It seems impossible that there could ever be any way back for these brothers now.
And whatever other opinions Diana might have had about how Harry’s been treated and the decisions he’s made along the way, that surely would have broken her heart. Her two boys, divided. Strangers, at war.
Sadder still, Harry appears to suggest that they weren’t that close in the first place, mentioning William’s “familiar scowl, which had always been the norm in his dealings with me.”
It gives the impression of Harry as that annoying little brother, who you could never get rid of. Well, looks like William has now, for good.
