When my younger sister was very small, I once pushed her down the stairs. Fortunately, she was still small enough to bounce. But it was the beginning, not the end, of the fighting. We pinched and slapped in the back of the car on long interminable journeys, over a fraction of an inch invasion into each other’s elbow space. We scrapped over toys and games and who got the biggest share of pudding; then over clothes and boys and who was most popular at school (all right, it was her). We fought like all siblings fight and I can’t even remember now what most of it was about, but deep down it was probably the thing most sibling fights are really about, namely who is the most loved. Luckily in our family it was never obvious who was the favourite, which may help explain why these days we love each other to death; why the older we get, the closer we have become, through the years of bringing up our own children and now into the years of looking after our parents. But as I said, we were lucky. Prince William and Prince Harry have been less so, which may explain why – according to the latter’s new book, Spare, a grimly revealing title if ever there was one – three years ago the brothers came to blows even as full-grown men.
The fight was ostensibly about Harry’s wife, Meghan, and he writes angrily about his older brother calling her “difficult”, “rude” and “abrasive”, echoing the whispers beginning to circulate about her in parts of the press. But it seemingly escalated violently after Harry accused William of acting like an heir: the chosen one, around whom everything else seemingly revolves. There isn’t a sibling alive who won’t, on some level, recognise that feeling. But the twist in this case is that resentment is inexorably baked into a hereditary monarchy from birth. Its strength but also its weakness is that it exercises power through a family, with all the primordial and potentially destructive emotions that entails.
Like them, loathe them, or merely long to hear no more about them ever again, in recent weeks the Sussexes have raised questions of genuine and awkward public interest. They held up an important mirror to the country by exploring the reaction, public and private, to a mixed-race royal marriage. They have served up some uncomfortable truths too about the long and sometimes grubby relationship between royals and the media, where some intrusion is grudgingly permitted in return for the nation keeping the family in the gilded style to which they have become accustomed. But this book takes the prince into a queasier realm, where the washing of dirty linen in public is no longer obviously linked to effecting change and the political gives way to the intensely personal.
The details of the brothers’ alleged punch-up in a palace cottage are at once almost ridiculously trivial (he pushed me into a dog bowl!) and heartbreakingly sad. They were so young when they lost their mother, but at least they still had each other, and now it seems they don’t even have that. Harry clearly aches still to be reconciled – in trailers for yet more promotional interviews to be screened this weekend, he talks of wanting both his father and brother back – but every revelation surely makes that less likely. The younger prince’s tragedy is that the harder he fights for what he seems to want, which is to matter as much to his family as his older brother does, the further that slips out of reach.
For William doesn’t come out of all this looking good, and since childhood Harry’s function in brutal dynastic terms has been to absorb criticism that might otherwise fall on his older brother. The goal of monarchy is its own survival, which means its instinct is generally to protect the heir at all costs, while the spare – the younger brother – inevitably becomes more disposable. Harry was born the understudy, the plan B, and even then only until his brother had children. Unlike in centuries past, pushing back against this quasi-feudal order of things isn’t going to get him locked up in the Tower, but this is nonetheless a sibling relationship forged with the confines of a family that still considers it reasonable to curtsey to each other. If there’s a lesson to be drawn from all this misery, beyond the bleeding obvious one that there’s something deeply unhealthy about hereditary power, it’s arguably one for parents. For sadly, it’s not only children born into immense privilege who can be left feeling like spares.
The perennially wise psychologist Dorothy Rowe once wrote that sibling relationships were ultimately all about “being validated or invalidated as a person”, since they are where we learn our first indelible lessons about rivalry and resentment, victory and shame, love and hate. They’re intense enough when all you’re fighting over is who stole whose tights, never mind the vast reserves of power embodied in a crown. What siblings crave above all else is fairness – or perhaps more accurately, the sense that the other one isn’t too far ahead in the eternal and terrifying war for their parents’ attention. It is a catastrophic thing, for a child to feel the lesser loved, and the scars run deep. For the sake of spares everywhere, I hope Harry finds the peace he so clearly seeks.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
