Prince Harry’s Tell-All, Called “Spare,” Has A Publication Date, A Cover Shot, And Is Primed For Impact

The first rumors that Harry might be wanting to tone down some of his recollections in his $20-million as-told-to autobiography, Spare, surfaced in the publishing lunchrooms of Manhattan last summer, which is to say, after Harry returned from the rather grand but toned down April funeral of his grandfather, Prince Philip. It was at that funeral in Windsor that Harry came face to face with his immediate family and his larger, extended family, seeing many of them for the first time since the announcement of his upcoming book, and since he and Meghan Markle sat for their extended televised sit-down with Oprah Winfrey in the CBS /global broadcasting event in March 2021.

His grandfather’s funeral — that of a rather grand and blustery old-school patriarch — would ordinarily be an occasion for the Windsors to come together to celebrate a long, well-lived life. But the event was the opposite of that for the prince. He soldiered through it, and, though he was seen speaking with them, not a lot of his family really knew what they should do with him. There was a distinct distance and a chill that most of them kept. Kate made a notable effort to include him, and Harry and his brother walked up the hill together. But what Harry confronted, two years after moving to Canada and thence to the States, was that his strivings in Hollywood, on television, on podcasts, in speeches and in print, had had an effect back home.

The title of the his upcoming book is simple, quite blunt, and carries gravitas precisely because it deftly exploits the old rhymed cliche “an heir and a spare,” the British polity’s wry gift to the language, rooted in Cockney rhyming-slang, in assessment of their monarch’s breeding duties to ensure the stability of succession. Suffice it to say, Charles and Diana gave Britain an exact fulfillment of the cliche’s requirements. Prince Harry would likely have himself joked about and/or been robustly teased with the designation across decades, at Eton, at Sandhurst, in the Army, wherever his crew of blokes would have wanted to rag him.

But whether or not he came up with the idea of using it in this instance, the act of taking on the cutting derogation as his book title is Harry’s own move. It’s a bold one, and it dovetails nicely with what we know of the straight-spoken combat chopper pilot and his two tours in Afghanistan. The prince’s use of the word opens a cosmos of connotations, bringing weaponly swagger as well as going straight into Harry’s role as an outsider in the monarchy. There’s power in that level of ownership; this usage shows Prince Harry recognizes it. Not least, it makes deft literary and enormous marketing sense. You want a tome on a royal family from an outsider who gives his book a title like that. There could be no better or simpler flag to get the browsing masses to ask themselves this book-buying question: What could lie between the covers of that?

Seven thousand miles east of Montecito, California, the proud use of the word as a derogatory noun — along with a few other words describing the book’s narrative in the promotional jacket copy, notably, the participle “unflinching” — will have caused some concern in Buckingham Palace. To say that King Charles, Prince William, and/or their senior courtiers have been “dreading” the book is arguably an overstatement, with the possible exception of those courtiers whose direct mandates include spinning webs of positivity around any negative anecdotal flotsam coming off the book’s reviews or its drop date of January 10. Those courtiers would be well within their rights to dread the first few weeks of the British press playing hacky-sack with the thing. But the regent Charles, and the lone heir in the cliche that the book’s title so eloquently evokes, William, have a kingdom to run and with it, more productive things to do than worry about how they’re being portrayed by Harry. Harry’s given Charles, particularly, a couple of good solid years of practice. Charles can take it.

That’s not to say that the book won’t have impact. Spare will make an enormous splash, first, across America and the 54 countries of the Commonwealth, and secondly on the Continent, some of whose royal families are related to the Windsors, and whose people still look to the British royals as the preeminent noble family in Europe. Harry is particularly beloved on the Continent for his Invictus Games in service of disabled military veterans, the next installment of which will be held in Düsseldorf, Germany, a few short months after his book drops.

Ergo, the coverage will be global, and varied. We can look forward to much of the same breathless television coverage that attends Prince Harry and Meghan Markle whatever they do or wherever they go, both pro and con. Some of Prince Harry’s and Meghan Markle’s more vocal detractors in England — such as Fox broadcaster Piers Morgan, who was fired by his former network, ITV, for not publicly apologizing for expressing his opinions about Meghan Markle on air, when in fact his opinions were one big reason for his and his program’s immense popularity — will be quick off the mark, both on air and in print. More sympathetic interlocutors will be scheduled by Harry and his hardworking phalanx of publicists with certain outlets. Certainly, with Oprah Winfrey and CBS This Morning’s Gayle King being friends with the couple, those bookings will be widely awaited. This is not to mention the robust advertising campaign that the publisher will be engineering.

The point is that, no matter the platform and no matter the slant — whether it is Harry himself making an appearance on at a book-signing, Piers Morgan exploding on talkTV about Harry’s take on certain royal family events, or Tina Brown creatively doubling down upon and/or having to eat her words that the book would “never see the light of day” — Spare will be Topic A for weeks.

The security around the Spare manuscript, in whatever format, has been admirably and understandably tight thus far. Eventually, actual review copies will have to be sent out, presumably with some architecture of an embargo. With an embargo or without, at that review-copy moment, the cat’s out of the bag on Fleet Street. Some sort of leak will occur. Somebody — and there are a thousands of somebodies on both sides of the Atlantic who can be classified as parties whose commercial interests would mean that they’d be highly interested in a peek at an advance copy of Spare — will get a leak. It can be digital, it can be in manuscript form, it can be incomplete, or it can be read and simply chatted about over drinks. And that leak, in whatever form, will find its way to the people who care about it the most, namely, Fleet Street. Whether that happens this month or next will matter to Harry and his publisher, which is why security is tight, but its date of occurrence doesn’t materially affect what happens when the dam is eventually breached, which will be that the British press will kick into high gear and begin parsing Harry’s every adjective about his family. The appetite will be especially great among those actors who have axes to grind, such as the Daily Mail, or any of the publishers whom Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have sued and/or personally blacklisted from any kind of cooperation.

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First serial rights, meaning, the publication of a serious extract from the book rather than quotes and/or opinions of it, can have been retained by Harry and team or can reside with the publisher. It can be assumed that they will be spectacularly sold, but it also can be that, in this special instance, they remain unexercized in favor of making the January 10 splash all that much bigger. Usually, first serial are considered, a way to recoup part of an advance, and as good advertisement for the book. But it’s unclear whether first serial would work for any periodical trying to bring a chunk of it out.

Most significantly, the production and news-stand (read: sales) time is getting short between now and January 10 for a monthly, or even for a weekly, to wade in with presumably big cash for a piece of the Spare action. That (theoretical) excerpt would have to be in the teeth of production (fact checking, copy editing and art) now, for a monthly to recoup any sales. For a weekly, the latest they would want to put it into production would be by early December. Time would be capable of performing what they call “crashing” the story into print somewhat later than that, but not many others could do it. It’s not outside the realm of possibility for anybody to do it of course, given the manpower, and it would only be entertaining if they did, but for a monthly, the editors would really have to be on their toes. It’s possible that a bright and tidy excerpt could go to one of Prince Harry’s and Meghan Markle’s few friends in print journalism. Edward Enninful, editor of British Vogue, springs to mind.

Whether first serial rights are exercised or not, it seems Harry’s book will debut on two very different stages at once. The first stage will be rather more serious, involving book review pages, critics, and that possible serialization. That will be international, but its starting point will be in New York, seat of Penguin Random House US and of many of the best periodicals in the English-speaking world. The second, far louder stage will be the book’s minute, generally hostile dissection in the UK, where Fleet Street will instantly put it through the food processor and then probe the resulting puree for any possible inaccuracy, exaggeration and/or insult to the Crown, the Queen, Charles, or William made by Harry.

For his part, Harry’s dad is a busy king. Charles has shown a remarkably fleet turn of foot since the day after his mother’s death on September 8, blasting out to seal the official transfer of the crown before the parliaments of Scotland, Northern Ireland, England, and the Welsh Senedd. During all that, he seamlessly led the nation in mourning from Balmoral down to Buckingham Palace and on to Westminster, where Elizabeth lay in state. Those stages of the cross included not just the grand military sendoff procession from Balmoral, in Scotland, but the Vigil of the Princes both in Scotland and in London, as well as the reception of Commonwealth and world leaders.

At each turn Charles gave short, graceful speeches, open about his own grief, taking the time to thank everyone for their moving tributes to his mother. In short, he led. It was what he was brought up to do.

He’s limning his mother still, making the Commonwealth and parliamentary rounds, ushering Liz Truss out the door of 10 Downing and welcoming Rishi Sunak in, full of old-fashioned get-up-and-go. Nothing gets in his way. In shaping his team, he’s quietly drawing his younger siblings Edward and Anne into the day-to-day core family team in the absence of Harry. In the ultra-traditional latter-day Greek stage play that the British Royal Family present when they publicly appear, Charles’ has been a performance that perfectly communicated the thousand-year monarchy’s one basic message: Continuity. It’s going to be a fun, fit, no-nonsense reign. He lets nothing get in his way.

Not so Charles III’s younger son. Though Harry’s been back to England and to his family since he left for his “vacation” in western Canada in 2019, perhaps his most remarkable accomplishment is his thorough alienation of himself from his family, beginning with his father and brother. Harry was caught somewhat flat-footed down in London by his grandmother’s death in early September. He had refused an invitation from her to Balmoral; this was to be a charity trip for him and for Meghan Markle, including a pop over to Germany to check on Invictus preparations for next year.

When he got the summons to Balmoral, he was late getting in the air, and his grandmother died while he was en route. A lot of things both big and small shifted for Harry as his father assumed the kingship. Over the next days of the family vigils and the funeral, Harry’s “otherness” shone through, exactly as it did at his grandfather’s funeral last year. Yes, he walked with them behind Elizabeth’s caisson down the Mall. But he was faced with the fact that, in his absence, his home and his family had changed forever.