What would the great British public do without the Royal soap opera? These days, it’s producing explosions and flashes of light worthy of any New Year fireworks display.
If you said ‘It’s all about the money’, you’d be half right. Has there ever been a book that has received such widespread and detailed publicity prior to its launch? Maybe ‘Diana: Her True Story’ by Andrew Morton. But I’d say the Spare’s biography will outdo even his mother. (We should keep in mind, incidentally, that neither Diana nor Harry wrote a sentence of their respective book. The Royals do horse-riding, adultery and drugs, but not writing books.)
But back to the money. Harry and his wife Meghan went to live in the US, complaining that they couldn’t any longer bear the onerous job of being a working Royal (stop sniggering, Virginia). Since then, they’ve been raking it in on the back of having been Royals. There was that Netflix series, there have been the many interviews boosting the book, and there’ll be the huge international sales of the book when it’s released to newspapers and the world in the coming days. The Netflix series is said to have netted them $100 million; what they got for the TV interviews and will get for Harry’s revelations in Spare one can only wonder.
If money is only the half of it, what’s the other half? Royal hatred and vitriol: privilege tends to turbocharge family feuds.
I won’t be buying a copy of Spare myself, but from reports it appears to have the essential ingredients for a public that loves scandal: violent family punch-ups, sexual initiation behind the pub, bereavement (Granny and Diana), killing foreigners (Talibans = chess pieces) and a strong shot of Royal racism.
If all this makes you feel just a little bit ill, I feel your pain. But remember, for every one of us who thinks the Royals make East Enders look demure, there are a hundred who are wetting themselves as they await Tuesday’s publication of Spare.
God Save The King – or should that be The Tampon?
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