the last stand union city hacked all outfits

Let’s hope those million-and-a-half purchasers not only read Prince Harry’s memoir in its entirety, but that their numbers are significantly augmented in the months and years to come, as the regally priced hardback edition is superseded by a more plebeian paperback one. Spare sold 1.5 million copies in this country within 24 hours of its publication – making it the fastest-selling book in British history, eclipsing even the serial adventures of that other orphaned boy-wizard.

Sometimes, dare I say it, it helps to read a controversial book from cover to cover, rather than react to uncontextualised quotes that have already been pulled by partisans. One in which the folie à trois between the monarchy, the media, and the British people shifted from being a deeply neurotic co-dependency to out-and-out polyamorous psychosis. This book and its attendant publicising interviews have far more significance for the monarchy than the King’s past collaborations with the likes of Jonathan Dimbleby arguably even more than Diana: Her Story, the revelatory text brokered by Andrew Morton, that – with its own notorious publicising interview – inaugurated the current era for the Windsors.

And it really has been a shitstorm – and there truly is wreckage. Is there any contradiction implicit in these counterfactuals appearing simultaneously but almost certainly emanating from the same deep and gilded throats? I don’t think so – it suits the King and the Prince of Wales just fine, for now, to run this sort of interference: will Harry and Meghan even be allowed to attend? Hoping to keep the press and public guessing until they can see a gameplan emerge from the wreckage. It’s still going on as you read this – spin and counter spin: a great maelstrom of officially sanctioned… supposition.

Stories began appearing in the press soon after its publication asserting that the King and the Prince of Wales wanted to sit down for a reconciliatory meeting with the eponymous “Spare” before the congregation in May – and then again: other stories were appearing in the press to the effect that there wasn’t a sorbet’s chance in Hades the deeply offended regnant monarch and his hurting heir were prepared to do any such thing. Even as the shitstorm swirled into being by Prince Harry’s memoir looked like it might be subsiding, those numinous “palace sources” and “friends close” to his father and brother were continuing to spin their narratives.

The last stand union city hacked all outfits