JAN MOIR: If Big Willy really pushed Little Harold over, it’s clear why

Just when I thought I was out, I was pulled back. So says Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part III when he is dragged back into the family’s organized crime business after trying to go straight.

Well, that’s exactly how I feel Prince Harry. Just when I thought I was out, he pulls me back in.

Just when I felt free to write about other current affairs, perhaps Rishi’s oh-so-exciting plan for extra maths classes or one of the former Marquis of Bath’s wives suing the estate for a share of his will – here’s the mathematical equation for this, dear: 0 + 0 = 0 — Harry plunges back into the narrative, cheering on his constant pain, which is simply impossible to ignore.

This time, the reluctant man did throw all his toys out of the royal pram. My favorite new revelation is that Prince William physically attacked him after an argument over Meghan’s alleged rudeness to staff, leaving Harry ‘scared’, breaking his ‘necklace’ and causing him to fall into the dog bowl.

What? Rather than a heated disagreement between two expensively educated army veterans, Willy vs. Harold sounds like a catfight between two big girls squabbling outside St Trinian’s dorms over lipstick.

This showdown was less of a rumble in the jungle and more of a bit of light-hearted banter in the Nott Cott kitchen. “The dog bowl burst under my back, the pieces cut into me,” Harry cries in his autobiography Spare.

He ended up, he notes, with ‘scratches and bruises’. All this from a former British army captain who served two tours in Afghanistan, who now boasts of killing 25 Taliban and was once a captain-general in the Royal Marines, whose new motto should be By sea, by land, with a dog Bowl.

How glad they must be that Harry no longer bears their honorary title, as this elite fighting force would surely be burning with shame at his indecision.

Not to mention his lack of discretion in publicly mentioning the number of his Taliban kills; it’s the kind of morbid vanity that any decent, professional soldier abhors and that only belongs in a video game.

Prince Harry’s adventures are particularly hard to miss right now because he’s moving with all the subtlety of a runaway tank into the crucial Megxit phase.

Three years after the Duke and Duchess of Sussex fled these shores to escape the tyranny of royal privilege and free homes, their campaign to wreak havoc on the Windsor family has reached its climax.

After the damning revelations, first aired on Oprah, then in select podcasts, interviews and a six-part Netflix documentary series, we now have the pièce de résistance, the sour cherry on top; Harry’s tell-all book with at least three accompanying TV interviews.

But what is left to tell us? It seems like a lot. Don’t forget the teenage cocaine use and the loss of virginity in a field outside a country pub – aren’t all dukes doing that? — the printed page produced the purest distillation of Harry’s deep dissatisfaction and unhappiness with himself, his family, and above all, his miserable secondary position in the royal hierarchy.

In no particular order, Spare reveals that he once communicated with a spiritualist of some sort to contact his dead mother; he believes that his brother is his ‘chief enemy’; he begged his father not to marry the ‘wicked stepmother’ Camilla; and he was once furious because Meghan was furious Kate was furious after Meghan accused her of having a hormonal baby brain when she was pregnant with Prince Louis.

Anything else? yes We can only admire his rigor when it comes to accounting. Seventeen years after the event, Harry uses Spare to accuse William and Kate of encouraging him to wear that infamous Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party – and he seems to be most furious that they escaped blame in the subsequent scandal.

Then, as now, what haunts Harry is not what actually happens in his life, but the media coverage and public perception of what happened. This allows him to avoid responsibility and make sure that he is never guilty of anything, not even wearing a swastika in public for a laugh.

“I’m just following orders,” was what he didn’t say while not clicking his heels. Still, he was 20 at the time, a gun cadet at Sandhurst. If I wasn’t responsible for making my own decisions in those days, when would I be?

The book isn’t even out yet, but the amount of leaks and details that are coming out are delicious. The bruises, the dog bowl, the swastikas, the fairy cruelties he felt were his daily lot – they were the little tent pegs holding up Harry’s huge tent of misery, they were the ballast in his great balloon of dark hot air.

And in writing it all down, he may have invented an entirely new literary genre—the self-inflicted memoir, the autobiography that tarnishes rather than enhances reputation.

Prince Harry wants to be seen as a hero on the long road to freedom, but every new revelation about Spare suggests that he is far more Adrian Mole than Nelson Mandela. The public is already begging for less, with the hashtag #ShutUpHarry trending on Twitter for most of yesterday. Spare Us might be a more appropriate title for his book.

It certainly seems that the more the Duke and Duchess harvest their story, while subjecting their harvest to deeper scrutiny and analysis, the less and less admirable they will appear. Even now, the worthy goals they so vociferously cling to are sometimes seen as mere camouflage for the real Sussex business of revenge, making millions and creating one’s own legacy at the expense of others – most notably the Prince and Princess of Wales.

Can Harry and Meghan’s shared narrative of events hold up to the new self-revelation? Credulity is already straining and raising eyebrows. For example, Prince Harry revealed that he called his therapist immediately after a physical altercation with William in 2019.

It says everything about the kind of man he’s become, and even more so about the Duchess of Sussex’s claims around this time that palace officials stopped her from seeking help for her suicidal condition because “it wasn’t a good look”. But her husband had a therapist on 24-hour emergency call. What stopped her from doing the same?

So far, the strongest narrative is Harry’s obsession with palace officials ‘leaping the press’ against him and his wife, which he believes is at the heart of all his problems.

But it doesn’t make sense. He seems to believe that Britain’s newspapers and magazines form a giant sponge whose sole purpose is to soak up the cream of lies about the Sussexes every day – and then spoon-feed those same lies to the milk of the gullible British public.

This is to deny the vibrant, independent nature of British newspapers and the vibrant and diverse opinions of British people who can make up their own minds, thank you very much. Harry thinks everyone is stupid and gullible except him.

When William tells Harry that Meghan is difficult and harsh with staff, Harry accuses his brother of buying into the ‘press narrative’. In his interview with Tom Bradby, which airs on Sunday, the ITV presenter suggests that Harry is a hypocrite when he opposes invasions of his privacy and is now “invading the privacy of your nearest and dearest without permission”.

Prince Harry responds: ‘That would be an accusation by people who don’t understand or don’t want to believe that my family has been reporting to the press.’

However, she is not shying away from the details of intimate family conversations following Prince Philip’s funeral. “Please, boys, don’t make my last years a misery,” was Charles’ plea to a feuding William and Harry hours after burying his own father. I thought revealing this very private moment to the world was a particularly low blow.

“I want a family, not an institution,” he also told Bradby, a classic moment of peak Harry hypocrisy. Because in the pages of his book, in the canyons of his mind, and in all his interviews to date, Prince Harry has done nothing but disparage his family and abuse their trust while clinging madly to the institutional titles and ciphers, heritage and lineage that are the only things that separate him from the herd.

Like a drowning sailor clinging to the mast of a sinking ship, he cannot let go. I would be nothing without the institution.

Meanwhile, this great collection of his grumblings is not yet over, and must be exhausting to all who throng in his cauldron of woe. But who would have imagined at this point that the hero of Spare would be William and not Harry. And if the big brother pushed the young brother in anger, it is understandable why. And you even secretly admire him for it.